Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell 

Sources – Dark Matter History

We thank the following experts for their critical reading and input:

Tanja Schreiber
Institut für Prähistorische Archäologie, Freie Universität Berlin

Mehmet Somel
Department of Biological Sciences, Middle East Technical University, Turkey

Bogdana Milić
Spanish National Research Centre (IMF-CSIC), Barcelona, Spain

Disclaimer: We took some artistic liberties in representing the events described in the text and visuals for storytelling purposes. We do not aim to accurately represent the entire timeline that is described in the story. Please consider the script and video a simplified, curated story built around selected parts of the timeline rather than a comprehensive or direct account of events.

– In the hills of southern Anatolia and northern Syria, the first truly connected human cultural world emerges. This is Karahan Tepe, one of the first villages known to us. 

After the last Ice Age, approximately 16,000 years ago, a trend toward sedentary life throughout Southwest Asia started to be seen. Certain camp sites began to be occupied for longer periods, and this development unfolded over a very long span of time. This process was interrupted around 9700 BCE during the period known as the Younger Dryas, when a new phase of cooling began. The entire preceding period is referred to as the Epipaleolithic.

From around 9600 BCE onward, particularly in the region where Karahantepe is located, though not limited to that area, but across Southwest Asia as a whole, numerous settlements started to emerge indicating a stronger trend toward permanent occupation and year-round use of specific locations. For both Karahantepe and its contemporaneous sites in the region, the earliest available dates go back to around 9600 BCE. This period corresponds to the earliest phase of Neolithic, more specifically pre-pottery neolithic. We don’t know if it’s really the first one but it’s one of the earliest sites that we know.

[Until recently, the Neolithic was primarily defined through a technological distinction based on the production of pottery: the Pre-Pottery Neolithic and the subsequent Pottery Neolithic. In reality, this entire process represents internal phases within a long period extending roughly from 9600 BCE to 6500 BCE. The first stage, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, is itself divided into several phases. These are commonly designated as Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA), B (PPNB), and, according to some regional traditions or specialist classifications, also C (PPNC). The archaeological layers encountered at Karahantepe begin in the middle of the PPNA period and continue through to the end of the PPNB period. However, the most monumental structures from this era date to the PPNB phase, meaning that the earliest buildings encountered at the site are primarily associated with PPNB. It looks like people lived in Karahantepe continuously for 1500 years between 9600-8000 BCE.]

#Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. Taş Tepeler – The discovery of a Neolithic cultural landscape. 2026
https://www.dainst.org/newsroom/tas-tepeler-die-entdeckung-einer-neolithischen-kulturlandschaft/792
Quote: “From exceptions to key finds
Characteristic T-pillars of the same type as discovered at Göbeklitepe can be found at numerous other sites in the region, including Karahantepe, Sayburç, Sefertepe, Harbetsuvan Tepesi, and Yenimahalle. The dating of these sites to between 10,000 and 7,000 BC attests to a shared cultural identity and a far-reaching interaction sphere extending from southeastern Anatolia to northwestern Syria. New findings show that the region formed a network of complex Neolithic communities whose monuments served both ritual and social functions. Community cohesion was a crucial factor for survival and adaptability amid changing social and climatic parameters.

[...]

Of life and death
At over 12,000 years old, the stone monuments are among the oldest of their kind. Archaeological findings document not only ritual use, but also everyday life and social interaction: human figures are increasingly coming to the fore, often in narrative scenes with animals that illustrate power, danger, and social roles. This points to the development of a new cultural self-perception in which humans actively shape their environment. In addition to numerous reliefs of foxes, boars, cranes, vultures, and snakes, finds of human skulls and long bones as well as skeletonized figures testify to an increasing iconographic engagement with death and dying. Monumental architecture and funeral rituals indicate that the deceased continued to play an important social role for the living.

Identity and society in the Neolithic period
The Taş Tepeler illustrate the transition from mobile hunter-gatherer communities to sedentary, food-producing societies. Monumentalization, communal buildings, and the deliberate staging of human and mythological figures up to six meters high mark a turning point in social organization. These developments had a lasting impact on both cultural identity and community structures and laid the foundations for later societies.”

#Tolga İldun. Discovering a New Neolithic World. Archaeology Magazine. 2024.

https://archaeology.org/issues/march-april-2024/features/discovering-a-new-neolithic-world/

Quote: “Archaeologists working across the region over the last several decades have uncovered more than 20 sites dating to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (ca. 12,000 to 10,200 years ago). These sites share characteristics such as monumental architecture, often in the form of T-shaped or rounded pillars and large decorated stone benches. They also feature stone carvings of humans with skeletal features, as well as of human heads, masks, phalluses, and predatory mammals, including raptors and snakes. Between 1983 and 1991, at the site of Nevalı Çori, which is now covered by the waters of the Atatürk Reservoir, researchers discovered a series of large T-shaped standing stones that are acknowledged to be the first known examples of monumental architecture in the region. Inspired by those finds, later in the 1990s, archaeologists returned to the site of Göbeklitepe, some 35 miles away, which had been discovered in 1963. There they unearthed structures similar to those at Nevalı Çori. (See "Last Stand of the Hunter-Gatherers?") While digging at Sayburç, another of the Taş Tepeler sites, in 2021, archaeologist Eylem Özdoğan of Istanbul University unearthed a stone bench with a carved relief showing two humans, two leopards, and a bull—a scene, she says, that represents the most detailed depiction of a Neolithic story found to date.”

#Sweatman. Representations of calendars and time at Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe support an astronomical interpretation of their symbolism. Time and Mind. 2024.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1751696X.2024.2373876#d1e222

– Today is the first day of our timeline, day 1 of the year 0. 12,026 years ago from you watching this. Hundreds of people have come together from tribes around the region for the greatest gathering in history so far, an epic event for everyone involved. They are celebrating the first great construction of humanity, 7000 years before the pyramids. How would they have felt if they had known what it would lead to eventually?

Here we obviously don't pinpoint to a specific day, its figurative speech for storytelling. Also, we don’t know how many people really gathered or whether this was the first event of this scale. We used a bit of imagination to be able to tell a story.

– With tools of stone and wood they begin to carve shapes into bedrock, T shaped columns multiple meters high, decorated with strange animals. Naked humans proudly presenting their fertility, figurines of birds or beasts.

#Necmi Karul. Buried Buildings at Pre-Pottery Neolithic Karahantepe. 2021.
https://tastepeler.org/en/pdf/karulN2021.pdf

Quote: “The limestone shale surfaces provided both the building material and the raw material for the construction of T-shaped pillars in Karahantepe. The presence of limestone bedrock, which is relatively easy to process, was obviously a determining factor in the construction of monumental-sized structures carved into the bedrock as well as those of large T-pillars. At Karahantepe archaeological fills cover an area of nearly 10 hectares, and extend an additional five hectares when the quarries for the T-shaped pillars are included. Archeological deposit commences over a limestone hill and continue along the eastern slope, and continue on the western terrace of the opposite hill as well as on the southern plain (Fig. 1). Some excellent engineering went into the cutting, carving and smoothing of the limestone surfaces, which expand and descend in steps towards the slope, providing an optimal setting for structures.”

#Necmi Karul. Republic of Türkiye Culture And Tourism Ministry. Retrieved Sept 2026
https://tastepeler.org/en/settlements/karahantepe

Quote: “On the lower levels of the western slope, a complex of circular communal buildings was excavated. Although the complex, which was probably designed and built together, is currently defined by three buildings, there are other communal buildings associated with the group. Structure AD in the center of the complex has an internal diameter of 23 meters. One side of the structure was formed by cutting the bedrock by 4.5 meters and the rest of the structure is surrounded by stone walls. The walls indicate at least three phases built one inside the other. The floor of the building was obtained by leveling the bedrock. The wall of the building is divided by 16 pillars and there are two-step benches between the pillars. In the center of the building, two more pillars are facing each other. At the bottom of the building, there are deep pits dug into the ground in two different places. There are also pits dug into the rock in front of the benches and then covered over.”

