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Archaeologists are still excavating Göbekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species' deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Göbekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider. At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event—a sudden flash of genius—that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. The new research suggests that the "revolution" was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely.

Most of the world's great religious centers, past and present, have been destinations for pilgrimages

Göbekli Tepe may be the first of all of them, the beginning of a pattern. What it suggests, at least to the archaeologists working there, is that the human sense of the sacred—and the human love of a good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself.

n the 1960s archaeologists from the University of Chicago had surveyed the region and concluded that Göbekli Tepe was of little interest. Disturbance was evident at the top of the hill, but they attributed it to the activities of a Byzantine-era military outpo

To Schmidt, the T-shaped pillars are stylized human beings, an idea bolstered by the carved arms that angle from the "shoulders" of some pillars, hands reaching toward their loincloth-draped bellies. The stones face the center of the circle—as at "a meeting or dance," Schmidt says—a representation, perhaps, of a religious ritual. As for the prancing, leaping animals on the figures, he noted that they are mostly deadly creatures: stinging scorpions, charging boars, ferocious lions. The figures represented by the pillars may be guarded by them, or appeasing them, or incorporating them as totems.

nches below the surface the team struck an elaborately fashioned stone. Then another, and another—a ring of standing pillars.

Geomagnetic surveys in 2003 revealed at least 20 rings piled together, higgledy-piggledy, under the earth.

he pillars were big—the tallest are 18 feet in height and weigh 16 tons. Swarming over their surfaces was a menagerie of animal bas-reliefs, each in a different style, some roughly rendered, a few as refined and symbolic as Byzantine art.

The circles follow a common design. All are made from limestone pillars shaped like giant spikes or capital T's.

They hadn't yet mastered engineering." Knoll speculated that the pillars may have been propped up, perhaps by wooden posts.

Within minutes of getting there," Schmidt says, he realized that he was looking at a place where scores or even hundreds of people had worked in millennia past.

Puzzle piled upon puzzle as the excavation continued. For reasons yet unknown, the rings at Göbekli Tepe seem to have regularly lost their power, or at least their charm. Every few decades people buried the pillars and put up new stones—a second, smaller ring, inside the first.

he site may have been built, filled in, and built again for centuries.

Bewilderingly, the people at Göbekli Tepe got steadily worse at temple building.

Finally the effort seems to have petered out altogether by 8200 B.C. Göbekli Tepe was all fall and no rise.

“My contention is that status is on everybody’s mind all of the time, whether they’re conscious of it or not,”

“new journalism” combined the emotional impact of a novel, the analysis of the best essays, and the factual foundation of hard reporting. He mingled it all in an over-the-top style that made life itself seem like one spectacular headline.

pointed look at fund-raising for the Black Panther Party by Leonard Bernstein and other wealthy whites.

And no one more memorably captured the beauty-and-the-beast divide between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones: “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” he wrote, “but the Rolling Stones want to burn down your town!”

s a child, he did rewrites of the Authurian legends and penned biographies of his heroes.

unsuccessful pitching tryout with the New York Giants before

The Washington Post, where he won Washington Newspaper Guild awards in 1960 for his coverage of U.S.-Cuban affairs and a satiric account of that year’s Senate civil rights filibuster.

The next year, Wolfe was assigned to cover a “Hot Rod & Custom Car” show. He completed a story, the kind “any of the somnambulistic totem newspapers in America would have come up with.” But he knew there was a much richer, and longer story to tell, one about a thriving subculture that captured the post-World War II economic boom and the new freedom to “build monuments” to one’s own style. No newspaper could contain what Wolfe had in mind, so he turned to Esquire magazine, wrote up 49 pages and helped give birth to a new kind of reporter. “For the who-what-where-when-why of traditional journalism, he has substituted what he calls ‘the wowie!'” according to a 1965 Newsweek story.

“A Man in Full” turned Wolfe’s smirk to Atlanta society. His 2004 novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” looked at life on a fictional elite college campus rife with drinking, status obsession and sex.