Discovery of Turkish 11,400-year-old village challenges ideas of when and why humans first settled down
Esber Ayaydin/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Suggest that society was established before the dawn of agriculture
Excerpt:
Scientists long believed that the domestication of plants and animals around 10,000 years ago is what compelled humans to adopt a sedentary lifestyle and that the boom in food production allowed them to develop complex societies and lay the foundations of civilisation.
But the mounting evidence that Stone Age people built permanent structures for spiritual, rather than strictly essential, pursuits is disrupting conventional thinking that they lacked a large-scale society with division of labour and shared ritualistic motifs.
“It will take time for the scientific community to digest and accept this game-changing research,” says Mehmet Özdo?an, the professor emeritus of archaeology at Istanbul University. “We must now rethink what we knew—that civilisation emerged from a horizontal society that began raising wheat because people were hungry—and assess this period with its multi-faceted society.”
The Neolithic era, coinciding with the end of the Ice Age, marks humankind’s dramatic shift from foraging to farming. “The foundations for today’s civilisation, from family law to inheritance to the state and bureaucracy, were all struck in the Neolithic period,” Özdo?an says.