More images of the findings from Karahantepe and other sites within Tas Tepeler can be found in the official website:
https://tastepeler.org/en/gallery

Excavations in Tas Tepeler archaeological site are relatively new and still ongoing, so many new artifacts and structures have been unearthed in recent years.   

#Ellen Wexler. Archaeologists Uncover a Neolithic Sculpture of a Human Riding a Leopard That’s ‘Unlike Anything We Have Encountered Before’. Sept 2026.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-uncover-a-neolithic-sculpture-of-a-human-riding-a-leopard-thats-unlike-anything-we-have-encountered-before-180989477/

https://www.dailysabah.com/life/history/dawn-of-civilization-reborn-turkiyes-tas-tepeler-takes-the-lead

https://www.tastepeler.net/sites/karahan-tepe/structures/structure-ab/objects/carved-human-head/

https://www.tastepeler.net/sites/karahan-tepe/structures/structure-bd/objects/griffon-vulture-sculpture/

https://www.reuters.com/science/tiny-carved-animals-found-turkey-tell-story-prehistoric-myth-making-2025-08-28/

– A brutal effort like this requires a lot of energy and a new kind of organisation and specialization that has never existed before – while some carve bedrock all day, others gather grain, bake bread, brew beer or hunt antelopes – to feed the builders of the new world. 

While there is no direct archaeological evidence for a formalized division of labor at Karahantepe (e.g., dedicated workshops or occupation-specific burials), the complexity of its architecture, the scale of communal construction, and the presence of specialized features such as large ovens and bedrock-cut chambers have led excavators to infer at least a functional differentiation of tasks and some degree of labor organization within the community.

#A Guest Lecture: The Origins of Sedentism in Anatolia and Göbeklitepe by Professor Necmi Karul. University of Helsinki. Retrieved Sept 2026.
https://www.helsinki.fi/en/faculty-arts/news/guest-lecture-origins-sedentism-anatolia-and-gobeklitepe-professor-necmi-karul
Quote: “Excavations in Anatolia in recent years revealed remarkable results regarding the early stages of the Neolithic period, and therefore of the production-based, settled life. The impressive monumental ruins of the UNESCO World Heritage site of Göbeklitepe not only show the complex social structure of the period and the level reached in architectural technology but also demonstrate the existence of a rich symbolic world and thought-system dominated by animal symbols. 

These excavations also shed light on how societies that have acquired knowledge of how to utilize the natural environment, and learned to reproduce it, have contributed to the emergence of the basic dynamics of social organization, division of labor, resourcefulness, and similar subjects that govern us in modern societies. The site of Göbeklitepe, which is one of the first permanent settlements in world-history, not only shows us the place of Anatolian geography in this process but also brings us closer than ever before to the world of Neolithic people.”

– Over millennia humans have learned that if you put the tasty parts in the ground, they come back again next year, larger, richer. Now, with the climate finally stable, communities start to cultivate them in earnest rather than simply gathering from the wild. Opening up the ground, ripping out plants they don’t desire, sowing the food of today to have more in a distant tomorrow. The roots of agriculture are here – with permanent settlements, community, ritual, belief all growing around it.

#Baird et al. Agricultural origins on the Anatolian plateau. PNAS. 2018.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1800163115

Quote: “As in other geographical areas, interpretations of how agriculture—here defined broadly as the cultivation of plants and herding of animals—spread onto the Anatolian plateau have been dominated by two polarized positions. One posits that cultivation and herding spread into the region with farmers, possibly as part of a Neolithic demographic transition, in which growing population in successful farming regions pushed some people to colonize new areas and regions (3). This claim has been most clearly expressed for Central Anatolia by research

that used the similarity of Central Anatolian Neolithic crop and weed seed packages to those from northern Syria to suggest the introduction of cultivation by colonizing farmers from that region (11). While these similarities, as with evidence for obsidian distributions, point to meaningful interactions between settlements across these regions, they do not themselves identify the mechanism by which the crops spread. Rather, they demonstrate a possible point of origin from which they might well have diffused by other mechanisms, including exchange, well evidenced at these periods.

Opposing approaches propose that foragers were responsible for the spread of agriculture by adopting it from farmers with whom they were in contact. In Central Anatolia material culture

continuity with the Epipaleolithic combined with borrowed features from the PPNB (approximately 8500–7000 cal BC) of the Levant have been used to identify local indigenous contributions to the development of animal husbandry at As¸ıklı (8). Adoptionist models have been best developed in Europe (5, 6, 12), with the most detailed seeing a long “availability” phase of several centuries at the forager–farmer “frontier zone,” giving way to a competitive and, therefore, unstable “substitution” phase, where crops and animals were incorporated into food acquisition practices on a small-scale basis, and then a “consolidation” phase of larger-scale agricultural production (6, 12). Rapid uptake of agriculture during the substitution phase—in effect an unstable transition point—is a key element of this model, separating distinct phases of foraging and farming that are considered economically and socially incompatible (12).”

#Dietrich et al. Cereal processing at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, southeastern Turkey. 2019.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0215214

Quote: “Cereal food is one of the main components of the modern human diet. Its integration into the subsistence strategy during the late Epipalaeolithic (c. 12500–9600 cal BC) and Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN, c. 9600–7000 cal BC) has been recognized as a very long and complex process involving the selection and utilization of plants, strategies of exploitation of plants and land, the development of cultivation, and ways of processing, storing and consuming plants [1–12]. The establishment of agricultural economies at the end of the later part of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPNB, c. 8800–7000 cal BC), comprising the deliberate, large-scale cultivation of domesticated cereals and other domesticated plants [1, 13–16], was predated by a longer period of experimentation and technological modifications that led to the development of a specialized tool kit for plant food processing [17–24]. Typical implements for cereal processing are pounding and grinding tools used in pairs, comprising a static low implement (mortar, grinding slab or grinding bowl) and an active upper tool that is moved across its surface (pestle or handstone) [25]. The different processes for fragmenting cereals include de-hulling, pearling, polishing or grinding to fine flour and are also ethnographically attested [26]. The aim of all these techniques is to enhance the digestibility of cereals, lower their cooking time and raise their dietary energy [27]. Early direct evidence for the processing of cereals to fine flour through grinding was found in the Early Epipaleolithic site of Ohalo II, dated to c. 21000 cal BC [20, 27, 28] and the Early to Late Natufian site of Shubayqa, dated to 12500–9600 cal BC [29]. ”

– This is why we think this is the true first millenium of our history. Among the people of Taş Tepeler, a name that we have given them – a completely new way of life has emerged and is slowly spreading. More villages are emerging, from which more epic constructions are started, like Göbekli Tepe, the largest we have found so far. Slowly but steadily farming turns from a seasonal activity into a lifestyle, and as it does, more food means more people, new specialists, longer trade networks, the first craftsmen, artists, and overseers. 

#Moritz Kinzel, Lee Clare, Devrim Sönmez. Built on Rock – Towards a Reconstruction of the Neolithic‹ Topography of Göbekli Tepe. Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. 2020.
https://publications.dainst.org/journals/istmitt/article/view/4708

Quote: “Since 1996, a total of eight monumental structures with a round-oval ground plan, two large central T-shaped pillars (up to 5.5m high), up to three enclosing stone walls, reflecting different building phases, T-shaped pillars incorporated into the enclosing walls (2.5– 3.0m in height) and stone ›benches‹ along the interior perimeter walls were exposed5. These structures have been interpreted as ritual buildings of significant importance in a wider regional context6. The monumental buildings at Göbekli Tepe were found filled with enormous amounts of detritus material. These deposits, commonly referred to as ›backfill‹, consisted of extensive amounts of fist-sized limestone rubble interspersed with archaeological artefacts, primarily lithics, worked stone and animal bone, as well as small amounts of fragmented human bone7. It has previously been argued that these buildings were intentionally buried8 during ceremonies that included lavish feasting events9; however, this explanation now appears increasingly unlikely. Instead, the monumental structures were – as we will show later on – probably inundated by building collapse and eroded deposits from higher-lying parts of the mound. Notably, this new interpretation challenges the previously postulated ritual backfilling (›burial‹) scenarios10 and therefore also the hypothesis that these were realised in the frame of feasting events11.”

