Four Lost Cities

by Annalee Newitz

  How humans domesticated themselves

  In 1923, the Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe published a book called Man Makes Himself that offered one of the first stories of how urban life evolved. Influenced by the Marxist idea that human civilization changes during economic revolutions, Childe coined the term “Neolithic Revolution” to describe the constellation of developments that unfolded during the occupation of Çatalhöyük. Imagining an ancient version of the Industrial Revolution, he argued that all societies inevitably passed through an intense, rapid phase of transformation when they adopted agriculture, developed symbolic communication, engaged in long-distance trade, and built high-density settlements. He explained that this set of Neolithic practices swept through the Middle East rapidly, and from there spread around the world, sowing urbanism in its wake.

  For decades, anthropology students learned about the Neolithic Revolution, an abrupt cultural break when roaming bands of nomads became citified folk who paid taxes. Though many scholars used to believe in this idea, archaeologists today have gathered new data from Neolithic societies like Çatalhöyük, making the picture a lot more complicated. We’ve learned that the transition from nomadic life to mass urban society was very gradual, with many stops and starts over thousands of years. Also, it didn’t begin in the Middle East and radiate to the world; the set of practices we dub Neolithic emerged in multiple places independently, from Southeast Asia to the Americas. There is no question that Neolithic technologies and living arrangements changed the course of our civilizations. And the transition would have been jarring sometimes, especially for individuals leaving the old ways behind. But the Industrial Revolution is not a good analogy for the social changes we see at Çatalhöyük. During the early 20th century, one generation witnessed the widespread adoption of electricity, telephones, and cars. But over 10,000 years ago, during the Neolithic, it took dozens of generations to develop farming, and dozens more before we reached the dairy line. Still, despite progressing slowly, Neolithic people did manage to transform everything in the world around them, just as their distant progeny would with their fossil fuels and carbon-belching engines.

  By the time of Çatalhöyük’s founding, humanity had its own distinct ecological footprint full of animals and plants we cultivated,3 like goats, sheep, dogs, fruit trees, several forms of wheat, barley, and many other crops in different regions of the world. Along with these, we attracted life-forms we weren’t expecting, like mice, crows, weevils, and other vermin—plus plague-causing microbes that could jump easily from human to human, or animal to human, in the close quarters of a settlement. The human ecosystem is a complicated web of desirable and undesirable life-forms, attracted to our food, waste, bodies, and shelters.

  Humans changed every life-form that entered our settlement ecosystems. We bred plants so that their edible bits would ripen faster and feed more people, which led to wheat with bigger seeds as well as plumper fruits. Domestic animals like dogs, sheep, goats, and pigs changed during thousands of years of domestication, too. Perhaps the most obvious change is called neoteny, or the process of becoming more childlike. Domestic animals tend to be smaller, developing softer facial features like floppy ears and short snouts. Other changes are more dramatic: domestic pigs have an extra pair of rib bones. Humans weren’t exempt from this process. We also domesticated ourselves.

  Generations of settled life, eating a wide variety of soft, cooked foods, left their marks on our bodies. Neoteny has made human faces more delicate and thinned out our body hair. Our jaws became shorter and more rounded, which may have allowed new sounds to enter our languages.4 Specifically, the “v” and “f” sounds, produced when our top teeth press against our lower lips, are only possible in mouths where the lower jaw bites behind the upper. And this configuration, in turn, is likely the result of eating the kinds of farm-fresh grain mashes and stews that agriculture made possible.

  New kinds of foods also caused a huge segment of the human population to undergo neoteny at the genetic level. All human babies are born with the ability to digest lactose, a type of sugar found in raw milk. Before the Neolithic, we became lactose-intolerant as we aged, experiencing extreme gastric distress if we drank a glass of milk or ate cheese. But once milk products entered the human diet in the West, a genetic mutation for adult lactose tolerance spread like wildfire through the population. It was a dramatic and widespread genetic shift, and it happened entirely because of our shift to settled life. In the artificial ecosystem of the city, no life-form was unchanged—including Homo sapiens.

  This transformation would have been obvious to people at Çatalhöyük, who were deeply aware of the distinction between wild and domesticated animals. Koç University archaeologist Rana Özbal, who studies food in the city, told me that people in Çatalhöyük preferred meals made from domestic plants and meat. Based on the chemical residues she’s analyzed in storage containers, cookware, and trash pits, we know that people ate foods like milk, grain, sheep, and goat. Wild animals like aurochs were generally eaten only on special occasions, like a public feast. Domestication appears to be a self-reinforcing process: humans were drawn to domestic foods, which transformed our bodies, and over time our bodies were better suited to those foods, which made them all the more alluring.

  At the same time, domestication changed more than human biology. It was also connected to striking new kinds of symbolic structures. Hodder described finding teeth from weasels and foxes, along with bear claws and boar jaws, deliberately embedded in the plaster walls of many homes at Çatalhöyük. Often, people would spread a thick layer of plaster on auroch skulls, leaving the horns intact, and mount them next to their doors. Inside many homes, these plastered heads were stacked atop each other on pillars, creating the illusion of a ribcage made from horns. Wild animals have a starring role in paintings, too, where we find leopards, aurochs, and birds. Stanford archaeologist Lynn Meskell points out that the most common figurines at Çatalhöyük are animals, not humans;5 only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of figurines found at Çatalhöyük represent people or human body parts.

