On the bare Anatolian highlands of central Turkey, thirty-two miles south-east of the Turkish provincial capital Konya, are two ancient mounds hiding the ancient ruins of Çatal Hüyük, the world’s first town.
This substantial Stone Age community appeared from nowhere. There are no known sites which reveal where its inhabitants gained their technical skills, their religion with its complex temples or their ability to create an urban trading and farming lifestyle. This highly sophisticated culture suddenly erupted upon the fertile highland plains as though transported mysteriously from elsewhere.
For archaeologists and historians, this city is where civilization begins. It is, in effect, the beginning of the age of settlements and farming, the Neolithic. Its first excavator, Englishman James Mellaart, enthused
The Neolithic civilization revealed at Çatal Hüyük shines like a supernova among the rather dim galaxy of contemporary peasant cultures… Its most lasting effect was not felt in the Near East, but in Europe, for it was to this new continent that the Neolithic cultures of Anatolia introduced the first beginnings of agriculture and stockbreeding and a cult of the Mother Goddess, the basis of our civilization.1
Evidence of an unprecedented command of technology was discovered here: hundreds of knives, daggers, arrow-heads and lances, of flint or obsidian, all worked to an incredible and unique level of accomplishment, far in advance of any others known in the Near East at that time. Obsidian, in particular, is an extremely hard volcanic glass and flakes split off can have a cutting edge as thin as one molecule across, far sharper than any modern metal blade.
There also were found highly polished obsidian mirrors, finely pierced beads, jewellery and textile work of the highest standard, including carpets – evidence of a comfortable standard of living. These settlers did not use pottery but had wooden and basketwork which, for its sophistication and excellence, is unparalleled elsewhere at the time.
Their technical accomplishment was so great that we still do not know how they created some of their manufactured objects. We do not know how they polished their hard obsidian mirrors without leaving a single scratch; stone beads have been found, also some of obsidian, which, extraordinarily, have a hole drilled through them which is so fine that a modern needle cannot be pushed into it. It is impossible to think how they could have created them without using very hard metal drills. Yet somehow they managed it.2 Perhaps one day we shall learn their secret.
A well-developed and elaborate religion thrived, centred, it appears, upon a Mother Goddess who was perceived as three people in one: a young woman, a pregnant woman and an old crone. To serve this cult, even in the very small part of the city excavated to date, over forty shrines or sanctuaries have been excavated although not all were in use at the same time.
In other words, so far as archaeology is concerned, the urban culture at Çatal Hüyük was unique; it had no apparent forerunners, no apparent sites nearby where the talents the inhabitants displayed might have been learned.
The inhabitants must have learned their craft techniques somewhere. But this could not have been in any known contemporary communities such as those found at Jericho in the Jordan vally or Jarmo in the Kurdish highlands. For these communities did not display anything remotely resembling the same level of culture and craftsmanship.
It is absurd to believe that this urban sophistication appeared, suddenly, from nowhere, around 8000 BC. It is blindingly obvious that settled culture must have begun developing much earlier and elsewhere.
The question is, where and when?
From around 80,000 years ago an immense ice-cap with huge glaciers reached deep into Europe, Russia, Canada and the United States. An ice-cap, perhaps a mile or more thick in the north, covered all of Ireland, most of England as far south as the London area, and stretched across Europe. In North America an ice-cap almost two miles thick reached as far south as St Louis and Philadelphia; further south still were endless plains of arctic tundra.
This, of course, would not have been an insupportable problem for humans living at the time because the areas of southern Europe, North and Central Africa and Central America would not have been so affected, although it is thought that the general world temperature would have been much lower, the cloud cover and rainfall higher. If humanity had not developed an urban culture by then, it would have been under considerable pressure to do so, for people would have needed shelter from the rain and cold winds.
We have always thought of mankind at this early period as leading a nomadic hunter-gatherer life, seeking shelter when necessary within caves. This much is true, but true only to the extent that remains of humans have been found in caves. We need to be cautious regarding the conclusions we draw from this. It is rather like future archaeologists finding bodies in Second World War bomb-shelters and assuming that this was the norm for twentieth-century culture.
