Göbekli Tepe
We descended into the wheat field below, leaving our weapons behind.
Twenty-eight of us, armed with nothing but a belt around our waists.
Honestly, I was a bit scared at the time. I wondered how they would see us—a group of naked, weaponless people walking down the hill.
On the way down, I stuck close to Elder Mar.
“Hey.”
“What?”
“What if they just kill us?”
Elder Mar didn’t stop walking and answered.
“If they were going to kill us, they would have done it earlier.”
“...What?”
“When we were standing on the ridge.”
Elder Mar pointed with his chin behind him.
“They could see us all from down there. Their eyes are probably worse than ours. But they didn’t come up. That means they don’t want to kill us.”
I felt like I had a target on my back.
What this old man was doing now was reading their intentions based on what they didn’t do, even though they could have. In a situation with little information, this is the most reliable way to judge.
These people weren’t ignorant. They just knew less.
That’s a completely different story.
But when I got closer, I saw...
They were all naked too.
The fur tribe had pieces of tusks dangling from their earlobes, and the horn tribe had two red lines drawn on their foreheads. That was it. The rest was the same as us.
Long live humanity.
The age of fashion hasn’t arrived yet.
And I learned one more thing.
They also smelled.
No, not exactly. It didn’t smell to me. It was because my nose had woken up after four hours.
If humans can’t overcome their sense of smell, they evolve to not smell each other. Isn’t this the real secret to why humans survived by forming tribes?
Three old men came forward.
On our side was Elder Mar. On the fur tribe side was an old man with a body like a tree trunk. On the horn tribe side was a grandmother with no teeth.
The three of them stared at each other for a long time. No one spoke.
Behind us, our young ones couldn’t even breathe deeply. I really felt the pain of having empty hands at that moment.
The first one to smile was the grandmother from the horn tribe.
“You people don’t eat water.”
Elder Mar answered.
“You people eat thorn bushes.”
The old man from the fur tribe tapped his mammoth leg.
“These people eat the tops of trees.”
That was all.
Three sentences.
I wondered what that meant, and after about three seconds, I understood.
It was that their food sources didn’t overlap.
Hippopotamuses eat grass by the water, rhinos eat thorny bushes, and mammoths eat the tops of trees. No one puts their nose in someone else’s bowl. And that wheat field stretches on forever.
If you don’t go hungry, there’s no reason to fight.
If there’s no reason to fight, there’s no need to wake up the mountain ranges behind you.
Three sentences, and one war was eliminated.
I learned something that day. Diplomacy is really like this. It’s not about speaking nicely, but confirming that your bowls don’t overlap.
And there was still the face-to-face with the animals.
Honestly, this was the scariest part.
Our nine hippopotamuses, sixteen mammoths over there, and five or six rhinos on the opposite side. If we clashed here, twenty-eight humans would just be terrain.
But speaking from the result...
Nothing happened.
The mammoths looked at us once and just went towards the pine trees. The rhinos didn’t even look our way. They pushed us towards the thorny bushes.
Umba sniffed around for a water pool, and since there was none, he looked at me.
Hey water. It was like he was saying exactly that.
No brother, I just arrived too.
What this meant was that they had no interest in each other because their food didn’t overlap.
Animals fight not because they hate each other, but because their bowls overlap. If they don’t overlap, they’re just neighbors.
Only humans fight even if their bowls don’t overlap.
This I’ll learn painfully later.
I tried eating the wheat.
This was really touching. For four hours, I had been chewing dried meat and some unknown roots. But in front of me was an endless wheat field.
Bread. Noodles. Mandu. Kalguksu. Ramen.
I scooped a handful of wheat ears and tossed them into my mouth.
And thirty seconds later, I spat it out.
Shit, why is this like this.
Wild wheat has an insanely hard husk. Chewing it splits your palate. The kernel is only the size of a fingernail and still stuck with chaff. To eat this, you need to roast it, break the husk, and grind it between two stones.