#Ayla Jean Yackley. Discovery of Turkish 11,400-year-old village challenges ideas of when and why humans first settled down. November 2021.
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/11/17/discovery-turkey-karahan-tepe

Quote: ““Now we have a different view on history,” says Necmi Karul, an associate professor of prehistory at Istanbul University who is leading the dig at Karahan Tepe, a site carved into the slope of a hill on a high limestone plateau between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

“Our findings change the perception, still seen in schoolbooks across the world, that settled life resulted from farming and animal husbandry,” he said at a September presentation of the site. “This shows that it begins when humans were still hunter-gatherers and that agriculture is not a cause, but the effect, of settled life.”
Scientists long believed that the domestication of plants and animals around 10,000 years ago is what compelled humans to adopt a sedentary lifestyle and that the boom in food production allowed them to develop complex societies and lay the foundations of civilisation. But the mounting evidence that Stone Age people built permanent structures for spiritual, rather than strictly essential, pursuits is disrupting conventional thinking that they lacked a large-scale society with division of labour and shared ritualistic motifs.””

#Andrew Curry. Last Stand Of The Hunter-Gatherers? Archaeology Magazine. 2021.

https://archaeology.org/issues/online/collection/turkey-gobekli-tepe-hunter-gatherers/

Quote: “The smallest of the buildings is 20 feet across, with pillars rising to about 10 feet high, while the largest circle, which archaeologists call simply Building D, measures no less than 65 feet across. Building D is punctuated by two 18-foot-tall freestanding limestone central pillars, each weighing an estimated eight tons. The pedestals they rest on are carved directly from the bedrock, as if rising out of the earth. From a distance, the pillars have an abstract appearance, a combination of straight lines and gentle curves. But, moving closer to them, it soon becomes clear that the pillars aren’t simply geometric shapes, but stylized depictions of people. Standing inside the circles, it’s possible to make out finely carved reliefs decorating the massive stones—arms and folded hands, along with fox pelts hung from simple belts to form loincloths.”

“These buildings at the site of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey are more than 11,000 years old, making them some of the world’s earliest monumental structures. The settlement includes circular buildings decorated with T-shaped pillars likely used for communal ceremonies and rituals.”

#X. Wang, et al. Isotopic and DNA analyses reveal multiscale PPNB mobility and migration across Southeastern Anatolia and the Southern Levant, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. (2023).

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2210611120

Quote: “The classic model of “Neolithization” argues that there was a dramatic shift between mobile hunting and gathering to an increasingly sedentary herder/cultivator-based lifestyle as a result of growing economic reliance on animal and plant domestication during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) in Southwestern Asia (1–4). Although the “Fertile Crescent” (FC) has often been seen as a vital region of early pathways to “agriculture,” this process was heavily dependent on the distribution of the wild progenitors of domesticates, like wheat, barley, pulses, goat, sheep, pig, and cattle (5–12) in the FC (13), including the Levantine corridor, Southeastern (SE) Anatolia (which makes up a significant part of Upper Mesopotamia), and Zagros region, located at the western wing, the northeastern fringe, and the eastern wing of the FC, respectively. Nevertheless, despite decades of research into the “origins of agriculture,” direct insights into the complex mechanisms underlying Neolithization, especially the pace, patterns, and the relationship between sedentism and the integration of hunting-gathering and agricultural lifeways, are still insufficiently understood (2, 14, 15). In particular, the correlation between sedentism and the adoption of agriculture has been hotly debated, especially in light of almost-sedentary Levantine Natufian hunter-gatherer communities (16–24).“

– Perhaps 5 to 10 million of us inhabit our world.

It's very difficult to estimate prehistoric human populations, estimations comes with very large error margins and some experts even refrain from putting estimates out due to lack of reliable data. We used a commonly used figure.

#US Census Bureau. Historical Estimates of World Population

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/international-programs/historical-est-worldpop.html

#OWID. Population10,000 BCE to 2023. 

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population

– Exchange networks, already old, grow busier. Tools, beads, seashells — and above all obsidian, the jet-black volcanic glass that flakes into razor edges – travel hundreds of kilometers. You could call it the black gold of the Stone Age: it ties distant villages into a single web of contact.

#Carter et al. Networks and Neolithisation: sourcing obsidian from Körtik Tepe (SE Anatolia). Journal of Archaeological Science. 2013
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440312003536?via%3Dihub

Quote: “This paper details the use of obsidian sourcing to reconstruct networks of interaction (or ‘communities of practice’) amongst populations of south-eastern Anatolia and the Near East in the context of ‘Neolithisation’ during the late 11th–early 10th millennia BC. EDXRF was used to elementally characterise 120 artefacts of Epi-Palaeolithic – Pre-Pottery Neolithic A date from Körtik Tepe in south-eastern Anatolia. Four eastern Anatolian sources are represented, mainly Bingöl A/B and Nemrut Dağ, plus the first evidence for the use of Muş obsidian. When the source data is integrated with the artefacts' techno-typological attributes it is possible to locate the assemblage within an Upper Tigris tradition (with some interesting local differences), which stands in stark contrast to contemporary practices in northern Mesopotamia and the Levant. These local and regional distinctions support recent views of the Neolithic being much more heterogeneous, with a ‘mosaic’ of community-specific/local traditions of subsistence practices, raw material choices and lithic technologies during the Younger Dryas–Early Holocene.”

#Ibáñez JJ, Ortega D, Campos D, Khalidi L, Méndez V. Testing complex networks of interaction at the onset of the Near Eastern Neolithic using modelling of obsidian exchange. J R Soc Interface. 2015 

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4590507/

Quote: “We explore a network prototype of obsidian exchange with distant links which replicates the long-distance movement of ideas, goods and people during the Early Neolithic. Our results support the idea that during the first (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A) and second (Pre-Pottery Neolithic B) phases of the Early Neolithic, the complexity of obsidian exchange networks gradually increased. We propose then a refined model (the optimized distant link model) whereby long-distance exchange was largely operated by certain interconnected villages, resulting in the appearance of a relatively homogeneous Neolithic cultural sphere.”

#Baysal and Yelözer. From prehistoric shores: Marine shell ornaments, landscape, interaction and the Neolithic transition in Anatolia. 2024.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352409X2300487X

Quote: “Here we explore the relationship between raw material/artefact mobility and preferred habitation practices with the example of marine shell use in ornamentation through the Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transition in Anatolia. This region encompasses both the incipient stages of the Neolithic process from around 10,000 BCE and the movement of both Neolithic populations and their associated lifeways westward across the Anatolian Peninsula towards Europe as the Neolithic progressed (Haak et al., 2010, Kılınç et al., 2017, Omrak et al., 2016).

The procurement, distribution and use of marine shells as ornaments during the Neolithic is relatively well understood in both Europe (Dimitrijević and Tripković, 2006, Ifantidis, 2019, Miller, 1996, Rigaud et al., 2015) and large portions of western Asia (Alarashi, 2010, Bar-Yosef Mayer, 2005, Ridout-Sharpe, 2015). Shell ornaments have long been recognised as an important indicator of identity construction and display, movement of human groups and resource exploitation practices (Reese, 1991, Richter et al., 2011, Stiner, 2014). Research on these artefacts started relatively late in Türkiye, developing significantly only within the last few years (although see for example Reese, 2005), which has made it difficult to assess the importance of, and regional and temporal variations within, these elements of material culture in this large region bridging western Asia and Europe.”

