A Dollar Late And A Day Short

James over at Under a Gibbous Moon caught this Newsweek Article about the potentially oldest human built temple in Turkey.

This got my dusty old history brain rumbling  again.

Honestly I’m not all that surprised that they’ve found an earlier temple.  One of the interesting things about the neolithic era and the transition from hunter gather to agricultural society, is that it wasn’t a singular event but more like the ebb and flow of the tides.  Tribes of humans settled down tried to become farmers, sometimes it worked and other times it failed.  The temple is in the region where the known ancient near east civilizations were founded.  Sumeria was only a few hundred miles away further down the Fertile Crescent.  Granted that was 2-3 thousand years later, but just a hop, skip and jump away

I don’t agree with Schmidt’s closing statement that the temple was buried and forgotten because the religious views of the region changed and they didn’t need the old gods anymore.  If we look at other examples of religious changes in regions… The Roman’s adopted much of the Greek pantheon and just gave them new names.  The Turks in Turkey and the Moors in Spain converted Christian churches into mosques.  They did this because it gives the new religion continuity and a longer history by absorbing the previous religions of the land in question.  The Islamic crescent moon has been a religious symbol in the Near East going back to the Sumerian era.

I think he is giving an overly simple answer to what may be a large part of this temple’s history why after a millennium of use did the hunter gatherers stop meeting here, what happened to change this region?