One of the aunties from our tribe was doing it, so I stuck next to her to watch.
What came out after an hour of grinding was a handful in the palm of my hand.
A handful after an hour.
At that moment, I understood with my body why humans had been hungry for ten thousand years.
And I made a decision. This is development, dammit. Never development! At least I’ll make a millstone.
That night, we lit three fires below the hill.
They were close enough that the three almost looked like one.
And I finally hit the language barrier of my life.
Words only half work.
Exactly half. There are words that work and words that don’t.
“Um” works. Big thing. Beast.
“Ana” works. Water.
“Ta” works. Eat.
Up to here, the three tribes are the same. Maybe in ancient times, they were one group.
But outside of that, everything is different. Especially, nothing important works. “Hurts” doesn’t work, “dangerous” doesn’t work, “mine” doesn’t work.
So what do they do?
They do it with their bodies.
One of the fur tribe pointed at his mammoth, swung his arm high over his head, pointed at me with his finger, and mimed stepping on me.
“Our thing is huge, you can step on it.”
The horn tribe guy got into it. He put two fists on his forehead and mimed horns, then charged at a rock. He really charged. Blood came from his forehead.
“Our thing even pierces rocks.”
Are you crazy?
I was wondering what I should do, so I just reenacted the hyena incident from earlier. I laughed, drew a hyena shoulder-high with my hand, spread ten fingers saying ten, and mimed Umba. I opened my mouth as wide as possible and rolled a sound from my belly.
The fur tribe people got quiet.
And while pointing at me, they talked among themselves.
Honestly, my reaction was fine. I was originally the voice actor at company dinners.
Then I saw that girl.
She was a same-age woman from the fur tribe. Her name was Ina. (She pointed at herself and repeated “Ina” several times. She was really pretty. She had a good figure too. But she was naked.)
She had pieces of tusks strung through her earlobes. She gestured that when adults in her tribe got that, they got one.
I held up the seashell hanging from my belt.
“This is ours. If you receive this, you take care of one beast. Taking care of one beast makes you an adult.”
Here, they don’t count winters. There’s no concept of “I.” It’s just whether you have the mark or not.
Ina smiled.
Even though words didn’t work half, that smile worked.
And she patted my back.
“What are you doing?”
It was Nuri.
She’s from our village. She’s above me. I don’t know exactly how much older because there’s no age concept here. But there’s one thing that’s certain.
This person is one of the ones who raised Ur by carrying him.
Here, they raise the kids together. No one cares whose milk you drink or whose child you are. So it’s hard to say exactly who raised whom, but the memories remaining in Ur’s body definitely know this person.
On the first day I entered this body, when I was dazed and sitting, it was this person who brought me water.
The problem was...
This person wasn’t wearing clothes.
Everyone here not wearing clothes had adapted after four hours. Really adapted. Now, other people’s bodies don’t enter the eyes.
But this person was a bit different.
Even in front of this person, gaze processing wasn’t working.
“Hey, why are you staring so much.”
“...I wasn’t staring.”
“A moment ago, you were showing the other person the seashell and earrings and giggling.”
“That’s cultural exchange.”
Nuri looked at me with a face saying what are you saying. “Cultural” and “exchange” are words not present here.
Then she snatched the seashell from my hand and tied it back to my belt properly.
“If this falls off, you’re not an adult.”
Then she just walked away.
I stood there blankly for a moment.
And thought.
These people all live naked.
Then what exactly are these people getting excited about looking at?
When night deepened, I quietly slipped out of the group.
I climbed the hill.
A round navel-like hill. The top was flat and the wind was strong. The wheat field was spread out all around, and above it, stars were pouring down like crazy. Zero light pollution. I’ll admit it. This is the only luxury of this era.
I stood there looking at the ground beneath my feet.
Nothing.
Grass, stones, and dirt.
No pillars.
