You're Dead to Me - Çatalhöyük and the Neolithic Revolution

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

Greg Jenner and his guests explore the amazing prehistoric site of Çatalhöyük as we learn about the Neolithic Revolution of the Middle East. What is so special about Çatalhöyük and why did prehistoric hunter-gatherers decide to settle down with pottery, pals and porridge?In archaeology corner this week is Dr Lindsay Der from the University of Victoria in Canada and in comedy corner is the fantastically funny Mike Wozniak.Script: Chris Wakefield, Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Research: Chris Wakefield Project manager : Siefe Miyo Edit producer : Cornelius Mendez

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a BBC Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner, I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster, and I'm the chief nerd on the funny TV kids show, Horrible Histories. And today we are settling in the Stone Age with some state-of-the-art ceramics and severed skulls for company as we travel back thousands of years to explore Çatalhöyük and the Neolithic Revolution.

No, not an underrated Prince album, although it could have been. Yes, we are talking big changes in late Stone Age Turkey, roughly 9,000 years ago. And to help us get to grips with prehistoric paintings, parasites and porridge, we're joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, or rather Archaeology Corner, she's currently an assistant professor at the University of Victoria in Canada, where her work explores public archaeology, changing animal-human relationships through time. And she's also a researcher with the Châtel-Hoyoke Research Project. It's Dr. Lindsay Durr. Thanks for joining us, Lindsay. Lovely to have you here.

Great to be here. Thanks for having me. And in Comedy Corner, he's a fantastic comedian, actor, writer, and podcaster who you will recognise from his handsomely moustachioed face and from his appearances on Taskmaster, Man Down, and a random TV show called Horrible Histories that I've never heard of. Plus, of course, his hilarious radio and podcast work, my absolute modern fave being the delightfully silly Three Bean Salad podcast. It's the marvellous Mike Wozniak. Welcome, Mike. Hello. Hello. Thanks for having me. Very excited about this. You say you've listened to the show before.

I've listened to most of the show, I'd say. I mean, don't test me, necessarily. I mean, I could show you my phone and that would prove that I at least put it into my ears at some point okay yeah I want to see the metadata of when you listen for how long for you trained as a doctor you were a doctor a very long time ago yes sure but you've got a big brain so where are you with history and archaeology I like history I assumed as a small child I would be whip-cracking archaeologists purely because of Harrison Ford. That didn't happen. History-wise, I've always liked it. It was very dry at school though. I know there were options. There were things like Tudors you could do. There were things like Cold War module you could do. We got given socioeconomic history

in Britain between 1750 and 1950. so there's a lot about canals but if we get you back on for a canals podcast you'll be expert right oh no at all yeah i'll be flying it's gonna be electric so what do you know that leads us on to the first segment of the podcast so what do you know this is where i have a guess at what listeners at home might know about today's subject. You've obviously heard of the Stone Age, and thanks to Indiana Jones and the Raiders Lost Ark, you may remember that Neolithic means New Stone Age, Neolithic. Maybe you're seeing marvellous megalithic monuments in your mind, Stonehenge and Scarabray in Orkney, but actually the Neolithic in Britain happens later than what we're talking about today. And I'll be honest, the Neolithic doesn't really pop up much in pop

culture. There's a very dodgy movie called 10,000 BC that is nonsense, frankly, and there's a confusingly vague Stone Age meets Bronze Age aesthetic of the charming Aardman animation Early Man, but neither of them are really Neolithic at all. It's more of a sort of a thing you'd encounter, I guess, in video games. I'm thinking perhaps Age of Empires, where you have to start at the very beginnings of human life. So you might be a bit of a Neolithic newbie, is my guess. But let's dig into some prehistoric populations and find out a little bit more, shall we? Dr. Lindsay, let's quickly start with a bit of background. We've mentioned already the Neolithic and the Neolithic Revolution, not a Prince album. Who coined the term Neolithic Revolution and what does that even mean?

Well, the term was actually coined in the 1930s by an Australian archaeologist named V. Gordon Child and we still use that term today. It basically just refers to the invention of agriculture and the shift from hunting-gather gathering economies to farming subsistence pathways. So it's a revolution in that it's a change in how people got their food and where they lived. And we've mentioned the Stone Age. And, of course, Mike, as you well know, the Stone Age gets sub-compartmentalised into six different distinct eras.

Six? I think I can manage three. Go on then, give us three. Neo. Yeah, Neolithic. Paleo, very old old and in the middle there's the old your old meso hey you've done all right there that's why i thought it was three no one i didn't get the memo that had been further subdivided into six what am i missing neo meso

paleo meso neo paleo meso and miscellaneous the Middle East, what we're talking about, we go for six, right, Lindsay? Yeah. So you're very close. So we have the Lower Paleolithic, the Middle Paleolithic, the Upper Paleolithic, and then the Mesolithic slash Epipaleolithic, the Neolithic, and then the Chalcolithic. What is chalc? What does the chalc bit mean? It's just a period when there's pottery generally.

Wild card. It's spelled C-H as well, so Chalkolithic, and it's usually associated with copper. So it's sort of pre-Bronze Age, but not quite. Prior to the Neolithic, there had been the Epipaleolithic or Mesolithic or Mesolithic, depending on which you want to use. So do you want to talk us a little bit about what had gone before? What's happening in the Epipaleolithic before we get to Neolithic Shattul-Huyuk? Well, the Epipaleolithic is characterized by these hunting-gathering groups

who are moving around the landscape, and they may have hunting camps, but we don't see them really settling down as much. And it occurred around 23,000 to 9,600 BCE. And then after that is when we start to see the changes that lead to the Neolithic Revolution. That's the Epipaleolithic. So it's a pre-revolution. It's the warm-up act. But we don't care about that. We're here to talk about the Neolithic. Mike, the Neolithic is often described as a package by archaeologists, which includes the domestication of crops, the domestication of animals, people settling down into bigger

