Could the Bible’s oldest story be rooted in reality, asked last night’s Channel 5 documentary Ancient Mysteries: Eden Revealed, about the archaeological discoveries at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. The short answer? No. The long answer? No, but it’s roughly where Genesis suggests it was and that’s a good enough excuse to hang another of the absorbing, punchy documentaries that – ill-advised reconstructions of the past aside – 5 does so well. They are masters of the art of delivering an hour of enthusiastic, energetic investigation that manages to be accessible without being patronising on subjects that could just as easily be made so dry your eyes would crumble to dust before you could find the remote.
Göbekli Tepe is a 22-acre collection of enclosures full of enormous pillars, carvings and remains that suggest neolithic hunter-gatherer tribes started to gather together long before we thought. And by we, I mean the kind of people gloriously gathered here to talk with infectious excitement and passion about their specialist subjects – be it the analysis of gazelle teeth (suggesting seasonal feasting, as did the 11,000-year-old calcium oxalate crystals lining stone troughs that most likely were left by brewing beer), the DNA of wild grasses (suggesting experiments with farming much earlier than previously thought) or of 9,000-year-old carvings that are making the experts wonder if organised religion was the driving force behind the transition to settlement and farming rather than a product of it.
Not that the Eden element was entirely specious. It allowed the programme to ask why Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden, if it symbolises the great leap forward that was the coming of agriculture, is depicted as a punishment? The answer, perhaps – and the programme was meticulous about avoiding definitive statements throughout – is in the remains of ancient farmers nearby, who suffered overcrowding, tooth decay, malnutrition and arthritis. It didn’t look like progress at the time. And yet, once you are settled in a new way of life, as one of the experts noted as he showed us round the ancient homes and hearths, you can’t go back to a simpler one. I’m still wondering if we should take heart from this, or just despair.
