by Morris, Ian;
If we take a fairly commonsense definition of religion as belief in powerful, supernatural, normally unseen beings who care about humans and expect humans to care about them (which seems to apply to so many societies that some evolutionary psychologists think religion is hardwired into the human brain), we should be able to recognize, if not necessarily understand, remains of rituals through which people communicated with a divine world.
Rituals are notoriously culture-specific. Depending on when and where you find yourself, it may be that the mighty ones will listen only if you pour the blood of a live white goat on the right side of this particular rock; or only if you take off your shoes, kneel down, and pray facing in that direction; or if you tell your misdeeds to a man in black who doesn’t have sex; and so on. The list is endless. Yet despite their wondrous variety, rituals do have certain things in common. Many require special places (mountaintops, caves, unusual buildings), objects (images, statues, valuable or foreign goods), movements (processions, pilgrimages), and clothes (highly formal, totally disheveled), all heightening the sense of stepping outside the everyday. Feasting, often involving unusual foods, is popular; so too is fasting, which induces altered states of mind. Sleep deprivation, pain, repetitive chanting and dancing, or (the favorite) drugs all do the same job, and may tip truly holy people into trances, fits, and visions.
These sites have it all: strange underground rooms, humanoid pillars, jawless skulls—and while everything in the archaeology of religion is speculative, I find it hard not to see them as religious responses to the Younger Dryas. The world was freezing, plants were dying, and the gazelles were going away; what could be more natural than asking gods, spirits, and ancestors for aid? What could make more sense than identifying special people and creating special places to facilitate communication? The shrine at Qermez Dere looks like an amplifier, turning up the volume on requests for help.
So when the world warmed up at the end of the Younger Dryas, around 9600 BCE, the Hilly Flanks were not the same place they had been when the world had warmed up at the end of the main ice age, three thousand years earlier. Global warming did not step into the same society twice. Sites from the earlier period of warming, such as ‘Ain Mallaha, give the impression that people just happily took advantage of nature’s bounty, but in the villages that popped up around the Hilly Flanks after 9600 BCE people sank serious resources into religion. Many post-9600 sites have evidence for elaborate treatment of human and aurochs skulls and several have big, underground chambers that look like communal shrines. At Jerf al-Ahmar in Syria, now slumbering alongside so many other sites beneath the waters of Lake Assad, French archaeologists found ten multiroomed houses around a large underground chamber. A human skull was sitting on a bench and in the middle of the room was a headless skeleton. It looks disturbingly like a human sacrifice.
Most spectacular of all is Göbekli Tepe, perched on a hilltop with commanding views across southeast Turkey. Since 1995 its German and Turkish excavators have exposed four sunken chambers, up to ten feet deep and thirty feet across, dating to 9000 BCE or even earlier. Like the smaller, earlier chambers at Qermez Dere, each had been deliberately filled in. Each contained T-shaped stone columns, some seven feet tall, decorated with carved animals. Geomagnetic surveys suggest that fifteen more chambers remain unexcavated; in all there may be two hundred stone pillars at the site, many weighing over eight tons. A twenty-foot-long pillar found unfinished in a quarry weighed fifty tons.
People did all this with nothing more sophisticated than flint tools. While we will never know why this particular hilltop was so sacred, it certainly looks like a regional sanctuary, perhaps a place for festivals where hundreds of people congregated for weeks at a time, carving pillars, dragging them to the chambers, and setting them upright. One thing seems certain, though: never before in history had such large groups worked together.
Humans were not passive victims of climate change. They applied ingenuity, working to get the gods and ancestors on board in the struggle against adversity. And while most of us doubt that these gods and ancestors actually existed, the rituals may well have done some good anyway as a kind of social glue. People who sincerely believed that big rituals in lavish shrines would win the gods’ aid were surely more likely to tough it out and stick together no matter how hard times got.