groups and homes and houses, the development of pottery and weaving. It's like Neolithic, but it's kind of middle-aged, kind of people starting to get into, I think I'm going to buy a pot as well. It's that you just wanted to settle down a bit, catch on some of the great novels, that kind of thing. Exactly. Kids are getting a bit older now. Yeah. A holiday in the Cotswolds it's very nice yeah lovely okay so what's in mike wozniak's 21st century package is what i want to know

the dominant force in my life at the moment is is a domesticated animal or barely which i mean is almost certain to interrupt this podcast which is a small hungarian vizsla called pam who's very poorly trained pretty much every waking hour, my schedule is determined by that beast. So the beast has become master of man in this package. Well, I mean, seeing on that note, actually, Lindsay, the first of the major movements within the Neolithic package we have to talk about is domesticating animals. And I know this is an area that you research closely, the relationship between humanity and animal species. So how do people go from running around chasing animals, hunting them, chucking javelins at them,

to domesticating them and keeping them in the back garden and feeding them scraps and patting them on the head and then killing them? How does that work as a process? Well, we aren't exactly sure is the problem. There are a bunch of different theories. One of the most popular ones, also by Viggold and Child, is the Oasis Theory, which basically says that after the Ice Age ended, the land dried up, and then people and animals gathered at these oases over time. And then people began to feed these animals, and eventually that led to domestication. There's another theory called the Nuclear Zones theory, which basically says that hunters and gatherers lived in these areas with abundant resources. And that led them to try new types

of food and led them to settle down. And this afforded people the ability to observe animals, develop close relationships with them, experiment, and then eventually domesticate them. Which of those two sounds more sensible to you, Mike? I'm quite impressed by the second one. I don't think if i was there at the time i would have progressed humanity at all because i don't think i could have been bothered to try and experiment and if i was trying to do an experiment on a auric or something like that i don't think i'd have the imagination to imagine that if i mated it with different types of thing or develop a nice cow with nice creamy milk i don't think i'd have that in the kind of imagination or patience patience is the key i think i'd end up in the former i think the beasts would come to

me because they were just hanging around in the same area and just get used to each other and eventually start you know doing tummy tickles and stuff and is that what happened with pam is that did she just come to you one day in an oasis we just came together over there was a bit of meat that was left on the streets nearby and and we were both attracted to it. We decided to share. We've been happy ever since. Mike, already you mentioned the word breed, actually. But Lindsay, when we talk about domesticating animals, we are talking about changing them genetically, aren't we?

That's right. So domestication involves physical change, but also genetic change, and we're actually creating new species. So it's not something that happens fast over one generation or even several generations. As you might imagine, it's going to take thousands and thousands of years. So it's quite hard to make a Pam in an afternoon is what we've learned. This is it. Yeah, this is where I struggle. Yeah, it's very long-term thinking.

I'm sort of imagining cavemen essentially being, being really long-term strategizers. Maybe. They've got plenty of time. Nothing else on. Their boss isn't emailing them at 2am. Yeah. That's animal domestication, Lindsay, which gives us cows and gives us goats and sheep and cats. Of course, we also get the birth of farming, which is hugely important and one of the key tenets of the Neolithic. And so this is cereal crops. important and one of the key tenets of the Neolithic. And so this is cereal crops. Is farming just a process of picking up something that already exists and planting in the ground and

going, hey, it grew? Or are they actually creating their own new crops as well genetically? So farming also includes the domestication of plants. It's similar to animals. The theories are the same. The oasis theory, the nuclear zones theory. There's other theories that are maybe not as popular or not as famous. For example, under the oasis theory, the land's all dried up. So where are the plants going to grow? They're going to have to grow at these oases so that they have a source of water. And all these changes, the first place in the world where it really happened, where we see farming is in the Middle East in an area called the Fertile Crescent. And this is where the first plants were farmed.

And these were cereals like wheat and barley. People are putting them in the ground and they're watering them and they're nurturing them and they're harvesting them at the right time of year and then eating them. This is food production, isn't it? This is not just horticultural gardening for the sake of it. It is 100% food production and not just cultivating of plants. Mike, if you could grow anything at all in your back garden, what would you grow out the back?

Do you mean things that can grow? Or do you mean things like a sort of pizza bush or something? Well, if you want a pizza bush, I guess out of the many generations you probably could get there. Start now, pass it on to your children and your children's children. It might be a bit of hard work. These crops, it's not just stuff you can pick off a tree and shove in your gob if you've come out of a cave for the first time and you see some barley just growing

somewhere you're unlikely just to sort of put it out of the ground and start munching and think that that was a great success you're gonna have a fair bit of bellyache and terrible squits and you're probably never going to go near it again do we know how they've worked out how to use these we don't really know how or why they figured that out because unfortunately we can't actually go into the minds of past peoples. But we do know that they did figure out how to process these items so that they could actually eat them and that they were ground down and they were tolerable. Unfortunately, we will never know why they decide to suddenly do it, but probably they had a lot of experimentation.

Are we found in sort of early millstones or anything like that? Or is it just a guy jabbing a couple of rocks together? Oh, no, we definitely have millstones, evidence that they were cooking all around the world. Of course, the Neolithic happened at different times, but we do find evidence of all sorts of these tools for cooking and manufacturing and processing food. Recently, there's been new evidence for much earlier development of bread. So we are seeing actually with new research that we can go further back with some of these questions, which is exciting, but also a bit frustrating because we don't always have the

answers. We've talked about a revolution, which by the sounds of it didn't happen in a week, but it was quick in archaeological terms because we've had 3 million years of hunting and gathering. And then actually this happens in 10 to 15,000 years. We've talked about settlements. Again, do people just suddenly decide to just stay put? How do they go from being wandering cave dwellers, chasing the kind of various animals to suddenly deciding, nope, I'm going to set up shop here. I want to build a new life in the city. There have been a lot of theories around this, why people may have settled down. Some people have argued it may have been related to climate change at the time. But we have to keep in mind