Early man did not just live in caves. Even hundreds of thousands of years ago, shelters were built, some apparently permanent. In France the Terra Amata site near Nice, perhaps 300,000 years old, has revealed what appear to be post holes and stone circles which the discoverer, French scientist Henry de Lumley, argues are the remains of substantial shelters.3 As is often the case, this site is controversial and not all agree with his conclusion.4 More certain are the finds at Bilzingsleben, in Germany which are dated to around 400,000 years ago. Archaeologists have excavated three circular structures made of bone and stone with a diameter of nine to thirteen feet. They are considered to be foundations of structures which comprised a permanently occupied site. The most curious find here, which raises many questions about the potentially high level of culture reached by these early people, is an area, paved with bones and stone, twenty-seven feet wide. The director of research, Dietrich Mania, believes that the inhabitants ‘intentionally paved this area for cultural activities’.5
Potentially portable ‘tents’ or ‘windbreaks’ have been found constructed of mammoth bones at the 60,000-year-old site of Molodova on the Dnestr river, Russia.6 At Dolni Vestonice, in Romania, a group of five dwellings has been found dating up to 28,000 years, the largest being over fifty feet long. Nearby were the remains of a pottery kiln. This was used apparently only for firing small clay figurines since no domestic pottery has been found.7
Such solid shelters are fixed; they cannot be moved with a nomadic tribe. Hence a tribe must stay in one place, must domesticate animals and grow crops to supply the needs of food. To supply food for a sedentary population the members of the community must develop specialization of labour and attempt to produce a commodity surplus in order to trade for those goods they cannot grow or make. They need to establish patterns of land usage and ownership, must gather together for mutual aid, for defence and for trade. Such a mutually supportive culture, protected from the elements by well-constructed shelters, and from hunger by effective food production, is the best way for human beings to survive in an erratic, perhaps hostile, environment.
Where would these cultures develop? The answer must be, where cultures have always developed: in the temperate, fertile lowlands, near the rivers for water and communication. Especially, culture would emerge in the delta regions where these rivers entered the sea. It is reasonable to suppose the gradual construction of urban cultures at such sites over the 60,000 years or more of the last Ice Age.
Small boats were undoubtedly a well-used means of transport even long ago. Engravings and paintings of deep-sea fish, such as dolphins and whales, found in the ancient caves, attest to probable maritime activity. That such a technology was potentially available very early is proved by the discovery that boats capable of sailing for days in the open sea were in use in South-east Asia by perhaps 40,000 years ago.8
Unfortunately, these broad river valleys where culture most likely developed are never very high above sea-level: the present Indus valley, for example, stretches almost 450 miles before it exceeds 300 feet high; the Mississippi reaches about 550 miles; much of western France is below 300 feet.
At the peak of the last Ice Age, from around 24,000 BC to 14,000 BC, so much water was locked up in the ice-caps that, world-wide, it has been estimated, the sea fell by over 400 feet.9 By the end of the Ice Age, around 7000 BC, the sea had returned and regained its former level, reaching its approximate present shorelines, indicating a height rise of 400 feet.
With the return of the sea we would expect any ancient coastal settlements to be far out on the continental shelf, beneath the waters. It has been proved that most of the present under-sea continental shelf off the coast of the United States was dry land about 9000 BC. Fishermen dragging the sea bottom for scallops and clams have found the teeth of extinct mastodons or mammoths up to 190 miles out to sea, beyond Cape Cod. They have been found at depths of up to 400 feet. The remains of horses, tapirs, musk ox and giant moose also have been found. Similar finds of mastodon teeth have come from a depth of 300 feet in Japan’s Inland Sea.10
The shells of shallow-water oysters, normally found in tidal estuaries or lagoons, have been discovered at many different sites off the Atlantic coast of the United States, at depths of almost 300 feet. Radiocarbon dating put them at up to 9000 BC.11 This data gives an indication of the speed at which the water rose; it suggests a very rapid rise in sea-level after this date. For the seas had stabilized by 7000 BC, hence there must have been a rise of 300 or 400 feet over the preceding 2,000 years.
Vegetation has also appeared; ancient twigs, seeds, pollen and peat deposits have all been hauled to the surface by both fishermen and oceanographers; carbon dating has indicated that they too were submerged around 9000 BC. Scientists have also found evidence of sunken shorelines, sands and deposits of peat. All this evidence has led them to conclude that in 13,000 BC the United States continental shelf was a wide coastal plain teeming with wildlife and covered with forests. But after 9000 BC it was the sea floor.