By 10,000 BCE, the Hilly Flanks stood out from the rest of the world. Most people in most places still drifted between caves and campsites, like the one excavated since 2004 at Longwangcan in China, where the only traces of their activity that survive are small circles of baked earth from campfires. A battered piece of shale from this site might be a simple stone spade, perhaps implying that cultivation of crops had begun, but there is nothing like the fat rye seeds of Abu Hureyra, let alone the monuments of Mureybet or Qermez Dere. The most substantial building known from the Americas is a small hut of bent saplings covered with hides, detected by meticulous excavators at Monte Verde in Chile; while in the whole of India archaeologists have not been able to find even that much, and scatters of stone tools are the only traces of human activity.
A distinctive Western world was taking shape.
PARADISE TRANSFORMED
By 9600 BCE Earth was warming up again, and this time around, Hilly Flankers already knew how to get the most from grasses. They quickly (by the standards of earlier times, anyway) resumed cultivation. By 9300 BCE wheat and barley seeds from sites in the Jordan Valley were noticeably bigger than wild versions and people were modifying fig trees to improve their yields. The world’s oldest known granaries, clay storage chambers ten feet wide and ten feet tall, come from the Jordan Valley around 9000 BCE. By then cultivation was under way in at least seven pockets in the Hilly Flanks, from modern Israel to southeast Turkey, and by 8500 BCE big-seeded cereals were normal all across the region.
Changes were very slow indeed by modern standards, but over the next thousand years they made the Hilly Flanks increasingly different from any other part of the world. The people of this area were, unknowingly, genetically modifying plants to create fully domesticated crops that could not reproduce themselves without human aid. Like dogs, these plants needed us as much as we needed them.
Plants, like animals, evolve because random mutations occur when DNA is copied from one generation to the next. Once in a while, a mutation increases a plant’s chance of reproducing. This is particularly common if the environment is changing too, as happened when permanent villages created niches in which small, tame wolves had advantages over big, fierce ones, or when cultivation gave big seedlings advantages over small ones. I already mentioned that wild cereals reproduce by having each seed ripen and fall to the ground at a different time from the others, whereupon the husk shatters, leaving the seed free to grow. But a few plants—just one per one or two million normal plants—have a random mutation on a single gene that strengthens the rachis connecting the seed to the plant and also the husk protecting the seed. When these seeds ripen they do not fall to the ground and the husks cannot shatter. The seeds literally wait for a harvester to come along and get them. Before there were any harvesters the mutant plants died out each year because their seeds could not get into the soil, making this a most disadvantageous mutation. The same thing happened if humans shook the plants and caught the grains that fell; the mutant seeds would not fall, and once again died out.
Archaeobotanists argue passionately over just what happened to change this situation, but most likely good old-fashioned greed got involved. After investing their energy in hoeing, weeding, and watering the best stands of grasses, women (assuming, again, that it was women) may have wanted to squeeze every last bit of food from their plants. That would have meant visiting each stand to shake the bushes several times, and they would surely have noticed that no matter how hard they shook, some stubborn seeds—the mutants with the tough rachis—just would not drop. What could be more natural than to rip the offending stalk out of the ground and take the whole plant home? Wheat and bar
ley stalks do not weigh much, after all, and I’m fairly sure that’s how I would react if confronted by a cereal that would not surrender.
If women then replanted a random selection of their seeds, they would have taken mutant seeds along with normal ones; in fact, the mutants would be slightly overrepresented, because at least some normal seeds would already have fallen and been lost. Each year that they replanted they would slightly increase the proportion of mutants in their cultivated stands. This was clearly an agonizingly slow process, quite invisible to the people involved, but it set off an evolutionary spiral just as dramatic as what happened to mice in garbage dumps. Within a couple of thousand years, instead of one plant that waited for the harvester per field of one or two million, they had only genetically modified domesticated plants. The excavated finds suggest that even around 8500 BCE fully domesticated wheat and barley were still almost unheard of. By 8000, though, about half the seeds we find in the Hilly Flanks have the tough rachis that would wait for the harvester; by 7500, virtually all do.