that climate would have differed across a vast variety of ecological zones. And even within the region of Turkey or the Middle East, there are so many different ecological zones. Others think that maybe people began to see the world differently. So it was an ideological change. It could have been new types of social organization. There's also this idea that farming may have been a solution to rising populations. In order to farm, you really need to settle down. If you start farming your food, you need to stay there to look after it. So I suppose you can't go wandering off. settle down. If you start farming your food, you need to stay there to look after it. So I suppose you can't go wandering off. It feels so obvious to us that people would stay in one place. But of course, for so long, they hadn't. That just hadn't been manageable. So it is an enormous

revolution. But it's really interesting that it might be an ideas revolution as well, not just logistics. Yeah, it's interesting because actually farming is more costly than hunting and gathering. So you actually have more investment than hunting and gathering so you actually have more investment in terms of labor and you really rely on the climate versus hunting and gathering is more reliable so it's a bit counterintuitive not the way i do it though a better farmer than hunting and gathering i would be rubbish at chasing down animals i'd either befriend them and wouldn't want to eat them or I'd just get tired. I might make a fool of myself here because I've got no idea when cave paintings pop up.

Is there any kind of pictorial record? Because we know there are people who lived in caves, drew pictures of the hunt. Did anyone draw a nice little picture of their farm, little farmhouse with a swing in the front garden and little bucolic scenes in any caves in Turkey or anything like that? Not at the farming. There are paintings of the hunting going on.

We do have paintings, though, of the settlement. So we have a sort of first kind of town planner somewhere. That's right. This episode is about the Neolithic, but we're going to focus on Chateau Hoyuk, which is a site that Lindsay has researched. It's a very famous site. Mike, to archaeologists, it's basically the oldest town in human history. It's the first evidence of people settling down in large numbers. It's Milton Keynes Mark I.

Yes, that's right. Lindsay, roughly speaking, we're talking 9,000 years ago. So 7,100 BCE roughly is its start date. Can you just talk us through like what is it? How many houses? Can you describe it for us? So as you mentioned, Çatalhöyük was a prehistoric site from 7,100 to 5950 years BCE, kind of an early town in the Neolithic. We have found at least 270 different houses, although the site has only been excavated 10% or less in total. So there's a good chance there are actually many, many more houses that we just haven't uncovered yet. Between 3,000 to 8,000

people would have lived there, which is quite a lot of people. And it was occupied for over 1,000 years. One of the really interesting things about this town of Çatalhöyük is that there is no evidence for any public spaces. So we don't have any monumental architecture. We don't have any central administration or government or authority that we have evidence of. There's no religious centers and we don't have any zones of production. So that's kind of a mystery because how did these people live together for so long without a government or any sort of tension even? Because they're just kind of existing in an egalitarian way where people are mainly equal. Sounds awful.

A bunch of communists, a lot of them. But only 10% of it's been excavated. So it's possible that if you stick a spade in the Far East corner, you'll find a massive stadium and next to it, a gift shop, and then around the corner, a huge temple. I mean, obviously, archaeological science is a lot more thorough than that, but I suppose there's more to find, perhaps. There is a lot more to find. I mean, it's a bit unlikely we would find something on that scale just because there has been remote sensing done so that there are surveys done. But there could be a satellite site

where maybe they had to travel to something like that that we just haven't discovered yet. And where is it, this place? Central Southern Turkey from Ankara, which is the capital. It's about three hours. The nearest city is called Konya, which is the capital. It's about three hours. The nearest city is called Konya, which is an hour drive away. And in terms of the size of the site, Mike, do you want to guess how large it is in terms of football pitches or, as the American listeners will know, soccer pitches? I'm assuming big.

How many people did we say? 8,000 people. Up to 8,000, yeah. Up to 8,000. I'm going to say 10,000 soccer pitches. It's not that big. Is that massive? I think it's 33 soccer pitches, which is quite big.

So I really made a fool of myself for that guess. Okay. Sounds like very efficient farming then, is it? Shall we have a little look at it, actually? Because we've got a couple of reconstructed images which we can show you. Imagine that's sort of a small chunk of the entire town. So do you want to describe what you can see for us? I can't tell if the blue bit is sea,

but what it looks like, an adorable, quaint little seaside village, I would say, with single-level housing, whitewashed stone walls, very wise in that climate, a couple of piles of straw. There's a man having an argument with a goat. They've got ladders. I wasn't expecting to see ladders. No chairs, though.

They haven't yet invented chairs. It looks really nice. And there's a pizza oven as well. I mean, the most obvious thing that you probably can't see is there's no roads, Mike. So how do you think people are getting around? I assume they're doing a lot of on foot.

I'm assuming they're trying to domesticate horses. Is that right? Not quite. They hadn't got around to riding stuff by then? That's a little bit later on. They don't need roads because they use the roofs. They're using parkour. It's that scene in the Bourne movies where he's jumping over the roofs in Morocco.

Yeah, they walk across the roofs. So if you want to get across the town, you have to go up a ladder and cross all the buildings. Why do we think they did that? Well, because the houses were actually so tightly packed that the walls would actually abut each other. We would call it an agglutinated settlement. So there were actually no gaps to really have streets. And they also didn't have doors in their houses. So the only way they entered their houses was there was a hatch in the

roof and then they would climb down the ladder to go inside. And we know that they use ladders because we actually have the scars of the ladders still on the walls. Speaking as a podcaster, it would be a nightmare having people and goats trampling across my roof all the time. There's a microphone to pick up all of that. I mean, I'd never get anything done. Mike, let's treat it as if you were going to move there, right? Into the Chateau Hoyet community. Lindsay, how many people could live in one of these little single-story houses? Do we have rough numbers? Do we know what life is like indoors?

Well, we think roughly five to ten people could have lived in them, but they are very small, speaking as someone who has stood in one of them. Most of them have a very similar layout, so they have a central kind of room, as we might call it. Then we have side rooms for storage. They all have areas for cooking. So hearths, they have platforms to sleep on. And they didn't have chairs per se, but some of them do actually have benches.