#Rosenberg, Michael, and Aslı Erim-Özdoğan, ' The Neolithic in Southeastern Anatolia', in Gregory McMahon, and Sharon Steadman (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia: (10,000-323 BCE) , Oxford Handbooks (2011; online edn, Oxford Academic, 21 Nov. 2012),

https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/36332/chapter-abstract/318716123?redirectedFrom=fulltext

#Baysal, Emma. “Envisaging the Neolithic and Chalcolithic as a Connected World: Tracing Ornament Movement in Anatolia.” BEAUTY AND THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER Personal Adornments across the Millennia, 2020.

https://www.academia.edu/43645154/Envisaging_the_Neolithic_and_Chalcolithic_as_a_connected_world_tracing_ornament_movement_in_Anatolia

– The permanent villages grow larger and more elaborate. We don’t know exactly why so many people clustered together - more hands for the harvest, kinships, festivals and prayers to forgotten gods, trade, safety in numbers.

#Kuzucuoğlu, Catherine. Chapter 9. The Neolithic in Anatolia at the Regional Scale. 2015. 

https://books.openedition.org/editionscnrs/22071?lang=en

#McMahon, Gregory, and Sharon Steadman (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia: (10,000-323 BCE) , Oxford Handbooks (2011; online edn, Oxford Academic, 21 Nov. 2012),

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195376142.001.0001

– Let’s travel west, to Çatal höyük, a metropolis of hundreds of people around 8500 years ago.

#Clark Spencer Larsen et al. Bioarchaeology of Neolithic Çatalhöyük reveals fundamental transitions in health, mobility, and lifestyle in early farmers. 2025. 

https://iris.unito.it/retrieve/handle/2318/2099813/1946403/larsen-et-al%20

Quote: “One such community is Neolithic Çatalhöyük, located in the Konya Plain on the Anatolian plateau of south-central Turkey (Fig. 1). Çatalhöyük includes the material remains of one of the most well-known Neolithic megasite communities and is represented by a large tell measuring 13 ha with nearly 21 m of stratified deposits spanning 1,150 y of continuous occupation (ca. 7100–5950 cal BCE) (19). For Southwest Asia, in particular, and the Old World, in general, Çatalhöyük contains an extraordinarily well-contextualized record of Neolithic life, in large part owing to its comprehensive and detailed archaeological documentation, including an unprecedented record and analysis of environment and landscape, funerary contexts, living circumstances, material culture, animal and plant remains, and associated human remains.”

Quote#2: “For purposes of temporal comparisons for tracking key lifecourse events in the Çatalhöyük community, we subdivide the 1,150 y of occupation into 3 temporal periods: Early Period (7100−6700 cal BCE), Middle Period (6700−6500 cal BCE), and Late Period (6500−5950 cal BCE). The community began as a small settlement, likely consisting of a few mud-brick houses occupied by a small group of adults and children. At its initial settlement, Çatalhöyük was likely similar to the earlier and short-lived community located 9 km to the north at Boncuklu Höyük (15). Çatalhöyük houses typically had a lifespan of several decades or more (27–29). Once a house was abandoned, the floor surface was cleaned, the roof and walls were largely removed, and a new house was often built on the same footprint as the old house. Multiple

construction phases occurred, sometimes involving 4 or more rebuilds of a house following an abandonment−rebuild sequence.

Following its founding, the Çatalhöyük community grew, reaching a peak population size of ∼3,500 to 8,000 individuals in the Middle Period (27). Based on house number, size, and density, the Middle Period saw a rapid increase in population size and the highest level of crowding in the history of the community (27). This development reversed course in the Late Period, resulting in considerable population reduction and dispersal, and culminating in abandonment and dispersal of Neolithic Çatalhöyük by the remaining members of the community and the establishment of a new settlement nearby in the Chalcolithic period (24).”

#Hodder, Ian, ' Çatalhöyük: A Prehistoric Settlement on the Konya Plain', in Gregory McMahon, and Sharon Steadman (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia: (10,000-323 BCE) , Oxford Handbooks (2011; online edn, Oxford Academic, 21 Nov. 2012), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195376142.013.0043

Fairbairn, A. (2005). A history of agricultural production at Neolithic Çatalhöyük East, Turkey. World Archaeology, 37(2), 197–210.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00438240500094762

#Neolithic Site of Çatalhöyük. Nomination File. 2012. 

https://whc.unesco.org/uploads/nominations/1405.pdf

– The village has a unique architecture and way of life. There are no streets or alleys, only houses hugging each other closely, accessible only by wooden ladders and bridges and holes in their roofs. Surrounded by farmland and feral goats and sheep – the first animals raised for food. 

#UNESCO: Neolithic Site of Çatalhöyük. Retrieved Sept 2026. 

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1405

Quote: “Two hills form the 37 ha site on the Southern Anatolian Plateau. The taller eastern mound contains eighteen levels of Neolithic occupation between 7400 bc and 6200 bc, including wall paintings, reliefs, sculptures and other symbolic and artistic features. Together they testify to the evolution of social organization and cultural practices as humans adapted to a sedentary life. The western mound shows the evolution of cultural practices in the Chalcolithic period, from 6200 bc to 5200 bc. Çatalhöyük provides important evidence of the transition from settled villages to urban agglomeration, which was maintained in the same location for over 2,000 years. It features a unique streetless settlement of houses clustered back to back with roof access into the buildings.

[...]

Criterion (iv): The house clusters of Çatalhöyük, characterized by their streetless neighbourhoods, dwellings with roof access, and house types representing a highly circumscribed distribution of activity areas and features according to a clear spatial order aligned on cardinal directions, form an outstanding settlement type of the Neolithic period. The comparable sizes of the dwellings throughout the city illustrate an early type of urban layout based on community and egalitarian ideals.”

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:MUFT_-_Catal_H%C3%B6y%C3%BCk_Modell.jpg

– The insides were beautifully decorated, paintings of animals adorn rooms, plastered bull skulls are set into walls, painted in striking red ochre. And figurines of animals and of naked females – maybe they were goddesses, maybe our ancestors just admired the female form as many of us do today, we don’t know. Life in these houses feels eerily similar to our life today. Families ate meals of bread and nuts, ate cheese and drank beer. Complained about a noisy neighbour or admired a strong lad who beat back a leopard!

#Hodder, Ian & Meskell, Lynn. (2012). Symbolism, Feasting, and Power at Çatalhöyük: A Response to Sutliff and to Hayden. Current Anthropology. 53. 128-129. 10.1086/663329.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259709894_Symbolism_Feasting_and_Power_at_Catalhoyuk_A_Response_to_Sutliff_and_to_Hayden

Quote: “We have seen that at Çatalhöyük the narrative paintings show mainly wild animals. Moreover, installations in the houses featured bucrania (wild bull or wild ram and goat skulls and horns with the heads plastered). The teeth of foxes and weasels, the tusks of wild boars, the claws of bears, and the beaks of vultures were placed in protuberances on the walls. We have found a leopard claw and the talons of raptors in burials. While we have seen the preponderance of male cattle bones and horns in special deposits, we have no evidence so far that the claws, teeth, and beaks of other animals and birds were mainly from males, and we do not argue in this paper that violence and danger were associated solely with males. Our interest is more in the overall focus on parts of animals that are dangerous or piercing; there is little symbolic emphasis on femurs, humeri, molar teeth, and so on. It is also the case that dangerous or flesh-eating wild animals and birds are selected for representation. The economy at Çatalhöyük is based on domestic sheep and goats, but these hardly appear in the symbolism.”