Laziness, greed, and fear constantly added improvements. People discovered that planting cereals in a garden one year then protein-rich beans the next replenished the soil as well as varying their diet; in the process, they domesticated lentils and chickpeas. Crushing wheat and barley on coarse grindstones filled bread with grit, which wore people’s teeth down to stumps; so they sieved out the impurities. They found new ways to prepare grains, baking clay into waterproof pots for cooking. If we are right to draw analogies with modern agriculturalists, women would have been responsible for most or all of these innovations, as well as for learning to weave linen into clothes. Skins and furs were out.
While women tamed plants, men (probably) took on animals. By 8000 BCE herders in what is now western Iran were managing goats so effectively that bigger, calmer strains evolved. Before 7000 BCE herders turned the wild aurochs into something like the placid cows we know today and tamed wild boars into pigs. Across the next few thousand years they learned not to kill all animals for meat while they were still young but to keep some around for wool and milk, and then—most useful of all—to harness them to wheeled carts.* Previously, moving anything meant picking it up and carrying it, but an ox in harness could deliver three times the draft power of a man. By 4000 BCE the domestication of plants and animals converged in the ox-drawn plow. People carried on tinkering, but nearly six thousand years would pass before humans added significant new energy sources to this package by harnessing the power of coal and steam in the industrial revolution.
The early farmers of the Hilly Flanks transformed the way people lived. Those of us who quake at the prospect of sitting next to a screaming baby on a long plane ride should spare a thought for female foragers, who regularly carry their infants with them as they walk thousands of miles every year gathering plants. Not surprisingly, they do not want too many children; consciously or not, they space their pregnancies by extending breastfeeding into the child’s third or fourth year (producing breast milk prevents ovulation). Ice Age foragers probably followed similar strategies, but the more they settled down, the less they needed to do this. Having more babies in fact became a boon, providing extra labor, and recent skeletal studies suggest that the average woman in an early farming village, staying in one place with stores of food, gave birth to seven or eight babies (of whom maybe four would survive to their first birthday and perhaps three to reproductive age) as compared to the mere five or six live births of her roving ancestresses. The more food people grew, the more babies they could feed; although, of course, the more babies they fed, the more food they had to grow.
Population soared. By 8000 BCE some villages probably had five hundred residents, ten times the size of pre–Younger Dryas hamlets such as ‘Ain Mallaha. By 6500 Çatalhöyük in modern Turkey had perhaps three thousand. These were villages on steroids, and they had all the problems that implies. Microscopic analysis of sediments from Çatalhöyük shows that people simply dumped garbage and night soil in stinking heaps between houses, to be trodden into the dust and mud. The filth would have appalled hunter-gatherers but surely delighted rats, flies, and fleas. We can see from tiny pieces of excrement trodden into the dirt floors that villagers also stabled domestic animals in their homes, and human skeletons from the site of ‘Ain Ghazal in Jordan show that by 7000 BCE tuberculosis had jumped from cattle to people. Settling down and raising more food increased fertility, but also meant more mouths to feed and more germs to share, both of which increased mortality. Each new farming village probably grew rapidly for a few generations until fertility and mortality balanced each other out.
Yet for all the squalor, this was clearly what people wanted. Little hunter-gatherer bands had had broad geographical horizons but narrow social ones: the landscape changed but the faces did not. The early farmer’s world was just the opposite. You might pass your whole life within a day’s walk of the village where you were born, but what a place it was—full of shrines where the gods revealed themselves, festivals and feasts to delight the senses, and gossipy, nosy neighbors in solid houses with plastered floors and waterproof roofs. These buildings would strike most people today as cramped, smoky, smelly hovels, but they were a big step up from sharing damp caves with bears or huddling out of the rain under skins stretched over branches.