That fits the communal living thing, doesn't it? It's all about community, right? If we're going to have something to sit on, let's all sit on it. You would think so. But then some of these benches had animal horns coming out of them, so you really couldn't sit on them at all. Oh, right. Yeah.

In fact, I think we've got a picture, actually. Oh, crumbs. I don't think I'd ever call that a bench. I'm not quite sure where the seating bit of the bench is. So there's these big old blocks with quite enormous horns, curved horns coming out, so curved to almost create right angles. Are the horns armrests? Are you supposed to sit on the horns?

The horns also look very sharp. I mean they look like if they were benches they might be punishment benches. I'm assuming this world wasn't quite as peaceful and benevolent as we're now imagining. The naughty step. Yeah, thieves and adulterers give them the horns. Are they functional furniture or are they decorative?

Are there wear patterns where people's bottoms have sat on them? They probably weren't sitting on them. They were probably there for adornment, elaboration in the house, and probably ritual purposes. Okay. So they're like the best sofa that you're not allowed to sit on. Your mum's like, no, you can't sit on that. It's just for guests.

So we have got these little houses. They've got whitewashed walls good transport links to the local area they're in a great location they're the only location but they've got furnishings built into the house which is nice and then five to ten people indoors which is not a huge number i mean you certainly get more than that in a victorian house in the 19th century slums should we have a look at the floor plan though because before you put an offer offer in Mike, before you're going to buy this house, there is one thing you probably should know. Do you want to just have a quick look at this image and just with your medical training, do you want to just explain what's going on at the bottom of the image?

Okay, it's strikingly, it's quite a clutch of skeletons directly below where the family appears to be enjoying a bit of leisure time inches below their buttocks yes that's right we have corpses aplenty under the floorboards right lindsey what the hell's going on here well at chattel hoyuk people were buried beneath the floors of houses in the foundations of the houses in the benches in bricks and in walls in fact people would sleep on the platforms above where the skeletons were actually buried. And some houses had 10 to 15 burials, some had as many as 62, and others had none at all. There's a lot of them at Chattel Hook.

We have a higher density of house burials than other Neolithic sites, but it's not uncommon to see this. Other cultures like the Maya also buried their dead under their house floors. It seems a bit of a health risk, doesn't it? Do we know what these people have died? I mean, have they all got sort of smashed in skulls? No, actually not. We don't have evidence of violence. So grandma's died in her sleep and they've literally just tucked her under a rug, essentially.

Except it's not grandma. Analysis has been done, Lindsay, and genetically speaking, these people aren't related to the people living in the house. These are just random people under the floorboards. I guess why. It would be uncomfortable, I suppose, to have grandma under the floorboards. So, yeah, I guess you come to an arrangement with your neighbours where I'll take your grandma if you take my grandma. Yes, of course.

It's a bit less stressful. Could you imagine they're going for a house survey and they're like, well, we found 62 skeletons under the floorboards and some in the walls. Okay, well, that's more than I was expecting. The other place was just 32, which seems more average. Yeah, it's really about the garden for me, actually. I love the garden. I don't mind the skeletons.

Just as long as there aren't any doors. You haven't got doors, have you? No, no doors. That's, I suppose, surprising to us, Lindsay. But as you said, actually, this was occupied for a thousand years consistently by new generations of people coming and going. So I suppose it's just previous generations who are buried under the buildings. But is this a part of daily life or is this they get stored away and then they're forgotten? They're not forgotten. Death was very important to the people at Çatalhöyük and they had a lot

of rituals around death. Sometimes children were even buried in baskets. Some skeletons would have burial goods like obsidian or flint blades. There were beads, there were leather pouches. Even animal claws would sometimes be found directly associated with skeletons. And actually, when you mentioned obsidian, this is the earliest evidence in human history for mirrors. These are obsidian mirrors that are sort of polished very, very brightly so you could sort of look at your own reflection you'd probably look pretty good in obsidian as well wouldn't you most people it's like looking at yourself in a mirror in a poorly lit room your absolute best damn i'm hot tonight let's go let's do this one particular body that archaeologists have recovered was smeared with or covered with a particular animal product do you want to guess what the animal product was mike uh goose fatose fat. Goose fat is a good guess. Early channel swimmer, something like that? No, it is weasel faeces. What is special about faeces of the weasel as opposed to the stoat, the badger, or any of his other woodland friends? Why has weasel been picked out first in

the team? That's a good question. I'll turn to our weasel been picked out first in the team that's a good question i'll turn to our weasel expert dr lindsey we're not really sure they don't specifically focus on weasels in a lot of the house elaboration or the art so this individual might have had some sort of association with weasels is the best we can speculate could have been a one-off yes it's probably there's always one weasel guy isn't there i guess every community and if you're in one place for 8 000 years you know someone is going to be into weasel feces it's the numbers game i suppose good old weasel jeff and his weasel he was a lot of fun weasel jeff but his brace of weasels to all sorts the application of weasel feces possibly was to stop animals like mice and

rats from chewing the body maybe but we don't particularly know but yes that's how we know about weasels because they are weasley recognized but we've also got other burial customs what do you think people were doing with skulls mike in terms of burial practices indiana jones would tell me that skulls quite a useful item and I would have thought why waste that bit the rib cage could be used for sort of straining off pasta they've started using sort of thicker sheets of pasta and the skull seems like quite a useful beverage container quite useful for an early sort of spice rack that kind of thing Lindsay did we have a neolithic spice rack made of a human head no I don't think we have a spice rack per se but people

were largely buried intact with their skeletons maybe in some different positions but some burials were actually reopened and skulls or skull parts were removed and then they would circulate them and then they would rebury them again later this actually happened at other sites as well in the middle east for example jericho in palestine and in jordan we've found skulls that have been plastered to reconstruct the facial features and the eyes added in and this is commonly known as the neolithic skull cult absolutely great name for a band yeah isn't it the t-shirts would be fantastic but slightly somber when they were reburied were they reburied with the same owner of the head? No.