A mapping of the world’s land masses at their maximum during the peak of the Ice Age has revealed the true extent of extra land then available. Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania were all one continent; the Philippines, Sumatra, Borneo and Java were together connected to the land mass of continental Asia. Extensive lands extended almost 100 miles south from the tip of South Africa and a dry land passage, interestingly ice-free (while mile-high ice covered Canada and the northern United States), was available between
Submerged land areas off the coast of the United States: showing finds of land animal teeth (mastodon and mammoth).
Siberia and Alaska.12 In Europe the North Sea did not exist, most of the land being covered with a mile-thick ice-cap. Wide plains extended from the present English Channel into the Atlantic.
Studies on the Mediterranean area have proved intriguing: huge temperate watered plains stretched up to 120 miles out from the present coastline of Tunisia; Malta was connected to Sicily; plains also generally extended all along the coastline of Spain, France, Italy and Greece, where many of the islands were joined. But, most remarkable of all and previously unsuspected, was the existence of a huge fertile plain, crossed by many rivers, in the upper half of the Adriatic Sea, reaching almost 200 miles south of Venice.13 It is thought that this was the most fertile area in the region and must have attracted a considerable population whose remains now lie beneath hundreds of feet of sea. It is, of course, almost impossible to search for the remnants of these settlements.
We cannot overestimate the effect of this world-wide flooding caused by the melting ice and the changes it would have wrought to any developing cultures. The memory of its destructive horror would have seared itself into the cultural memory of the peoples living there and been communicated down through the generations in legend and mythology. The world-wide incidence of legends of a great flood could well be a residue of this event in the collective folk memory.
One expert in the field has stated, ‘it is not an exaggeration to say that in many parts of the world the largest and most important environmental change of the past 15,000 years has been the rising level of the sea’.14
The waters may have come in a terrifying few years of utter disaster, or decades of endless rains and floods. Or they may have crept slowly up over the land during millennia of inexorably rising tides and destructive storm-driven waves. However it occurred, the melting of the last great Ice Age had ended around 7000 BC.15 The glaciers and ice-caps retreated to the general position they occupy now.
If, year after year, century after century, the tides inexorably rose and, with them, the deterioration of the weather created violent storms and waves large enough to crush the mud-brick or stone houses, what would be the reaction of the population? They would, of course, leave for higher ground, taking what they could and carrying with them their skills in building, agriculture and weaving.
The Adriatic and Aegean Seas before the rise in sea-level after the end of the last Ice Age: showing fertile lands where early civilization may have developed prior to the widespread inundation. (The dotted line gives today’s land contours.)
They would also have taken their culture, their religion, their myths, their songs and stories.
They would have no way of knowing how far the gradual flooding of their land might reach, so they would withdraw progressively to higher ground. In the now ancient legends of a world-wide flood which have survived into our time, there is consistent mention of human survival by virtue of boats and high ground.
The ancient Greeks believed that, following a catastrophic, world-destroying flood, survivors rebuilt Greek civilization in Thessaly. Their myth echoes much of the story of Noah. It explained how Zeus, angered with mankind, sent a great flood. Deucalion was warned about this by his father, one of the demigods, and so constructed an ‘ark’ on which he and his wife rode out the flood. When the waters receded he landed upon the top of Mount Parnassus. Deucalion and his wife then reigned in Thessaly. Their son, Hellen, was regarded as the ancestor of all the Greeks who, in classical times, called themselves Hellenes.
Was this tale an embellishment of a real folk memory of the rising sea-levels? And if so, why should Thessaly have been pinpointed as the original homeland of the Greeks?
The Greek philosopher Plato (c. 429–347 BC) considered it ‘perfectly credible’ that this story symbolized a reality. He believed, furthermore, that civilization had existed in Greece prior to this destructive deluge; that towns had flourished on the plains and near the sea; and, further, that the Greeks had known the use of metal. But this catastrophe not only destroyed the towns, it also destroyed the knowledge of mining and working metals. The mines were all flooded and those with the skills necessary to work metal were killed. In consequence, humanity was forced back into a more primitive age which knew only the use of stone tools.