  Why would a society with a taste for domestication be so fascinated with the wild world they’re desperately trying to leave behind? Though humans in the city were domesticated, most were only a few degrees of separation from nomads who lived without walls, surrounded by animals who might become predator or prey at any moment. Hodder speculates that wild animals remained a source of spiritual awe for city folk, and people used their images to invoke power.6 One of Hodder’s favorite wall paintings shows two leopards standing toe-to-toe, their fierce faces turned away from each other to gaze pitilessly at the viewer. In another mural, gigantic vultures appear to be making off with people’s heads. Hunting scenes feature tiny, stick-figure humans looking puny next to dramatically enlarged bulls and boar. Wild animals loomed large in people’s imaginations at Çatalhöyük—often quite literally.

  Humans weren’t always depicted as being at odds with their wild counterparts. A favorite subject for Çatalhöyük artists was the therianthrope, or a human-animal hybrid. In one painting, a vulture has human legs. Many humans are drawn with leopards’ spots while they hunt or taunt bulls. Archaeologists have found weasel and other predator scat placed deliberately into human graves, as if to combine “dirt” from a dangerous animal with grave dirt. Perhaps this was one way humans claimed symbolic power, boasting that they were as swift as leopards, as dangerous as vultures, or as bloodthirsty as weasels. Hodder suggests that wild animals might have been treated as powerful ancestor figures from the past, and having relationships with them granted authority to people in the present. Put another way, the therianthrope might have been an early form of political posturing, a way of asserting authority over other people by claiming to be a bit more than human.

  But maybe the wild animals in the walls were meant to remind urbanites of a time when their ancestors slept in bedrolls or tents, flimsy structures that could not withstand an auroch attack. Looked at from
this perspective, wild animal imagery was a reminder of human weakness. Our walls, now strong enough to filter out predators, were once fragile. Wilderness lurked just beyond them, waiting to claw its way through. Marc Verhoeven of the RAAP Archaeological Consultancy interprets the walls at Çatalhöyük as places for “hiding and revealing”; the untamed world is invited in, only to be plastered over. After all, domesticity doesn’t mean shutting out nature. Instead, it’s more a filtering process, allowing certain life-forms inside while keeping others at bay. Domesticated animals, plants, and people live inside the house, while the wilderness remains trapped in its walls. Çatalhöyük’s urban design reflects a society adjusting uneasily to domesticated life. Its people held onto their wild past because it gave them power, but they wanted to keep it contained, at a remove.

  There was something else that the people of this ancient city wanted to keep at a remove: their neighbors. In this regard, people living in Istanbul’s gleaming high-rises would have a lot in common with their Neolithic precursors. Crammed together permanently, Çatalhöyük’s people struggled to maintain privacy with only about 60 centimeters of mud brick between themselves and the people they saw every day. Anthropologist Peter J. Wilson writes in The Domestication of the Human Species that cities like Çatalhöyük existed at the dawn of the concept of privacy.7 As nomads, humans had very little alone time. Space was shared, and houses were collapsible, providing courtesy screens rather than actual separation from the group. That said, absolute privacy was guaranteed to those who wanted to leave the group and go their own ways. If two groups got into a conflict they couldn’t resolve, they didn’t have to stew on either side of the same wall. They could simply walk in different directions.

  Çatalhöyük turned this social formula on its head. People could conceal themselves completely in their homes, shielding everything they did from the eyes of their neighbors. But in a permanent settlement where people acquired a lot of possessions, leaving the group behind became extremely difficult. As a result, the doorway into someone’s home became a boundary saturated with both social and mystical power. Wilson writes that when someone asks to enter a home, they request that the host “expose or reveal something of [her] private domain to neighbors.”8 Urban society is full of closed doors and hidden rooms, which gave people a new way to interact with each other, exposing only parts of themselves. Ironically, it took the invention of a city for people to conceive of being alone, away from the crowd. Put another way, the concept of privacy had arrived, and with it the concept of a public.

  Back in the South excavation shelter at Çatalhöyük, I looked deep into the layers of the city: walls built on walls, floors on floors, all revealed in an enormous staircase of levels that led backward in time. I realized that this city wasn’t merely a physical structure. Along with houses, its residents were building new layers to their identities. Inside their homes, they could do things that nobody knew about. No doubt sound leaked between the walls, and gossip networks broke silences, but people here had a novel psychological sense of being able to get away from other people even while staying among them. Opening the door to go outside meant putting on a public face, and with it a set of behaviors that might be quite different than the ones acceptable within the home. The public sphere existed above ground, on the rooftop sidewalks, while the private world existed on the earthen floor below. And beneath it all was the realm of buried ancestors and ritual mementos, in a space beyond public and private. In short, the house was a way to think about social relationships.