So it's not as if you want to have a word with Aunty Jude, and you're like, I think Aunty Jude would know what to do in this situation. Let's just, let's give it a punt. Let's dig up her head and ask her. And then it doesn't work and they put it back. It's not that. Yes, they're not. We do have one example for at Chateau Hoyock again.

We've got a burial of a woman, and she's cradling a man's skull in her hands. It has been plastered, as you say, Lindsay, three times, painted red. So his face has been sort of redrawn on three times. She's holding it in a Hamlet soliloquy way, but she's dead herself. Can we say prehistoric love story? You know, is this her beloved husband? Do we have any inclination that they knew each other in life? Well, not likely because the skull that the woman is actually holding is from a different time. So it's probably more to do with ancestor veneration. And something interesting about that particular burial is that we also found the one leopard bone at the site, which was carved into a pendant. So even though there's leopards in the art, that was the only burial that also had

an actual leopard remain. So she might've been pretty sort of bling individual. She was the only burro that also had an actual leopard remain so she might have been pretty sort of playing individual she's the only girl in town with a leopard bone yeah she's been allowed to be buried with a skull obsidian mirror she's ready to go out on the town pretty big cheese yeah so lindsay as well as religion and ritual at shuttle hoyuk when we go wider afield there's another very famous site called gobekli Tepe. To be honest, I don't really know how to describe it. What is it, a religious shrine? It's older than Çatalhöyük, isn't it? It does predate Çatalhöyük, and it is a site also in Turkey, more south, closer to the Syrian border. And it's made of these mounds created from layers and layers of debris, which are over 15 meters deep.

And it's high in the landscape on a very high hill. And the interesting thing about that site that it's famous for is it has these T-shaped pillars in these enclosures. So these monolithic pillars that have reliefs of animals on them, carved into them. And there was even one that is interpreted as wearing an animal loincloth and having hands. And we have lots of evidence of large-scale feasting. We have tons and tons of animal bones that somehow got all the way up on this high hill and even potential evidence for making and drinking beer.

When I was an archaeology student 15 years ago, we were taught that religion and monumental architecture, the building of shrines and temples, requires farming and settlement and agriculture and towns. And yet this predates Çatalhöyük. This is older. So Lindsay, am I being naive? Is there a missing town that we haven't found yet that built this? Well, a lot of people interpret Göbekli Tepe as some sort of a sanctuary site or a temple

site. So that's why it's being cited as potentially the first place of religion in the entire world. But on the other hand, some archaeologists would argue that these enclosures actually had roofs. And so it was actually residential. So we can't really say either way. We don't have enough evidence. Music festival? Is it a sort of Glastonbury or a sort of catella it's like you know everyone goes up a hill every summer and they eat loads of food and they get a bit drunk mike do you want to have a look at it actually because i mean we've got a very nice image

oh wow yeah it's quite hengi the way it looks here yes unlike stonehenge it's not opened it's closed because yeah there's huge stones and then yes there's closed off little walls and little tunnel and it looks like a sort of miniature castle. Well, it's got rampart walls almost, doesn't it? And what I'm looking at here, would these be mud bricks? No. They carved the stones into the pillars that are T-shaped

and they used stones for the enclosures as well. So this is heavy-duty lifting. And it's on a hill. And it's on a hill. It's quite impressive but it is slightly mysterious. It's a bit tantalising but I'm really intrigued by the fact that this predates Chateau Hoy. Obviously, this was something that was being built by a lot of people. This is huge amounts of stone being shifted up a hill and carved into something beautiful and organized. So it's not just three blokes in a field going, right, let's just stick up a rock in the corner and that'll be fine.

This is hundreds of people, isn't it, Lindsay? rock in the corner and that'd be fine. This is hundreds of people, isn't it, Lindsay? Yes, it would have taken a lot of people to work together cooperatively just to do the heavy labor of creating these enclosures. Because it's not just one enclosure, there's several enclosures. And then again, the location, the landscape wouldn't have been the easiest thing. And then all that refuse too, you know, that's not just from one person or five people generating it. So it indicates there were a lot of people using this site. It'sasel jeff he's just he's had an absolute bender he's been partying he's got so drunk and he's gone up the hill him and his weasels and he's had a rager um all right so gobeki teple is a kind of fascinating slight mystery that we haven't

quite solved yet but let's get back to chateau hoyuk so we've seen that chateau hoyuk is a town of perhaps 8 000 people and we've seen inside those cute little houses but when we were looking at reconstruction of one lindsay i didn't see anywhere toilety so first obvious question is are they going up on the roof chucking it over the back wall are they going out on the street i mean there's no roads right so where are they going up on the roof, chucking it over the back wall? Are they going out on the street? I mean, there's no roads, right? So where are they doing their business? We think they might have collected it in vessels or baskets. And this might sound a bit gross, but evidence suggests that the houses themselves were kept fairly clean. The issue was that many of the gaps that did exist between the buildings had what we call middens full of waste and so this would have included things like old meat bones as well as the poo which would have been really

smelly and obviously unhygienic so you're saying the houses are charming and adorable and clean but next door is is literally a pile of shit yes and beneath you, corpses. Exactly, yes. But do we know what the impact that must have had on human health? Well, the conditions were very crowded, as we mentioned, right? All the houses are budding each other and they didn't even have room for streets. So you have this in addition to the garbage and these middens, the waste that's there. And so there has been some evidence that people would have had some parasites. And so they looked at the coprolites from the site, coprolites being fossilized poop, which contained whipworm eggs, which is caused by fecal

contamination of food and water. But I would say that the ratio of people with this problem at this site in Turkey is smaller than other Neolithic sites. So obviously the Çatalhöyük people were doing something right by keeping their houses so clean. So they were crapping down the side of the walls, but they were washing their hands afterwards. Well, yes, potentially. And the houses themselves, right? They didn't have any windows. So there would have been a lot of soot coming in there. And that's why they replastered their walls hundreds of times, because the dwellings would have been very, very soot coming in there and that's why they re-plastered their walls hundreds of times because the dwellings would have been very very smoky and that obviously would have caused

