Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

VISIT ÇATALHÖYÜK IN ANATOLIA

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/visit-%C3%A7atal%C3%B6y%C3%BCk-in-anatolia-7e1b17f96320

The Indo-Europeans were just getting down from the Iranian Plateau, and they had still a long way to go to expand to the world, which was essentially for them Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Caucasus, and mainly Europe. The first Indo-Europeans to settle in Anatolia were the Hittites and that happened a couple of millennia later. Hence the only population in Anatolia were Turkic and had been there in Anatolia for a good 30-40,000 years. But after the Peak of the Ice Age, the climate was changing fast, water was rising fast, and during the 8-10 millennia of the Peak of the Ice Age Homo Sapiens had become very resilient and they learned a lot of ways to improve their lot, to resist and survive. They did better than taking care of the natural garden. They started cultivating it. They did more than just hunt animals. They started domesticating them, though apparently, the Gravettians had already started before the Peak of the Ice Age. The people in Anatolia then were only, speaking Turkic languages, like all the people in the whole of Europe.

The question then is what kind of changes did the end of the Ice Age bring to Homo Sapiens? Agriculture for one, the selection of plants and their “domestication.” Herding for two, the selection of some animal species, and their domestication. They learned, for three, how to live together in clustered communities with built houses or shelters. They also developed, for four, their rites, rituals, and spiritual minds, and that was to produce religions. They also went on and probably amplified the decoration of their living quarters with paintings, artifacts, and strange geometric patterns that I consider to be signs. These paintings and geometric Gestalten were of course accompanied by language, stories, rituals, prayers, and even orations directed at or to the supernatural beings they started to codify. They also started building some spiritual centers like Gobekli Tepe, and apparently, they started doing this before building shelters and cities for themselves. This spiritual dimension was not new, but the buildings it inspired were a new development. This implied some kind of collective organization and management, hence the cultivation of some recording system, essentially committed to the memory of some people who kept all sorts of discussions, decisions, and documents in their memory for them to be available anytime they were needed.

The main stake was to guarantee the rejuvenation and the expansion of the community and that was achieved as it had always been achieved since Homo Sapiens evolved into what they were, continuing more spiritually and abstractly what hominins had done before them: the control and management of pregnancies, deliveries, the raising of newborns, then infants, then children so that each woman in the community could at least bring three individuals to a full procreative life within their 29-year life-expectancy. That’s the question all anthropologists, archaeologists, and other historians and linguists working on these old times have always mostly neglected. In this field of the emergence and development of the human species, most research is biased and women are not captured at their real level, with their real value. They are devalued. Let’s start correcting this mistake.

 Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2023

Anatolian Archaeology,  *  Spirituality,  *  Plant domestication (Prehistoric Archaeology),  *  Animal domestication,  *  Cities

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:17 AM