. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.
This turns on it's head our general notion of the transition of human society from simple hunting-gathering bands to complex villages, and eventually cities. The current idea has been that humans settled down first and then developed agriculture and social hierarchies, but Gobekli Tepe opens the idea that people came together in the building of this monument, resulting in a society instead of the society building the monument once they were already organized.