some respiratory issues so a bit of asthma a bit of coughing and spluttering i mean mike you're a doctor by training i assume you would diagnose that quite quickly as shuttle hoyock syndrome right nice i like it parasites and chronic emphysema it's quite a combo yeah but i think it's fair to say that these people are living quite good healthy lives they're there for a thousand years they must be pretty robust and that means that they are also probably eating quite healthily so lindsay can we move away from the feces and go to the things that's going in the body in the first place so what's on the menu in chateau hoyuk 9 000 years ago yeah so they were eating mostly the domesticated

crops, like we mentioned, the wheat and barley, as well as animals, especially sheep and goats. And these cereals, they would have processed into breads or porridges alongside roasting or baking their meat. And even though they were farmers, they did continue to forage wild plants like lentils and peas, and they did continue to hunt especially these wild bulls which i think mike previously mentioned which are the now extinct species called aurochs wowzers have you ever hunted an auroch mike no i it's just a word that's in my brain just for sort of ancient cow you volunteered it early on i was sort of showboating early doors with the one piece of glossary that's in there so they've hunted hunted those, they've taken the horns, they've brought them indoors to decorate the lounge.

And they're eating perhaps auroch, but they're also eating peas and lentils. It's very healthy. You mentioned porridge as well, Lindsay. Do we know what impact that sort of diet has on teeth and oral hygiene? Have they got a lot of cavities and gum disease or are their teeth in surprisingly good nick? Well, it would have caused issues to the teeth. They would have had issues like dental caries and gum disease. Obviously, it would have been a change. But then again, you know, eating harder objects also can ruin your teeth. It sounds like quite a balanced diet, I think, actually, is what I was slightly surprised about. I mean, we haven't mentioned pottery yet,

but actually, pottery is a hugely important technology that's invented in the Neolithic too. haven't mentioned pottery yet but actually pottery is a hugely important technology that's invented in the neolithic too mike i remember from taskmaster that you are a keen milk drinker 37 pints a month i think is your uh the level you've reached so clearly a big fan of milk yes yeah i got sort of painted into a corner and i have to put a number on it that's the number i put on it i mean that's a ridiculous amount of milk for any species let alone a human but actually you have the neolithic to thank for this. This is where the story of human milk consumption really begins, Lindsay, because this is where we get what's called lactase persistence. And it's a genetic mutation.

It's just a sort of accident of biology. We think that because people domesticated cattle in the Neolithic, that a secondary product would have been dairy. That because people domesticated cattle in the Neolithic, that a secondary product would have been dairy. And then the consumption of dairy products like milk would have created an evolutionary pressure for this lactase persistence. And what that means basically is that you can digest milk without having a dodgy tummy or cramps or anything like that. So there's been some fairly heavy evolutionary pressure on the poor Neolithic lactose intolerant guys. They're a pretty rough old time got weeded out they're back now they're okay now now there's a solution for them they're safe there's alternative milks but back then it was pretty rough on those guys yeah but i was quite surprised to learn this

statistic something like 55 to 60 percent of the world's population are lactose intolerant the milk drinkers like mike wozniak, you're in the minority. And fueling climate change as well, single-handedly. Possibly. It's a mutation that arrives through the Neolithic and is passed down through the generations, but it only spreads to certain parts of the world. And so, actually, more than half the world's population don't have that mutation. So let's turn away from how genes express themselves in terms of lactase persistence,

and let's look instead at a different type of expression, artistic expression, because Chateau Hoyer gives us some remarkable art. And Mike, you've already mentioned cave art, so you know, famous caves at Chauvet and Lascaux and so on. But here we're talking about a slightly different style of art. Lindsay, this is a really rich site for all types of different human artworks. I mean, we've got figurines, we have murals on walls, we've got sculpture. I know there's loads, there's too much to cover, but what are the highlights? So as you mentioned there, we do have the murals. We have over 3,000 figurines, which is more than other Neolithic sites, also including the Mediterranean and Greece.

We have plastered reliefs, and we have those installations of animal bones, like those animal horns that we saw earlier in the benches, and smaller art like stamp seals and decorated pottery pieces. All the art that's more fixed, art that you can't really move around, is found inside the houses, and it's often in the clean areas of the house, away from the hearths where they would have been cooking. And some of the paintings are geometric patterns, but the majority of the art is all around animals, wild animals, especially these dangerous creatures and their pointy bits like beaks, claws, and horns. Some of the species we'll see are leopards, bulls, deer, and vultures. There's even a painting of a vulture with human legs or vultures attacking

headless humans and some pieces are hidden under layers and layers of plaster and these plaster pieces would have been repainted and replastered multiple times for example there was a leopard that was repainted 40 times i love the vulture with human legs that's that's a marvel character we haven't seen yet, isn't it? That sounds like it might have been a Neolithic six-year-old boy to me. But as you say, Lindsay, the idea that the animal kingdom, it's on the walls, it's beautified, but there is a sort of element of danger, perhaps, that Mike hasn't quite tamed his lovely dog, Pam. Maybe there's a slight polite respect in terms of how humans are treating animals.

Yeah, I mean, for sure they respected the animals that they were hunting. So they were hunting those wild bulls, those aurochs. They were also hunting wild horses. There would have been bears roaming the landscape, wild boars. And they definitely seem to have a different position than the sheep and goat, the domesticated species. Because when they hunted the aurochs, they just used the meat for these huge feasts. And then of course, they would use their body parts as part of the house elaboration. They're also the subject of some of the wall paintings that are narrative showing the hunt. And then we start to see a little bit of a shift later on where these animals seem to have

a different position and it becomes more of the human being the master and the animals being the slave kind of a situation. One of the human being the master and the animals being the slave kind of a situation one of the murals that's particularly fascinating is from about 9 000 years ago we think give or take and it's an extraordinary painting actually i'm going to show you the image mike so this is a mural on the wall of one of the houses and it depicts a volcano and what else can you see there i assume that was an auric is that a volcano you see there? I assume that was an auric. Is that a volcano? You're telling me.