Plato writes of his belief that the only inhabitants who would have escaped were those shepherds in the hills whom he describes as ‘scanty embers of the human race preserved somewhere on the mountain-tops’, where they later turned to farming.16 Plato’s narrative is surprisingly consistent with recent archaeological and geological conclusions.
But there is one terrifying possibility: could it be that after several thousand years of steady melting, and steady but moderate sea-level rise, the vast polar ice-caps suddenly became unstable and rapidly, completely, collapsed with cataclysmic effect?
Scientific analysis of very deep core samples taken from the Greenland ice-cap in 1989 revealed that around 8700 BC the last cold period of the Ice Age came to an abrupt end. The ice retreated so quickly that major climate changes occurred within twenty years and a major temperature rise of seven degrees centigrade in fifty.17 This was disaster enough. But the evidence is mounting for the existence of an even worse scenario.
Later studies on new core samples, completed in 1993, revealed an even more dramatic picture of this event: they indicated that the most significant melting and collapse might have occurred in just one to three years.18 This is a record of utter catastrophe.
A gradual 400-foot rise over 2,000 years or so would not go unnoticed. If, for example, since the Romans, the sea-level had risen gradually to this extent, then such a rise would constitute a major factor in our history and culture. Especially if, during that time, it had always risen.
But if a catastrophic collapse of the ice sheet occurred over one to three years, allowing a turbulent sea literally to rush across hundreds of miles of plains and forests engulfing in its torrent all the human settlements, this would leave searing cultural scars for thousands of years. Scars which would be expected to find their tragic echo in myths and legends of a devastating flood.
Can it be entirely without relevance, given this date of around 8700 BC for a collapse of the ice-cap and consequent rise in sea-level, that the earliest town, Çatal Hüyük, is in the Anatolian highlands and is dated at around 8000 BC? A town which, as we have mentioned, appeared mysteriously, from nowhere?
Was it founded by survivors of the calamitous rise in sea-levels? If this is so, then the origins of its culture now lie beneath hundreds of feet of sea somewhere in the Mediterranean.
But where?
As happens so often, it took an intelligent and resourceful amateur in the field to blow apart the narrow thinking of established experts.
Late in 1962, in the wake of the successes in space enjoyed by Russia and the United States, the American writer Alexander Marshack was commissioned to write a book explaining how humanity had achieved such a level of civilization and scientific excellence.
During the course of his research Marshack interviewed hundreds of experts: top space officials, scientists, military commanders and the presidents of great commercial corporations. But his research did not provide the answers he had expected. He was surprised to find that none of these people had a clear idea of why or even how this cultural advance had occurred.19
Concurrent with this frustrating research, Marshack had his wider interests in mankind kindled. He began to mull over the essential similarities of aspiration in different cultures at different eras. He concluded that there ‘was no essential difference… between the first fully modern man of some 40,000 years ago and ourselves, either in brain size or general skeletal measurement’.20 Even though the tools used by this early man were, so far as was known, only made from stone, they demonstrated great variation and complexity. Marshack found himself wondering about the origins of civilization itself.
He confronted the ‘suddenlys’, the fact that all the cultural advances were described in the standard texts as having occurred ‘suddenly’: agriculture around 10,000 years ago; civilization in Mesopotamia; science with the Greeks. He found it impossible to believe that all these things could have happened like this, without any development. As he wrote, ‘They must have come at the end of many thousands of years of prior preparation. How many thousands was the question.’21
Where could the answers be found? Indeed, what sort of evidence would constitute answers?
Marshack had an idea which, he felt, might allow this question of evidence to be resolved: our modern world is created and bound by a sense of time. Science studies things which occur over time, from the movement of the planets to the swing of a pendulum. And the way in which science conducts this study is also bound by time, for it collects results: summaries or averages leading to theories which predict the likelihood of repetition ahead in time. This sense of time, Marshack argued, begins with agriculture. A hunting lifestyle can be conducted on a day-by-day basis, but a settled agricultural life needs a sense of a year with its cycle of seasons.
Thus, Marshack concluded, in order for early man to change from the primitive hunting and gathering way of life to a settled agricultural existence, he needed to learn a concept of time. Any evidence, then, of a concept of time would also constitute the evidence for the origins of a settled agricultural culture.
