First came addition; then came c

Our journey into the science of adding and subtracting now takes us to Turkey – specifically, to an archaeological site called Göbekli Tepe. What archaeologists found here shows us that adding isn’t just a biological instinct that we share with other animals. Instead, adding might be the driving force behind human civilization itself.

So what incredible wonder is Göbekli Tepe hiding? The answer is an ancient stone temple. This temple is an extremely early example of monumental architecture, a type of building whose sheer scale and intricacy goes far beyond what is necessary for its purpose.

Göbekli Tepe consists of enormous stone pillars; it would have taken hundreds of people a gargantuan amount of time and effort to build the temple. This in itself was impressive, but what the archaeologists discovered next would change everything they thought they knew about the history of human development.

They found that the huge temple predated the nearest human settlements and villages. What’s more, there were no signs of human settlement around the temple itself – no houses, no farm animal bones, no children’s toys. Eventually, it dawned on the archaeologists that the people who made the temple had been hunter-gatherers. Constructing the temple had been the very reason why they had settled down and begun living together in larger groups.

Through their shared desire to build and add to the superfluous temple, multiple bands of hunter-gatherers had started working together. The fact that they needed a secure, nearby food supply while they built the temple was the impetus for leaving their hunter-gatherer lifestyle behind and pursuing agriculture.

In other words, our overwhelming preference for adding, in the form of creating monumental architecture, was the catalyst for humans to go from living in small groups of wandering nomads to cooperative villages and settlements. In other words, when we started adding, human civilization took off.

The humans who lived in the time of Göbekli Tepe inhabited a world in which not much of anything existed. A built environment, and everything that came with it, were new and valuable innovations; no one would have considered subtracting them. In this sense, then, to embark on human civilization is to add – and addition is perhaps humanity’s oldest cultural heritage.