I assume that was an auric sort of skittering over some gigantic dominoes. It's a mountain peak, we think. Lindsay, this is Mount Hassan, which I believe is a live volcano that erupted around the time of Chateau Hoyek. The geologists have put that eruption to about 9 500 to 8 400 years ago it's this sort of geological reportage have they done a mural and gone yeah that happened that's that was quite scary let's let's keep an eye on that one it definitely seems possible that this is a depiction of hasanda which is a volcano that overlooks the settlement and then the little kind of squares below have a striking similarity to the actual settlement plan of the houses. So if you take an aerial view

of the houses, even today, and they're so crowded together with very little space between them. And so this painting is actually being interpreted as the first map in the entire world. Wow. So it's not only the oldest representation of a volcano possibly, but it's also the first ever street plan. I suppose the next thing I need to ask you, Lindsay, is about politics with a small p. You've already said there's no civic buildings. Mike, you mentioned town planners,

but there's no sort of mayoral office or... Not even a fountain to meet at. Yeah. I'm assuming, therefore, there's no king or queen of Çatalhöyük. How do they run things? Yeah, people were pretty much equal at Çatalhöyük. We don't have any elites versus plebs situation happening here. They would have had to cooperate together, right? To herd their animals, to cultivate their crops, to hunt those wild aurochs. And we know that they were feasting on them. So obviously even a feasting situation

is a communal experience. It might seem strange to say this, but people living roughly 9,000 years ago seem to have mostly gone along to the point where they managed to stay together in this settlement for over a thousand years. And then someone invented Twitter, and now everyone hates it. Do we see any distinction between what males are doing and females are doing around the house or around in terms of work or in terms of who's doing hunting and farming? Is there any evidence of gender split or is everyone just pitching in? There's not a huge amount of evidence for a very stereotypical division of labour.

There's not a huge split between what male and females were doing, not in the way that we think of today. This is a sort of egalitarian, slightly socialist utopia where everyone just gets along, lives next door. It's not bad, but 8,000 people, it's not a commune, is it, Mike? 8,000 is quite a lot. Yeah, you're not going to know everybody, are you? You'll know Weasel Jeff.

Well, everyone knows Weasel Jeff, yeah. That's different. Actually, Mike, this reminds me of your other podcast, the comedy show, the St. Elwick's Neighbourhood Association newsletter, which is a very charming small town, probably about 8,000 people, not so different from Chateau Hoyock, right? So how would the Chateau Hoyock newsletter be written in a similar style? Well, the big event's going to be the hunt, right?

There's going to be people writing letters about, we agreed that you would put your turds down the south wall and we would put ours down the north wall and you would definitely put your turds down the side of our wall. We've got an arrangement with the other neighbours. There'd be probably some gossip, I expect, about who's skittering between roof hatches at night and presumably announcements about whatever concerts were going on in sport.

I mean, I don't know what sport they played in Chattahoochee. They found any balls, any rackets, anything like that? No rackets. 90% of it unexcavated, so there's still time for snooker cues to show up. I'd love it if the only sport they found was a snooker haul. We've got a really fascinating insight into life in the town, what it's like indoors, what they're eating, and how they're pooing, and what diseases they've got. That's essentially everything we wanted to show you, Mike, for Chateau Hoyer. I suppose we need to find out a little bit more about how it ended, because we believe it was built around 9,000 years ago and it was used for 1,000 years or so.

But it does have an end point. Was it a big volcano-shaped catastrophe with people running and screaming? Or is it a bit more like people just moved out to the suburbs because the schools were better and the rent was a bit cheaper? What brings the end of Chatalhöyük, Lindsay? Well, from around 6500 BCE, we see that the population really peaks and the density of the population peaks and then Çatalhöyük starts to change. So we start to see the beginning of some sort of inequality happening. People start to specialize more, the households become a little bit more individualized, and we start to see artifacts and tools like mace heads, which are traditionally associated with war or conflict and tension. We see things like knuckle bones, which may have been used for competitive gaming.

And we see a lot more portable art pieces. So this is all indicators of rising tension and differentiation. So this is all indicators of rising tension and differentiation. And the settlement at Chattel Hook actually did continue on through until 5600 BCE. They did reestablish another mound nearby into the Chalcolithic period. And then after this, we start to see the rise of the first state societies and the invention of writing in Mesopotamia nearby. So it's fascinating, the discovery of gaming pieces. So knuckleuckle bone so that's sort of dice and gambling isn't it and then you've also got mace heads so people clearly that means we've got gamblers and we've got heavies they've got into gambling and they're armed such a grand combination they're collecting on the

debts they're sort of coming around and going right you owe me one auric but that is is the end of Çatalhöyük. And as you say, Lindsay, a couple of thousand years later on, we start to see Egypt and Mesopotamia and so forth. So, Lindsay, this episode is about the Neolithic revolution in Turkey and the Middle East. But there are other Neolithic revolutions. It's a sort of global process. Yeah, the Neolithic took place all around the world. And they were all revolutions, if you will.

The Neolithic took place all around the world and they were all revolutions, if you will. So, for example, of course, in the Americas and we have corn in China as well. So wherever it happened, it would have happened with their own local species of plants and animals. Obviously, the Neolithic comes further west and it comes into Britain later. So the only question I need to ask you now, Mike, really, is what will future oculologists make of your home? They will find no excuse for why there is poo down the sides of the walls. The epicentre of the end of civilisation was in this house. The Nuance Window! Time now for the Nuance Window.

