Çatalhöyük

I know.

Well, I, my sort of feeling about those places, like Çatalhöyük as well, you know, which is the other really well-known, much better excavated site in, in southern Turkey.

Um, my, my, my feeling about those places is that, uh, to take a Graham Hancock, uh, phrase, there's fingerprints of, of these, of these civilizers all over these things.

But I think a lot of the local style and local character of them is down to the indigenous people.

Mm.

And that's, that for me is the thing that really makes sense.

You k- because you know that Çatalhöyük is part of a whole line of Halafian, um, settlements, don't you? It's just one of many.

Mm.

These people weren't just protecting themselves as individuals or families, they were protecting the settlement itself, the permanent place they had created.

Then there's Çatalhöyük.

Located in what's now Turkey, this settlement emerged around seven thousand five hundred BCE and became one of the largest and most sophisticated Neolithic communities in the world.

At its height, it housed between three thousand and eight thousand people.

But what makes Çatalhöyük truly weird, truly fascinating, is how it was designed.

There were no streets.

None.

It meant security.

Each region's builders learned to work with their local materials, adjusting techniques to suit the earth they had available.

At Çatalhöyük in modern-day Turkey, one of the most remarkable Neolithic settlements yet discovered, mud construction reached impressive sophistication by 7500 BCE.

This densely packed community of perhaps 8,000 people lived in houses built entirely of mud, with walls plastered smooth and often decorated with paintings and reliefs.

The houses were built so closely together that there were no streets.

But in a permanent settlement fed on soft grain gruels that can actually be used to wean infants way earlier, the birth rate skyrockets.

Packing 8,000 people into a dense urban environment like Catalhoyuk, I mean, that brings massive logistical problems.

You can't run a society of that size as a loose, egalitarian band of foragers.

No, it falls apart immediately.

At places such as Jericho, people are living in permanent communities thousands of years before the great ancient cities we usually learn about.

And at Catalhoyuk, in what is now Turkey, from roughly nine thousand years ago, people live in tightly packed mud brick houses.

Very tightly packed.

There aren't conventional streets running between many of these houses.

Your neighbor may literally walk across your house.

Modern apartment living has at least established the principle that the upstairs neighbor should remain inside their apartment while making inexplicable noises.

At Catalhoyuk, they're on your roof.

Again.

surplus food that can be protected, controlled, traded, and whoever controls the surplus controls everything.

By 7,500 BCE, settlements like Çatalhöyük in modern Turkey had reached 8,000 people, 8,000 individuals living in densely packed mud-brick houses built so close together that people entered through holes in the roof.

the whole settlement was like a honeycomb of humanity pressed together in ways that would have seemed insane to their hunter-gatherer ancestors and the social complexity had exploded chattel hoyuk had specialized craftspeople not everyone was farming any more Some people spent their days making pottery, others weaving textiles, others creating elaborate artwork for the ritual buildings scattered throughout the settlement.

These specialists weren't producing their own food.

Nevalı Çori was one of the very first ones.

Uh, Karahan Tepe, um, uh, Ca- uh, Çatalhüyük was another one.

And, um, although this was a little bit in conventional, on the conventional timeline, it's, it's, it's post-Göbekli Tepe, but this Çatalhüyük is very well documented.

It's excavated.

It's, it's been published.

Yeah, I mean, I think it undoubtedly is.

I think Çatalhöyük, which is in modern-day Turkey, is the earliest evidence in my view of something akin to civilization.

And now archeologists will say it's not civilization because it doesn't quite tick off every ch- check- part of the checklist.

But I, I think that's n- neither here nor there.

Very impressive architecture.

Clearly organized labor.

Stra- stratified society because how do you achieve that without someone at, at the top and someone below? And these are all things that we used to think were civilization, right? And yet people aren't happy with us calling, uh, Çatalhöyük a civilization, but I think it will get there to be-

But don't you think that's just because of them trying to protect their timeline that they've been teaching?