“Fig. 12 Reconstruction of a dwelling of Çatalhöyük (the window on the left wall does not exist in reality).”
https://sah.org/2025/04/01/catalhoyuk-the-dawn-of-the-architectural-dream/

There is also a virtual reconstruction of interior of a specific type of house:
https://www.catalhoyuk.com/video/virtually-rebuilding-history-houses-shrine-10

Fig. 13 Goddess Figurine, terracotta, Çatalhöyük 5750 bc. Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara.
https://sah.org/2025/04/01/catalhoyuk-the-dawn-of-the-architectural-dream/

#Eren Yüncü et al. Female lineages and changing kinship patterns in Neolithic Çatalhöyük. Science (2025).
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adr2915

Figure : Bull bucrania, corner installation in Building 77, Çatalhöyük (photo: Çatalhöyük, CC: BY-NC-SA 2.0)
https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Art/Art_History_and_Theory/SmartHistory_of_Art/01:_Prehistoric/1.02:_Neolithic/1.2.04:_Catalhoyuk

#Atalay S, Hastorf CA. Food, Meals, and Daily Activities: Food Habitus at Neolithic Çatalhöyük. American Antiquity. 2006;71(2):283-319. doi:10.2307/40035906
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/article/abs/food-meals-and-daily-activities-food-habitus-at-neolithic-catalhoyuk/13114BD87061BEE6BFF761674B0E086F
Quote: “Overall, the diet of £atalhoyuk residents was healthy; the most ubiquitous ailment was anemia (Molleson et al. 2005). People were omnivorous, gaining protein and carbohydrates from both animals and plants (Richards and Pearson 2005). The available foodstuffs changed considerably throughout the year, fresh food especially cycling with the seasons. With autumn-planted domestic crops maturing in the spring, harvesting cycled with the spring equinox floods and the start of the warmer, out-of-doors time of year. Wall plastering evidence shows that sooting of the interior walls stopped periodically, suggesting that there was a move to prepare food and eat out of doors when the weather warmed (Matthews 2005). Carbohydrates were gathered seasonally, with fresh tubers and greens in the spring, grains in early summer, and sweet fruit into the autumn. Animals were slaughtered throughout the year. During the cold, snowy winter, people ate stored grains, legumes, dried fruit, nuts, wine or syrup sweetener, dried herbaceous plants, and both dried and fresh meat. There was little fresh food except meat provided by sheep, fish, the winter birds and their eggs, including the great bustard, coots, some geese, and ducks. These birds and fish make up only a small part of the overall faunal assemblage, however, and appear to have played a limited role in the daily diet (Russell and McGowan 2005; Sidell and Scudder 2005). Storage and use of fruits and nuts is suggested by seed clusters especially found in the earlier deposits (space 181). Grains and pulses are ubiquitous throughout the deposits, but surely were eaten more intensively during the winter months when other ingredients were less available.”

– And they honored their dead in a, well, fascinating way – if a loved one died they buried them in their homes, deep below the floor boards. After a few years their bodies were exhumed and their heads removed – decorated and painted. Each one did it in their own unique way, some sculpting faces with plaster, others using colorful stones. Why do all of this? Maybe to keep your family and their memory alive, to have them to tell great stories of the mystic world beyond theirs. Whatever the reason was, the living and the dead remained close.

#Scott D. Haddow. Bodies in buildings: Human remains and the life histories of houses at Neolithic Çatalhöyük. 2024. 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235222672500008X?via%3Dihub
Quote: “At Neolithic Çatalhöyük (7100–6000 cal BCE), where evidence of monumental architecture and large communal spaces and structures is lacking, the house served as the focal point not only for domestic activities such as food processing and storage, but also for cyclical and periodic ritual activity including layered wall paintings, animal installations and burials. Human remains, in both primary and secondary burial contexts, are commonly found beneath the floors and platforms of houses. While intramural burials elsewhere in southwest Asia often took place in abandoned structures, most inhumations at Çatalhöyük occurred during the occupation phase of houses. The close association between human remains and the built environment can be seen in the way that bodies -whole or in part- were embedded in the fabric of houses to mark important architectural milestones. In this way, the construction, occupation, adornment, transformation and eventual abandonment of houses reflect and are entangled with the lives of the individuals buried within them. Using examples from the site, this paper presents and discusses the ways in which the “life histories” of houses are connected with the remains of individuals to form shared biographies.”

#Croucher, Karina, 'The Materiality of ‘Ancestors’: Plastered Skulls, Statues, and ‘Stone Gods’', Death and Dying in the Neolithic Near East (Oxford, 2012; online edn, Oxford Academic, 16 Mar. 2015)

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199693955.003.0004

Quote: “This chapter looks at examples of plastered skulls within the context of the materiality of ‘ancestors’, including the processes involved and circumstances of deposition, as well as their role in interpretations of the mortuary practices of the Neolithic Near East. More specifically, it examines the place of the skulls within a broader imagery of ‘ancestors’, including large anthropomorphic pillars at Göbekli Tepe and plastered statues recovered from 'Ain Ghazal and other sites. It also considers the plastered skulls' association with the veneration of ancestors, along with the phenomenon of the ‘skull cult’, before turning to the main sites where plastered skulls have been excavated, including Jericho, Yiftahel, Tell Aswad, Kfar HaHoresh, Beisamoun, Ramad, and the Pottery Neolithic sites of Çatalhöyük and Köşk Höyük in Anatolia. Finally, the chapter discusses issues of display and performance, as well as several other categories of evidence such as masks and monumental stone pillars.”

– In the fourth millenium of the human era, farmers began spreading in different directions from Southwest Asia -carrying plants, animals, technologies and new ways of life with them. Across Europe and Asia, they encountered communities who had lived by hunting, fishing and gathering for thousands of years. 

Different groups met, traded materials, shared technologies and sometimes competed for the same landscapes. In some regions, hunter-gatherers and farmers  lived alongside one another for centuries. In others, farming gradually became the dominant way of life.

https://www.academia.edu/9424525/Map_Expansion_of_farming_in_western_Eurasia_9600_4000_BCE_update_vers_2026_2_

#Hofmanová et al. Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans. 2016
https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.1523951113

Quote: “Farming and sedentism first appeared in southwestern Asia during the early Holocene and later spread to neighboring regions, including Europe, along multiple dispersal routes. Conspicuous uncertainties remain about the relative roles of migration, cultural diffusion, and admixture with local foragers in the early Neolithization of Europe. Here we present paleogenomic data for five Neolithic individuals from northern Greece and northwestern Turkey spanning the time and region of the earliest spread of farming into Europe. We use a novel approach to recalibrate raw reads and call genotypes from ancientDNA and observe striking genetic similarity both among Aegean early farmers and with those from across Europe. Our study demonstrates a direct genetic link between Mediterranean and Central European early farmers and those of Greece and Anatolia, extending the EuropeanNeolithic migratory chain all the way back to southwestern Asia.”

#Manjusha Chintalapati, Nick Patterson, Priya Moorjani (2022) The spatiotemporal patterns of major human admixture events during the European Holocene eLife 11:e77625

https://elifesciences.org/articles/77625#s3

Quote: “Using data from 16 regions in Europe, we reconstruct a detailed chronology and dynamics of the expansion of Anatolian farmers during the Neolithic period. We infer that starting in ~6400 BCE, gene flow from Anatolian farmers became widespread across Europe, and by ~4300 BCE, it was present in almost all parts of continental Europe and the British Isles. These dates are significantly more recent than the estimates of farming based on archaeological evidence in some parts of Europe, suggesting that the local HGs and farmers coexisted for more than a millennium before the mixture occurred (Haak et al., 2015; Lipson et al., 2017). In many regions, after the initial mixture, there was a resurgence of HG ancestry, highlighting the complexities of these ancient interactions. We note that our results are consistent with two previous genetic studies, Lipson et al., 2017, and Rivollat et al., 2020, that applied genetic dating methods to a subset of samples we used in our analysis.”

#Penske et al. Early contact between late farming and pastoralist societies in southeastern Europe. Nature. 2023. 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06334-8.pdf

Quote: “Archaeogenetic studies have described two main genetic turnover events in prehistoric western Eurasia: one associated with the spread of farming and a sedentary lifestyle starting around 7000–6000 bc (refs. 1–3) and a second with the expansion of pastoralist groups from the Eurasian steppes starting around 3300 bc (refs. 4,5). The period between these events saw new economies emerging on the basis of key innovations, including metallurgy, wheel and wagon and horse domestication 6–9. However, what happened between the demise of the Copper Age settlements around 4250 bc and the expansion of pastoralists remains poorly understood. To address this question, we analysed genome-wide data from 135 ancient individuals from the contact zone between southeastern Europe and the northwestern Black Sea region spanning this critical time period. While we observe genetic continuity between Neolithic and Copper Age groups from major sites in the same region, from around 4500 bc on, groups from the northwestern Black Sea region carried varying amounts of mixed ancestries derived from Copper Age groups and those from the forest/steppe zones, indicating genetic and cultural contact over a period of around 1,000 years earlier than anticipated. We propose that the transfer of critical innovations between farmers and transitional foragers/herders from different ecogeographic zones during this early contact was integral to the formation, rise and expansion of pastoralist groups around 3300 bc.”