He contacted experts with his thesis; in particular, he contacted the French expert on the cave art which dates from the Ice Age period. He asked if any of the art revealed evidence for seasonal or periodic time for the painting. He received the reply that it was suspected to do so, but there was no proof.
But in 1963, when his scientific book was virtually completed, he found a key piece of evidence which was to unsprocket his entire writing schedule. He belatedly looked at an article he had clipped from a scientific journal the year before. It dealt with a small bone tool, a prehistoric engraving tool – a bone handle with a sharp chip of quartz fixed to one end which had been found in a site at Ishango in Zaïre, near Lake Edward. It was dated to 6500 BC. The bone handle had a series of scratched markings down its length. The interpretation given for these markings seemed unconvincing to Marshack. Acting on a hunch, in fifteen minutes of study he had found the explanation.
The scratches, he could demonstrate, were a record of lunar phases: of the sets of new, quarter and full moons during the course of a few months.
Whoever constructed this, then, had a concept of time. Marshack began looking at all the published finds of prehistoric stones and bones which had been scratched, marked or engraved in any way. Hundreds of these, dating back to 35,000 years ago or more, had been found all over Europe but they remained enigmatic. Here, Marshack concluded, with the people who made these objects, were the true origins of our civilization.
Yet why did so many millennia pass before the apparent beginning of culture?
Commenting on this, the writer Colin Wilson throws his hands up in exasperation at the orthodox dating of the rise of urban centres. With man, he says
poised on the brink of civilisation 35,000 years ago, living in a community sufficiently sophisticated to need a knowledge of astronomy, we are asked to believe that it actually took him another 25,000 years before he began to take the first hesitant steps towards building the earliest cities. It sounds, on the whole, rather unlikely.22
Alexander Marshack has argued that all the necessary elements of civilized culture were in place by 35,000 BC. It is obvious that if the elements were in place, then they were in use. Therefore at this time we can expect that somewhere there were settled farmers needing to understand the movements of the moon and sun in order to regulate their agricultural production.
The implications of his thesis are important. Settled farming means trade; trade means communities – villages or towns which in turn mean the specialization of trades, craftsmanship and art, for example. Language, laws and a primitive writing are not far away. In fact, a symbolic system of notation – primitive writing, in effect – seems to have been in use by the prehistoric cave painters.
Where might be the residues? Where might be the farms and towns we would expect? As we have already seen, the best lands for agricultural and trading settlements would be the well-watered river valleys and coastal delta regions.
The maximum amount of land of this type was available, as we have seen, for about 10,000 years during the greatest period of the Ice Age, from around 22,000 BC to 12,000 BC. At this latter date the sea’s rise would begin to cause serious disruption. With the rise of water levels, any remaining evidence of occupation – if it was in any form to survive – would be on the seabed.
If Marshack’s analysis is correct and a settled culture had developed at least by 35,000 BC, this would allow a very long period of development and refinement preceding the end of the Ice Age. The ice began to melt in 12,000 BC; the ice-cap collapsed catastrophically around 8000 BC, but had stabilized by 7000 BC. This would be a perfectly competent explanation for why we ‘suddenly’ find urban cultures around 9000 to 8000 BC in the Anatolian highlands – cultures founded by refugees from the flooded lowlands.
After this, with the stabilization of the sea at its new level, mankind perhaps dared venture back down to seek the fertile valleys. This would be one explanation of why the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Indus valley come after those of the Anatolian highlands, when the reverse would normally be expected.
These suggestions have received support from a recent study by Professor Tjeerd Van Andel of the University of Cambridge and Professor Curtis Runnels of Boston University. It focuses upon the colonization of the Larisa basin region in Greece, north-west of Athens.23 Here lie the plains of Thessaly, the legendary kingdom of Deucalion, survivor of the Flood.
All over Europe during the latter part of the Ice Age, from 12,000 to 8000 BC, great rivers, swollen by the melting ice and rain, carried large quantities of gravel and silt down from the glaciers and ice-caps. These overloaded rivers regularly silted up, flooded and changed their course. Over the years they filled in the valleys with many yards of debris creating wide flood plains.