Early farmers tamed the landscape, breaking it into concentric circles—at the center was home; then came the neighbors; then the cultivated fields; then the pastures, where shepherds and flocks trekked between summer and winter grazing; and beyond them the wild, an unregulated world of scary animals, savages who hunted, and who knew what monsters. A few excavations have found stone slabs incised with lines that, at least to the eye of the believer, look a bit like maps of fields divided by tiny paths; and around 9000 BCE villagers in Jerf al-Ahmar and some of the neighboring sites now under Lake Assad seem to have been experimenting with a kind of protowriting, scratching images of snakes, birds, farm animals, and abstract signs on little stone tokens.
By imposing such mental structures on their world, Hilly Flankers were, we might say, domesticating themselves. They even remade what love meant. The love between husband and wife or parent and child is natural, bred into us over millions of years, but farming injected new forces into these relationships. Foragers had always shared their knowledge with their young, teaching them to find ripe plants, wild game, and safe caves, but farmers had something more concrete to pass down. To do well, people now needed property—a house, fields, and flocks, not to mention investments like wells, walls, and tools. The first farmers were apparently quite communal, sharing food and perhaps cooking collectively, but by 8000 BCE they were building bigger, more complicated houses, each with its own storerooms and kitchens, and perhaps dividing the land into privately owned fields. Life increasingly focused on small family groups, probably the basic unit for transmitting property between generations. Children needed this material inheritance, because the alternative was poverty. Transmitting property became a matter of life and death.
There are signs of what can only be called an obsession with ancestors. We perhaps see it as early as 10,000 BCE, with the jawless skulls of Qermez Dere, but as farming developed, it escalated. Burying multiple generations of the dead under house floors became common, mingling bodies in ways that seem to express very physically the link between property and descent. Some people went further, disinterring bodies after the flesh decayed, removing the skulls, and reburying the headless corpses. Using plaster, they modeled faces on the skulls, sticking shells in the eye sockets and painting in details like hair.
Dame Kathleen Kenyon, a formidable woman in the man’s world of 1950s archaeology, was the first to document this horror-movie custom in her excavations at the famous site of Jericho on the West Bank, but plastered skulls have now been found in dozens of settlements. What people did with the skulls is less clear, since we only find ones that have been reburied. Most were placed in pits, though at Çatalhöyük one young woman was b
uried around 7000 BCE hugging to her breast a skull that had been replastered and painted red no fewer than three times.
Such intimacy with corpses makes most of us squeamish but clearly mattered a lot to early farmers in the Hilly Flanks. Most archaeologists think it shows that ancestors were the most important supernatural beings. The ancestors had passed on property, without which the living would starve; in return the living honored them. Possibly ancestral rituals clothed the transmission of property in a holy aura, justifying why some people owned more than others. People may also have used skulls for necromancy, summoning ancestors to ask when to plant, where to hunt, and whether to raid neighbors.
Ancestor cults flourished all over the Hilly Flanks. At Çatalhöyük almost every house had bodies under the floor and ancestral skulls plastered into the surfaces and walls. At ‘Ain Ghazal two pits were found containing life-size statues and busts made from bundles of reeds coated with plaster. Some had twin heads; most were painted with giant, staring eyes. Most striking of all, around 8000 BCE people at Çayönü in southeast Turkey built what its excavators labeled a “House of the Dead,” with sixty-six skulls and more than four hundred skeletons stashed behind an altar. Chemists identified deposits on the altar as hemoglobin crystals from human and animal blood. More human blood was caked on clay bowls, and two other buildings also had bloodstained altars, one with the image of a human head carved on it. The mind fairly boggles. It sounds like a slasher movie—struggling victims tied to altars, priests tearing their jugulars open with razor-sharp flint blades and sawing off their heads for storage, worshippers drinking their blood …
Or maybe not. Nothing archaeologists dig up can prove or disprove such flights of fancy. Still, the statues and the House of the Dead seem to imply the emergence of religious specialists who somehow persuaded everyone that they had privileged access to the supernatural. Perhaps they could fall into trances or fits; perhaps they could just describe their visions better. Whatever the reason, priests may have been the first people to enjoy institutionalized authority. Here, perhaps, we see the beginnings of entrenched hierarchy.
