"After carving limestone pillars with all sorts of animal images, they hauled the 16-ton stones into multiple huge rings — without the help of wheeled vehicles or domesticated animals. The site is billed by German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt as the world's first temple, constructed by hunter-gatherers. Schmidt found no convincing signs of human occupation there: no ovens, fireplaces or other hints of residential dwellings. The huge T-shaped pillars seemed to him to represent stylized human shapes, and their carved images — scorpion-like animals, snakes and wild boar — he saw as religious totems. E.B. Banning suggests that the builders of Gobekli Tepe may have been settlers (not hunter-gatherers), living in spaces best understood as both sacred and domestic, i.e. there was no temple, but symbolic rituals of a sacred nature probably did take place within people's ordinary houses. Banning charges that anthropologists superimpose the modern Western concept of sacred versus profane incorrectly onto the Near Eastern past." - Adriano