When Göbekli Tepe was first examined in the 1960s by anthropologists from the University of Chicago and Istanbul University, it was dismissed as the remains of an abandoned medieval cemetery. Today, Göbekli Tepe is considered the oldest temple in the world dating back to around 9000 BCE. In 1994, Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute visited the ruins and felt that they were older and more interesting than what the earlier researchers thought.
A year later, Schmidt and a small team uncovered the first megaliths and he continued to excavate the site until his death in 2014. Until Schmidt’s discovery, archaeologists believed that agriculture lead to the formation of the first civilizations, but Schmidt and other researches now believe it may have been the other way around.
