![[Göbekli_Tepe,_Urfa.jpg]] *Gobekli Tepe in 2023. Over 90% has not yet been excavated.* As I hinted in the previous chapter, in addition to the agricultural and pastoral advances that enabled the Neolithic Revolution, an equally or maybe even more important change was cultural. Some people seem to have shifted their lifestyles from being hunter-gatherers to being farmers. Let's examine what that might mean. In the ancient, prehistoric world, the human population would have been much smaller and may have been much more spread out. It seems reasonable to assume that, as they tend to today, bands of people involved in hunting and gathering would have been small and mobile. Inspired by anthropologists, historians have typically imagined them as extended families or clans, organizing themselves in groups of twenty-five or so and wandering the landscape in search of edible plants or following herds of game animals. Every once in a while they might come together with other bands, possibly in seasonal festivals at which they would share news and knowledge as well as giving young people the opportunity to find a mate outside their tiny community. One explanation scholars have proposed for the building of monuments like [Gobekli Tepe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe)) and [Karahan Tepe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe), and later [Stonehenge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge), is that these sites may have been important meeting places for ancient people. The social importance of the connections these types of meetings may have fostered, could easily have been understood in spiritual terms and led to something like religious reverence for the locations of these events. ---- Next: [[2.2 - Why Shift to Agriculture?]]