#Porčić at al. Demography of the Early Neolithic Population in Central Balkans: Population Dynamics Reconstruction Using Summed Radiocarbon Probability Distributions. PLoS ONE. 2016. 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0160832#sec005

Quote: “It is widely accepted that the Neolithic way of life was introduced to Europe from the Near East, with Anatolia being the most important "source" region [1, 2]. There is little doubt that the spread of the Neolithic involved the actual migration of people from the Near East to Europe as demonstrated by accumulated genetic [3–7] and bioarchaeological evidence [8, 9]. The results of the mathematical modeling have shown that the demic diffusion (migration) was the main mechanism of spread [10, 11], although the process was by no means uniform. After the initial Neolithic colonization in Greece in the first half of the 7th millennium calBC [12], the Neolithic spread to the rest of the Europe via two major routes: the maritime Mediterranean route (Greece –eastern and western Adriatic coast—southern France—Iberia) and the continental route (Greece—Balkans—Central Europe—Western and Eastern Europe).”

#Brami et al. Was the Fishing Village of Lepenski Vir Built by Europe’s First Farmers? Journal of World Prehistory. 2022. 

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10963-022-09169-9

Quote: “It is now widely accepted that agriculture and settled village life arrived in Europe as a cultural package, carried by people migrating from Anatolia and the Aegean Basin. The putative fisher-forager site of Lepenski Vir in Serbia has long been acknowledged as an exception to this model. Here, the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition—possibly inspired by interaction with the new arrivals—was thought to have taken place autochthonously on site. Our reinterpretation, based on ancient genomes, as well as archaeological and isotopic evidence, indicates that here, too, house construction, early village society and agriculture were primarily associated with Europe’s first farmers, thus challenging the long-held view of Lepenski Vir as a Mesolithic community that adopted Neolithic practices. Although aspects of the site's occupation, such as the trapezoidal houses, were inspired by local Mesolithic traditions, it is far from certain that the village was founded by Iron Gates foragers. A detailed timeline of population changes at the site suggests that Aegean incomers did not simply integrate into an established Mesolithic society, but rather founded new lineages and households. Iron Gates foragers and their admixed descendants largely appear to have been buried separately, on the fringes of the settlement. The diet of those buried outside in pits shows no major shift from aquatic to terrestrial food resources.”

– Different farming tribes established themselves but the relationships between them were not always peaceful. We have found skeletons bearing wounds from arrows, clubs and other weapons – and grim mass graves: bodies tipped in together, some with arrowheads still lodged in the bone, some filled with men struck down from behind, others with whole families. We don’t know how violent the transition to farming was or how common it really was – but violence was part of the dark matter of history.

We are not pinpointing to a single specific finding here, rather it is a general statement about the Neolithic as a result of multiple findings from different time points within the period. 

#Cristian Violatti. World History Encyclopedia. Neolithic Period. April 2018

https://www.worldhistory.org/Neolithic/

Quote: “By adopting a sedentary way of life, the Neolithic groups increased their awareness of territoriality. During the 9600-6900 BCE period in the Near East, there were also innovations in arrowheads, yet no important changes in the animals hunted were detected. However, human skeletons were found with arrowheads embedded in them and also some settlements such as Jericho were surrounded with a massive wall and ditch around this time. It seems that the evidence of this period is a testimony of inter-communal conflicts, not far from organized warfare. There were also additional innovations in stone tool production that became widespread and adopted by many groups in distant locations, which is evidence for the existence of important networks of exchange and cultural interaction.”

A very distinct example of violence that we know comes from a later time point 

#Curry. A Headless Mystery. Science. 2025.

https://www.science.org/content/article/headless-bodies-hint-why-europe-s-first-farmers-vanished

Quote:  “Known as the Linear Pottery culture (or LBK, after their German name, Linearbandkeramik), these early agriculturalists were direct descendants of the people who began to domesticate plants and animals in the hills of Anatolia around 9000 B.C.E. By 5500 B.C.E., they had reached today’s Hungary. Then they spread westward, farther into Europe. The LBK farmers flourished for more than 400 years, eventually occupying a 1500-kilometer belt of fertile land stretching as far west as the Paris Basin.

Then something went terribly wrong. Vráble and other mass graves across Europe attest to a wave of brutality around 5000 B.C.E., about the same time as hundreds of LBK settlements across the continent abruptly vanished. In the aftermath, parts of the continent remained empty for centuries. Other settlements transitioned peacefully into something else, with people living in the same place and continuing to farm, but building houses and decorating their ceramics in a different way. “The LBK were the first farmers, the first large pan-European culture, and the first time we see these repeated finds of violence,” says Christian Meyer, an independent osteoarchaeologist who has studied human remains from multiple LBK mass graves.”

#LaPolice. Modeling the European Neolithic expansion suggests predominant within-group mating and limited cultural transmission. Nature Communications. 2025

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63172-0

#Fibiger et al. Conflict, violence, and warfare among early farmers in Northwestern Europe. PNAS. 2023. 

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2209481119#sec-3

#Novak et al. Genome-wide analysis of nearly all the victims of a 6200 year old massacre. PLoS One. 2021.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7946188/

– Around 8000 years ago, farming communities had spread across much of Southwest Asia and into Europe. 

By about 6000 BCE, farming communities were established across much of Southwest Asia and had spread into southeastern Europe, although agriculture had not yet become dominant throughout the continent.

#Moore, Andrew M. T., 'Post-Glacial Transformations among Hunter-Gatherer Societies in the Mediterranean and Western Asia', in Vicki Cummings, Peter Jordan, and Marek Zvelebil (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers (2014; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 July 2014), 

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199551224.013.038

Quote: “The Mediterranean basin has experienced significant environmental change throughout the Holocene. This has conditioned human settlement and economy. Much of the coastline is backed by mountains so communication has usually been by sea, and seasonal vertical patterns of movement have been commonplace from the Mesolithic on. During the early Holocene the Mediterranean basin and its hinterlands were thinly inhabited by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. In the interior of western Asia, agriculture and settled life began during the late glacial. This new way of life spread throughout the Mediterranean in a series of rapid advances followed by episodes of stasis. Farming reached Cyprus before 10000 cal BP, and then the Aegean, Thrace, and Greece. Around 8000 cal BP this new way of life was carried along the shores of the central and western Mediterranean and to north Africa. Migrant farmers took this way of life with them, replacing the local Mesolithic inhabitants.”

#8,000 years of adaptation in Europe leave a mark on our genes

https://www.mpg.de/9760617/genetic-adaptation-agriculture

Quote: “The invention of agriculture ranks as a revolution in human history. Arable and livestock farming spread across central Europe around 7,500 years ago. In the course of the associated developments, humans had to adapt to new environmental conditions, an altered food supply, as well as close contact with domesticated animals and their pathogens. The genetic selection processes that led to adaptation to this altered lifestyle are reflected in the genome of today’s Europeans. A team of researchers led by Wolfgang Haak and Johannes Krause from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has gained important new insights into this process.”

The Dark Matter Apocalypse

—Around the year 3800 of the human era a sudden catastrophe happened in North America. The receding glaciers of the last ice age had created one of the largest lakes in Earth’s history, larger than the Caspian Sea today. It was held back by super massive ice sheets, which formed a gigantic dam. 