  The longer people lived on one plot of land, the more that land became part of who they were. You might say that this was the earliest stirring of feelings that led to phrases like, “I’m a New Yorker,” or “I’m from the prairies.” These statements are meaningless unless you already associate selfhood with a fixed location. Hodder and other archaeologists describe this way of thinking as “material entanglement,” when our identities become bound up in the physical objects around us. Those objects might be anything from a ritual weapon or a gift from someone we love, to a hill where we were born. At Çatalhöyük, houses are the most obvious sites of material entanglement, for spiritual and pragmatic reasons: their walls were studded with wild magic, their floors contained powerful history, and their storage rooms held enough food to keep an entire family alive without anyone having to venture beyond the safe, domestic realm of farm and flock.

  Humans had the technological ability to build houses long before we started living in them full time. So it wasn’t as if we had a technological breakthrough that led to a new way of thinking. Indeed, it might be the reverse. As societies became more complex, we needed more permanent objects to think about ourselves.

  Laying claim to the land

  Freie Universität Berlin archaeologist Marion Benz has been fascinated by this question for most of her career. She told me that settled life caused a culture shock that’s still reverberating across human civilizations today. To cope with that, or perhaps to express it, people built monumental structures that converted ordinary stretches of land into fantastical landscapes. Stone monoliths, pyramids and ziggurats, and even today’s mega-skyscrapers express the same impulse to tie humanity to a specific, special place.

  Benz argued that we see outbreaks of monumental architecture at tipping points in human civilization, when we move from one mode of community-building to the next. We see some of the first examples of this pattern in early Neolithic architecture from thousands of years before Çatalhöyük became a city. Roughly 12,000 years ago, seminomadic peoples created an incredible structure on the summit of a high plateau known today as Gobekli Tepe. Located about 300 kilometers east of Çatalhöyük, the site is populated with over 200 T-shaped stone pillars, some towering 5.5 meters high. It’s slightly reminiscent of Stonehenge, but far more elaborate. The pillars are crawling with reliefs and carvings of wild animals, many of them dangerous or poisonous.

  Evidence of periodic habitation at the site—mostly refuse from feasts and campsites—suggests it may be one of the first human settlements built in the West. But nobody lived there year-round, the way they did at Çatalhöyük. Visitors to the site reached it by following a narrow path from the mountains, and probably camped next to the pillar complex. The stone pillars, quarried nearby, stood inside a series of nested, circular walls that flanked a winding pathway to a central area full of benches and two of the tallest monoliths. The structure probably had a roof, creating a dark maze where the pillars’ animal imagery would have flickered in torchlight, seeming to come alive in the wriggling shadows. Archaeologists uncovered carved and painted human skulls at the site, with tiny holes drilled in their crania so they could be threaded with leather string and hung from the stones.9

  Physically imposing and unforgettable, Gobekli Tepe was a place where people returned for thousands of years, adding to its imposing stone structures and holding ceremonies and feasts. Klaus Schmidt, the archaeologist who led the excavation there in the 2000s, believed it was a proto-temple representing a cult of the dead.10 But for Benz, the exact purpose of the structure is less important than the fact that humans built it to be both lasting and imposing at a time when they were first moving into permanent settlements. It was, Benz said, a way that humans asserted their claim on the land, tying human community to a place rather than to a group of people.11

  But it was also a coping mechanism to deal with a social crisis. As people left nomadic bands to form agricultural communities, their populations grew in size. Suddenly, a community wouldn’t be an extended family of people whose faces you knew by heart. In a village of 200 people, or a city of thousands, even neighbors might be strangers. People needed more than personal connections to feel part of the group. “[They] needed huge monumental art to create commitment and remind people constantly of their collective identity,” Benz told me. You might say that people went from identifying with each other to identifying with a special, shared location. Symbolic landscapes replaced the nomadic tribe, b
oth literally and emotionally.

  By the time people settled at Çatalhöyük, 2,000 years after the creation of Gobekli Tepe, there had been a dramatic shift in the way people viewed their relationship with place. During that two-thousand-year gap, settled communities spread throughout the Middle East, and the shock of agricultural life faded. Benz explained the signs of this shift by tracing how animals are represented in art during this period. At Gobekli Tepe and sites of a similar age, there are some human figures, but they are “surrounded by a panoply of wild animals.” Artists show us a world where humanity and wild animals are equivalent to one another. Occasionally, at Gobekli, the animals seem to overwhelm human figures. Some of the T-shaped stones have arms and loincloths carved into their lower halves, but no faces. Instead, their upper bodies are covered in animals and abstract designs. But at Çatalhöyük, there are wall paintings where animals are surrounded by human figures bearing weapons. “We see a group of hunters … [and] together they are successful in killing the wild animal,” she explained. Benz sees “massive conceptual change” in this shift. The people of Gobekli were struggling to consolidate new societies in the wilderness, while the people at Çatalhöyük were part of “established, self-confident communities” numbering in the thousands.