Greece during the high glacial period was markedly different from the Greece of today. The greatest difference was that prehistoric Greece had many huge coastal plains; today such land is very rare.24 After the inundation of these Greek lowlands the only inhabitants were small roaming groups of nomadic hunters, killing game with their distinctive bows and arrows tipped with very small sharp pieces of flint.
Around 7000 BC, following the time that the coastline stabilized, there was an influx of a completely new type of people leading a completely different way of life. These immigrants chose, overwhelmingly, to live upon what remained of the fertile and well-watered flood plains which had never been settled by the hunters.
These new people were farmers; they led a settled life, domesticated animals and cultivated crops. They chose the flood plains because the soil was light, easily tilled and well-watered. In addition to their own animals and the crops, there were many local sources of food such as deer, wild boar and water fowl; fish and shellfish also abounded.
But this evidence confronts us with a mystery: we have no idea where these people came from. No artefacts, no pottery, fabrics, nor any other archaeological remains have ever been found which would allow an identification of their origins. All we know is that they came by sea, and they brought their skills with them.
Van Andel and Runnels consider that the most likely source for these immigrants is either from the highlands of Palestine or from southern Anatolia. The latter is considered the most likely since the terrain around Çatal Hüyük, they say, being on a flood plain, is very similar to the area in Greece where these immigrants first settled.
The results of this study opened more questions for its authors: why, they asked, since there was no pressure over land use in Anatolia, did anybody choose to emigrate from what must have been a successful and comfortable situation? And how did they find this particular Greek plain on which to settle? How did they even suspect it existed?
The authors speculate that the Anatolian farmers may have had contact with early traders and seafarers.25 Something of this sort must be the case since living in a landlocked site such as Çatal Hüyük would not promote the skills associated with building, sailing and navigating boats. It is more likely that they had good, presently unknown, contacts with these mysterious early mariners.
There were, it seems, even at this early era just following the last Ice Age, competent seafarers already exploring the Mediterranean, and perhaps even further afield, perhaps beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Straits of Gibraltar).26
The whole episode of the early settlement of Greece suggests less a gratuitous emigration from an already comfortable home than that of a long-awaited return to a lost homeland. One which was far beneath the sea off the coast of Greece. The refugees from the rising seas and destructive rivers had fled when the seas tumbled across their lands after 8000 BC. They took with them to their refuges in the highlands which border the eastern Mediterranean their skills in farming and animal husbandry.
There, their communities survived and it is the remains of these which archaeologists have excavated. It is only due to the destruction of their former homes that these new communities, like Çatal Hüyük, are considered to be the earliest by the archaeologists. When the changes had ceased, when the sea coast had arrived at its more or less modern level, around 7000 BC, the descendants of the original refugees acted upon a long-awaited plan and returned home; rather like the European Jews returning to the Holy Land after 1,800 years of exile.
At about the same time immigrant farmers moved into Crete. It is thought that they also came from the Anatolian highlands.27 Such maritime colonization both in Crete and in mainland Greece reveals a considerable degree of long-term planning and organization. At the least, they would need to use boats that were competent, to make certain that the seed stock was not ruined by water, as well as large enough to transport livestock.
Archaeologists emphasize that such colonization reveals a completely different mental perspective to that held by the primitive hunter-gatherers who were the earlier inhabitants in the region. It cannot be explained as a natural or accidental development of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.28
Amongst the academics who have studied this phenomenon there
Possible source for the immigration of farmers into Greece and Crete around 7000 BC.
is a growing suspicion that there might be much more going on than they have suspected. Speaking of the Cretan immigration, one study asks whether, on the one hand, it is perhaps unique and so just a local oddity of little importance, or whether it might be ‘the tip of a largely invisible iceberg’?29 Are we seeing just a fragment of what was a widespread and planned immigration and relocation? One which might have been a major factor in the settlement of Greece itself? If this proves true, then the history of early civilization will need rewriting.
The maritime skills by which these travellers reached their destination could not have been recently learned; they must have been part of a sea-going culture for hundreds of years, perhaps millennia.
If a competence in sailing had developed, so too would a competence in navigation and the mapping of routes. We can expect some very early geographical knowledge to have been recorded, somewhere. And, indeed, as we shall see in the next chapter, there are some ancient records which suggest the existence of geographic knowledge which is very extensive indeed.