#NOAA. Post-Glacial Cooling 8,200 Years Ago. 2021. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/2021-11/4%20Post-Glacial%20Cooling%208%2C200%20Years%20Ago%20-%20Final-OCT%202021.pdf 

Quote: “The cause of the 8.2 ka event remained a puzzle for some time, but research is converging upon a consistent picture. In the early Holocene, as the large ice sheets of the last glacial period were wasting away, a large lake formed south of the Hudson Bay from meltwater. A remnant of the Laurentide ice sheet to the north dammed the newly formed lake. At some point prior to 8.2 ka, this dam failed catastrophically, releasing the waters of Lake Agassiz and icebergs from the ice sheet to the Hudson Bay and downstream to the Labrador Sea. Once in the Labrador Sea, these freshwaters changed the density structure of the ocean and slowed deepwater formation and the thermohaline circulation”

#Li et al. Synchronizing a sea-level jump, final Lake Agassiz drainage, and abrupt cooling 8200 years ago. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2012.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012821X11003177 

Quote:“Freshwater pulses draining into the North Atlantic Ocean are commonly hypothesized to have perturbed the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (MOC), triggering abrupt climate changes such as Heinrich events, the Younger Dryas, and the 8.2 ka event. However, dating uncertainties have prevented causal links between freshwater pulses and climate events from being firmly established. Here we report a high-resolution relative sea-level record from the Mississippi Delta that documents a sea-level jump that occurred within the 8.18 to 8.31 ka (2σ) time window and is attributed to the final drainage of proglacial Lake Agassiz–Ojibway (LAO).”

#Dixit et al. Hydroclimatic impacts of the abrupt cooling event 8200 years ago in the western Indo-Pacific Warm Pool. Nature Communications Earth & Environment. 2024.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01825-6 

Quote:“Abrupt short-term climate anomalies that punctuated the otherwise stable Holocene climate have drawn considerable attention from the paleoclimate community in the past few decades1,2,3. Abrupt climate events during the Holocene also had associated cultural impacts4,5,6,7,8 and are therefore crucial to examine as they may provide essential information about the climate system’s sensitivity to future perturbations9. The most prominent of the abrupt climate anomalies during the Holocene occurred around 8.2 calendar kiloyears before present (present is 1950; ka BP) from the perspective of Greenland temperature change1,10. Greenland temperature dropped by 3 °C and methane concentrations declined by 80 ppbv, suggesting a substantial change in the hydrologic cycle11. It is now widely accepted that the drainage of meltwater from the proglacial Laurentide lakes (lakes Agassiz and Ojibway) and icesheets around 8.5 ka BP into the Hudson Bay probably caused perturbations in the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation12,13 and slowed the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)14.”

#Rhoades. Glacial Lake Agassiz. EBSCO. 2024

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/glacial-lake-agassiz 

Quote:“Glacial Lake Agassiz was the largest lake in North America during the Pleistocene epoch, formed as a result of melting glaciers from the Laurentide ice sheet. At its peak, it covered an expansive area of approximately 2 million square kilometers, stretching from the Rocky Mountains in Alberta to regions in South Dakota and north towards Hudson Bay. The lake had a maximum volume of 163,000 cubic kilometers and was characterized by significant fluctuations in size, shape, and depth, alongside multiple outburst events that caused dramatic drainage into various river systems, including the Mackenzie River Valley and the Mississippi River Valley.”

#Schafer. Caspian Sea. EBSCO. 2023

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/earth-and-atmospheric-sciences/caspian-sea 

Quote:“Unsymmetrically shaped and somewhat resembling the silhouette of a seahorse, the Caspian Sea’s size varies because it undergoes cycles of contraction and expansion. On average, the sea stretches about 1,200 kilometers from north to south and from 210 to 436 kilometers from east to west, encompassing an approximate area of 371,000 square kilometers.”

 – the whole lake suddenly drained into the ocean – global sea levels rose by 1-2 meters and the great conveyor belt that carried warm water northwards slowed down.

#Li et al. Synchronizing a sea-level jump, final Lake Agassiz drainage, and abrupt cooling 8200 years ago. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2012.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012821X11003177 

Quote:“Freshwater pulses draining into the North Atlantic Ocean are commonly hypothesized to have perturbed the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (MOC), triggering abrupt climate changes such as Heinrich events, the Younger Dryas, and the 8.2 ka event. However, dating uncertainties have prevented causal links between freshwater pulses and climate events from being firmly established. Here we report a high-resolution relative sea-level record from the Mississippi Delta that documents a sea-level jump that occurred within the 8.18 to 8.31 ka (2σ) time window and is attributed to the final drainage of proglacial Lake Agassiz–Ojibway (LAO).

[...]
In addition, the total inferred eustatic sea-level rise at 8.2 ka (after correction for gravitational effects) amounts to 0.8 to 2.2 m, considerably higher than previous estimates for the final stage of LAO drainage ”

#Dixit and Kumari. The 8.2 Ka Abrupt Climate Event: Causes, Impacts and Future Implications. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews. 2026

https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.70050 

Quote:“FIGURE 2    |    Mechanism of the 8.2ka cool event in the North Atlantic (modified from Lochte et al. (2019)). The map shows the Laurentide ice sheet (white shaded) and the Hudson Bay saddle collapse and the Proglacial Lakes Agassiz-Ojibway outburst flood. Blue shaded area displays Lake Agassiz-Ojibway that formed along the southern margin of the Laurentide Ice Sheet and drained through sub-glacial channel in the Hudson Bay. Dark blue and red arrows indicate cold and warm currents of North Atlantic respectively. Light blue curved arrow shows the influx of freshwater into Labrador Sea (stipling shows region of intrusion of freshwater influx in the North Atlantic) that slowed down the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation causing the cooling resulting in reduced inter-hemispheric heat transport.”

— Across the North Atlantic and Europe, and into the Near East, the climate turned colder and drier – in some regions by several degrees. Rain patterns shifted, summers grew longer and harsher, and a drought lasting well over a century parched the land.

#NOAA. Post-Glacial Cooling 8,200 Years Ago. 2021. 

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/2021-11/4%20Post-Glacial%20Cooling%208%2C200%20Years%20Ago%20-%20Final-OCT%202021.pdf 

Quote:“The cause of the 8.2 ka event remained a puzzle for some time, but research is converging upon a consistent picture. In the early Holocene, as the large ice sheets of the last glacial period were wasting away, a large lake formed south of the Hudson Bay from meltwater. A remnant of the Laurentide ice sheet to the north dammed the newly formed lake. At some point prior to 8.2 ka, this dam failed catastrophically, releasing the waters of Lake Agassiz and icebergs from the ice sheet to the Hudson Bay and downstream to the Labrador Sea. Once in the Labrador Sea, these freshwaters changed the density structure of the ocean and slowed deepwater formation and the thermohaline circulation”

#Dixit and Kumari. The 8.2 Ka Abrupt Climate Event: Causes, Impacts and Future Implications. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews. 2026

https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.70050 

Quote:“The 8.2ka event was marked by sharp and widespread cooling of ~1°C–3°C that lasted ~160 years and has been recorded in various geological records globally (Thomas et al. 2007). In Greenland ice core records, where it was first clearly noted, it is observed as the rapid climatic cooling of ~6°C±2°C at Summit, Greenland (Alley et  al.  1997; Dansgaard et  al.  1993; Johnsen et  al. 1992; Kobashi et  al. 2007). This abrupt cooling due to the freshwater forcing was accompanied by widespread cooling over Europe of ~1°C–1.5°C (Boch et al. 2009; Nicolussi and Schlüchter  2012; Thomas et  al.  2007) and hydroclimate changes in the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere tropics (McKay et  al.  2024; Morrill et  al.  2013; Parker and Harrison 2022).