This is where Mike and I go comfy. We sit on our bullhorn chair, hopefully not on the pointy bit, and we allow Dr. Lindsay to speak for two uninterrupted minutes about anything related to today's episode. Without much further ado, the nuance window, please. I'd like to take this nuance window to address the problem of using models of sociocultural evolution. So these are these outdated notions from 19th and 20th century anthropology that said that all societies could be slotted into different stages of cultural evolution. So for example, Edward Tyler said there were three stages, number one being savagery, then barbarism, and finally the pinnacle being civilization. And the problem

with these models is that they imply that some cultures and societies are actually more advanced than others. And this is a very ethnocentric perspective. And ethnocentrism means you're viewing other cultures through the lens of your own. So of course, your own culture is going to be superior. These are also very Eurocentric ideas because they view other cultures against Western values, and indeed the men who came up with these models were European and American. So again, obviously they would place themselves at the top of the evolutionary pathway and call themselves the civilized. On the other hand, these models slot other groups like indigenous peoples at the beginning of the evolutionary scheme, so they're considered primitive.

The reality is that sociocultural evolutionary models are laden with value judgments. Measuring which peoples or cultures were more complex than others is really a subjective thing. The idea that some societies are complex while others are not is very dangerous because it's a slippery slope to thinking that some peoples were not capable or smart enough to accomplish certain things. So we just have to be really careful when we talk about complexity and advancement that we don't talk about these things in reference to the people, the cultures, or the societies, and that we're making a distinction between biological evolution and technological advancement from the idea that some human groups are more advanced

or better than others. Amazing. Thank you so much. Mike, what do you think to that? Strong stuff. Loved it. Feel enlightened. Feel educated. Thank you, Lindsay. So what do you know now? Well, it's time now for the So What Do You Know Now? This is where we quiz our comedian, Mike, to see how much he has remembered. We fired quite a lot at you. There's been some big words, epipaleolithic being one of them.

We've definitely given you a challenge. I have strong faith in your abilities to recall all these lovely, lovely things you've learned. My theory is you're going to have a new low score-wise of all time. You're going to do absolutely fine. Let's crack on. Question one. What does Neolithic mean? New stone.

It does. New stone age. Question two. Name three key components of the Neolithic package. Domestication of animals. Yes. Domestication of crops. Yes.

And settling in a place. Absolutely. You could have had pottery or weaving as well. Very well done. Question three. Roughly how many people lived at Shattle Hoyock? It was up to 8,000. I think 3,000 to 8,000.

Farrow remembered. Question four. Lasting from 23,000 until 9,600 BCE, what is the name of the Stone Age era before the Neolithic? I thought it was Mesolithic. Yes. But you put in epi mesolithic chukta epi paleolithic curses yeah i will give you that because you remembered question five

if you had a house at chateau hoyuk how would you get inside it i would use the rope hatch like everyone else not idiot not gonna barrel through the wall. Question six. Skull cults describe which Neolithic burial practice? Digging up a skull, taking it about the place, maybe painting the face back on, putting a bit of plaster on, burying it somewhere else. Absolutely. Question seven. The introduction of soft foods like porridge to the Neolithic diet

had what unfortunate health consequences? Oh, toothache. Yeah, caries and gum disease and that sort of thing. Question eight. Roughly how many football pitches covers the area of Chateau Hoyock? I think it could have been 30 or something like that. 33. Yeah, yeah, you're not far off.

I'll give you half a mark for that. Question nine. A mural at Chateau Hoyock depicts what early natural disaster? Big old volcano. Big old volcano. Big old volcano. And question ten, this is for nine and a half out of ten, which is incredibly strong. What animal by-product was applied to a dead guy's chest, possibly to stop him being eaten by rodents? Weasel faeces, of course. Your friend and mine.

Nine and a half out of ten, Mike Wozniak. Very strong score. I'll take it. You've obviously had an excellent teacher in Dr. Lindsay who has informed you and given you all sorts of fascinating knowledge. So do you now feel comfortable in the Neolithic? I do. I haven't got long before this goes out to try and crowbar into conversations to pretend I always knew about this stuff.

That's what I'm going to do for the next few days. You don't know about the Skullcults? Come on. Pack your ideas up. Get your book, mate. That's what I'll be doing. Lovely. All right.

Well, I mean, I've had a great time. And listeners, if you've had a good time with this episode and you want to unearth more prehistoric podcasts, then check out our episode on Stonehenge. Or you can go nerd out on the Neanderthals episode. And of course, we've got more than 50 episodes on other subjects as well, all of them available on BBC Sounds.

So if you've enjoyed the podcast and had a laugh and learned some stuff, then please leave us a review, share the show with your friends and make sure to subscribe to BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. A huge thank you, of course, to our guests for joining us to natter about the Neolithic. In Archaeology Corner, we've had the brilliant Professor Lindsay Durr from the University of Victoria. Thank you, Lindsay. Thank you so much. It's been fun. And in Comedy Corner, we enjoyed the marvelously mustachioed Mike Wozniak. Thank you, Mike. Thank you very much indeed. I've had a lovely time. Thanks for having me. And to you, lovely listener, make sure to join us next time,

where we'll welcome two more prospectors to dig up more fascinating facts about the past. But for now, I'm off to go and redecorate my living room with a big old auroch skull. Bye! the past. But for now, I'm off to go and redecorate my living room with a big old auroch skull. Bye! You're Dead to Me was a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4. The research was by Chris Wakefield, the script was by Emma Nagoose, Chris Wakefield and me, the project manager was Saifah Mio and the edit producer was Cornelius Mendez. Mendes. What's the link between poisoned underpants? They wanted something that rubs against your skin. A plot to kill Nelson Mandela. To find a poison that would cause cancer and have him die shortly afterwards. And the deadly riots in South Africa this year.

I'm Andrew Harding with a tale of politics and paranoia. Some people wanted me dead. Oh, and the link is Jacob Zuma, South Africa's former president. And indeed, it was quite a strong poison. That's Poison from BBC Radio 4. To listen to all five episodes, just search for Seriously on BBC Sounds.