Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple? 11,000 years old?

German archaeologist, Klaus Schmidt, has excavated a massive prehistoric structure in Turkey that may be 11,000 years old and could be the world's first temple, according to The Smithsonian Magazine.

Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has excavated massive carved stones crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of the world's oldest temple.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html#ixzz1PkOWwx1q

Toolmaking humans may have evolved earlier than thought

According to an article in Scientific American , Reid Ferring, an anthropologist at the University of North Texas in Denton, and his colleagues excavating the Dmanisi site in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia, found stone artifacts--mostly flakes that were dropped as hominins knapped rocks to create tools for butchering animals--lying in sediments almost 1.85 million years old. Until now, anthropologists have thought that H. erectus evolved between 1.78 million and 1.65 million years ago--after the Dmanisi tools would have been made.

The full story is here:-
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=human-ancestors-in-eurasia-earlier