Those giant T-shaped stone pillars from the documentary. Things about three times human height arranged in a circle, with foxes, snakes, and birds carved on the surface.
None of that was there.
Of course not. They hadn’t been erected yet.
At that moment, I got a chill.
When I watched that documentary, the narrator said no one knew why they built this. Scholars didn’t know why people without cities or farming suddenly built temples on the top of this mountain.
It was called a mystery.
But now I’m standing inside that mystery.
The people who built it are lighting fires down below, laughing while doing voice acting.
Hey.
You guys are going to build that. There’s a guy with a broken forehead there, he’s going to build it too.
I kicked the ground with my foot.
Nothing under here yet.
But ten thousand years later, when they dig here, what comes out? About twenty circular pillars three times human height. They’re buried completely in the soil.
This was the second mystery.
Even building it was a mystery, but why they buried it in soil and left was even more mysterious. They didn’t smash it or abandon it, but carefully buried it.
I watched that documentary all the way to the end and fell asleep.
So I know the ending.
The people here will eventually bury it all and leave.
The people laughing down below now.
At that moment, I first felt scared on this hill.
And there was something even scarier.
I don’t know why I’m here yet.
I wasn’t hit by a truck or fell off a cliff. I just dozed off after overtime. When I opened my eyes, I was here.
The worst feeling is having no reason.
If there’s a reason, solve it and go back, but without a reason, I don’t know what to do.
When I came down at dawn, the three old men were still sitting.
It seemed they had been like that all night.
I sat quietly in the back. Now I could sit in the elder’s seat too.
“People fight when they’re full.”
The fur tribe old man said.
“There’s no end to the wheat here. So people will keep fighting here.”
“If they fight, those people will wake up.”
Elder Mar said.
“Once they wake up, they won’t sleep again.”
“Then what will you give to the young ones’ hands?”
The grandmother from the horn tribe asked.
“We have to give them work, but hunting ends in half a day. The remaining half a day drives people crazy.”
I listened from behind and really sighed in admiration.
What are these elders doing now?
It’s the surplus productivity problem.
When the labor time needed to eat and live decreases, free time is created, and where to direct that time determines the direction of civilization. The three Neolithic old men are doing this in front of the bonfire now.
The three of them didn’t speak for a long time.
First to speak was Elder Mar.
“Not give, but hang something.”
“What to hang.”
Elder Mar felt around the ground.
Then he picked up a flat stone. A limestone slab the size of a human head.
He placed it in front of the firelight.
“If you put a spear in their hands, they’ll stab each other. So let’s put this in their hands.”
The fur tribe old man looked at the stone.
“What do you do while holding it.”
“Carve how great our things are, set them up on the hill opposite each other, and show them.”
Elder Mar smiled with his two front teeth.
“A fight where the loser doesn’t die.”
“If you win, there’s something to brag about.”
The grandmother from the horn tribe giggled.
“The losers are laughing loudly now.”
The three of them laughed.
“But.”
The fur tribe old man stopped laughing.
“Why are the young ones doing this. Is it because they’re bored with carving stones?”
“I’m not bored.”
“Then why?”
Elder Mar stared at the fire for a long time.
“You have to hang something.”
“So what?”
“Decide that in your own village.”
Elder Mar grinned.
“Our village, I decide. I’ve already decided.”
I saw that smile from behind.
When this old man laughs like that, you have to be careful. I’ve learned that for four hours.
The three of them stood up from their seats.
The fur tribe old man asked last.
“So when do we start doing this?”
Elder Mar looked at the sky. The east was already getting a bit light.
“From today.”
I didn’t laugh.
I was looking at that flat stone.
This is now the size of a human head.
But I know what this will become ten thousand years later. It will grow to three times human height and surround the top of this hill about twenty times. It will become what scholars call the world’s first temple.
The beginning is this stone now.
A single pebble placed in front of the fire.
A single pebble thrown by the three old men because they didn’t want the young ones to fight.
Shit.
I know about that.