[...]
Owen et al. (2016) used calcium isotopes in Heshang cave, China as a proxy to show ~1/3rd decrease in summer precipitation at the onset of the event 8.2ka event.
[...]
The original freshwater forcing hypothesis for the cause of the 8.2ka event was the catastrophic drainage of ice-dammed proglacial Lakes Agassiz and Ojibway (LAO) that formed along the southern margin of the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the termination of the last deglaciation over North America (Barber et al. 1999). This sudden outburst flood led to erosive channels in

the southwestern Hudson Bay seabed suggesting that the LAO drained catastrophically underneath an ice dam, thereby bringing along red-colored hematite rich sediments, known as the icerafted debris, dispersed all along the western to eastern margins of the Hudson Strait (Andrews et  al. 1995; Clarke et  al. 2004; Hillaire-Marcel et al. 2007; Josenhans and Zevenhuizen 1990; Kerwin 1996; Kleiven et al. 2008; Lajeunesse and St-Onge 2008; Leverington, Mann, and Teller  2002; Leverington, Teller, and Mann  2002; Lewis et  al.  2012; Lewis et  al.  2012b; Teller et  al.  2002). This was proposed to have freshened the North Atlantic, leading to a weakening of the AMOC, which in turn reduced the northward meridional heat transport and resulted in cooling of the mid-high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere

(Buckley and Marshall  2016). LAO meltwater flux of 5.2Sv corresponding to 163,000km3 of freshwater was estimated to have drained into the North Atlantic in one or two successive pulses (Lajeunesse and St-Onge  2008; Leverington, Mann, and Teller  2002; Leverington, Teller, and Mann  2002; Teller et al. 2002) in the entire duration between 8740 and 8160years BP (Barber et al. 1999). Model simulations forced by the short-lived freshwater pulses of LAO volume as triggers for the 8.2ka event demonstrate global climate anomalies of the appropriate direction and magnitude similar to the proxy reconstructions (Carlson et al. 2009; Clark et al. 2001; Clarke et al. 2009; Gregoire et al. 2012; LeGrande and Schmidt 2008; Matero et al. 2017; Meissner and Clark 2006; Wiersma and Jongma 2010; Wiersma and Renssen 2006). While the amplitude and direction of the changes produced in these model simulations are mirrored in proxy records, LAO-only forcing produced cooling that is shown to have recovered in a matter of decades and failed to sustain the climate perturbation recorded in proxy reconstructions that lasts 160–400 years (Andersen et  al.  2017; LeGrande and Schmidt  2008; Morrill et al. 2013; Rohling and Pälike 2005; Rush et al. 2023; Thomas et al. 2007; Tindall and Valdes 2011). Wagner et al. (2013) used Community Climate System Model version 3 (CCSM3) model simulations to show that the Lake-only experiments document a short, slightly significant decrease in AMOC of about 10% that recovers after approximately 25 years. Decades later, sea-level reconstructions for the 8.2ka event provide an estimate of the total volume of freshwater added to the ocean during the event (e.g., Carlson et al. 2008; Törnqvist et al. 2004). Sea-level reconstructions show much larger sea-level rise than what could be explained from the lake outburst only hypothesis (Li et al. 2012; Rush et al. 2023), following which model simulations included more freshwater sources in their models (Wagner et al. 2013; Wiersma et al. 2006). Therefore, to sustain a millennial-scale 8.2ka event, additional sources of freshwater were later suggested, that includes collapse of the Laurentide ice sheet (LIS) over the Hudson Bay (Lochte et al. 2019; Matero et al. 2017). Using sea-level reconstructions (Carlson et al. 2009) alongside quantitative estimates of LAO meltwater forcing, model simulations suggest that meltwater from the Agassiz drainage was rapidly advected out of the North Atlantic. In contrast, freshwater input from the LIS generated more persistent anomalies, exerting a greater influence on the 8.2ka climate perturbation. This mechanism may help reconcile discrepancies in terms of the duration and magnitude of the event between model simulations and paleoclimate proxy records (Lochte et al. 2019; Wagner et al. 2013) (Figure 2). The disintegration of the LIS is believed to have accelerated during the early Holocene (~9–7ka), when a strongly negative mass balance, driven by orbital forcing combined with elevated greenhouse gas concentrations, triggered a surface mass balance feedback that ultimately led to the collapse of the ice saddle over Hudson Bay at ~8.5ka BP (Carlson et al. 2008, 2009; Gregoire et al. 2012, 2015; Lochte et al. 2019). Model simulations indicate that a ~100-year pulse of meltwater flux, resulting from the combined collapse of the Hudson Bay ice saddle and a proglacial lake outburst, is most consistent with the magnitude and duration of cooling anomalies recorded in paleoproxies (e.g., Matero et al. 2017; Wagner et al. 2013). Moreover, model results emphasize that the total volume of freshwater forcing, rather than its duration, constitutes the primary driver of the 8.2ka climate anomalies (Lochte et  al.  2019; Wagner et al. 2013; Wiersma et al. 2006). Recent comparative study of proxy data compilation of sea surface temperatures and oxygen isotope ratios from isotope-enabled model simulations constrain the meltwater released during the 8.2ka event suggesting a combination of 5.3m of sea-level-rise-equivalent meltwater in was released over a thousand years, with a short intensification over ~130 years (an additional 2.2m of equivalent sea level rise) due to routing of the Canadian river discharge, best reproduces the proxy anomalies (Aguiar et al. 2021)."

—Humans had spent the last few thousand years learning to depend on predictable rainfall to grow crops and suddenly this was over. For some communities this turned into an existential crisis.

#Berger, J.-F., Lespez, L., Kuzucuoğlu, C., Glais, A., Hourani, F., Barra, A., and Guilaine, J.: Interactions between climate change and human activities during the early to mid-Holocene in the eastern Mediterranean basins. 2016.
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-12-1847-2016

Quote: “The potential impact of the 9.2 ka abrupt climatic event on human societies during the Neolithic “revolution” has rarely been explored (Borrell, 2007; Flohr et al., 2016), in any case much less so than the 8.2 ka event. In this debate, the effects of the worldwide “8.2” climatic event on the Mesolithic and Neolithic societies have been under discussion for a decade, with interpretations varying from abandonment of sites to collapse, and from large-scale migration to

sustainability of occupation and social adaptation (for a complete overview, see Gehlen and Schön, 2005; Staubwasser and Weiss, 2006; Weninger et al., 2006, 2014; Berger and Guilaine, 2009; Flohr et al., 2016). Climatic records show that the 8.2 ka event resulted in some of the most extreme environmental perturbations of the Holocene. For this reason, it has often been a subject in the literature since being first discussed (Alley et al., 1997). Extended over a time span of 100–150 years in GISP2-GRIP polar archives (Thomas et al., 2007), its duration has been found to be longer in numerous marine and continental proxies (Fig. 1). In the eastern Mediterranean and other regions, the RCC interval between 8.6 and 8.0 ka spans a longer time period than in the ice record, supporting the idea of an enhanced Siberian highpressure anticyclone over Asia (Rohling and Pälike, 2005; Weninger et al., 2014) controlling a global intensification of atmospheric circulation with cooler temperatures in polar regions (Mayewski et al., 2004) and drier and cooler conditions in the Mediterranean Basin (Rohling et al., 2002; BarMatthews et al., 2003; Fletcher and Zielhofer, 2013; GómezPaccard et al., 2016). ”

#Flohr et al. Evidence of resilience to past climate change in Southwest Asia: Early farming communities and the 9.2 and 8.2 ka events. Quaternary Science Reviews. 2016. 

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379115300317 

#M. Roffet-Salque,A. Marciniak,P.J. Valdes,K. Pawłowska,J. Pyzel,L. Czerniak,M. Krüger,C.N. Roberts,S. Pitter, & R.P. Evershed,  Evidence for the impact of the 8.2-kyBP climate event on Near Eastern early farmers, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 2018 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1803607115

—But people were resilient and adapted, finding new ways to sustain themselves. Some leaned harder on their animals, some turned to sea for food, others shifted their settlements from plains to neighbouring mountains. Or they… just left, looking for a completely new home. 

#Flohr et al. Evidence of resilience to past climate change in Southwest Asia: Early farming communities and the 9.2 and 8.2 ka events. Quaternary Science Reviews. 2016. 

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379115300317 

Quote:“Tell Sabi Abyad is very well dated and shows a multitude of changes at around 8200 cal BP, which coincide with the transition from level A1 to B8 (van der Plicht et al., 2011)(Fig. S2-D-E). These include a change in settlement location within the site, an increased importance of the drought-resistant species of sheep and goat, a decrease of pig, changes in secondary product use shown by the use of older animals and a steep increase in spindle whorl numbers, a change in ceramic styles, the increased use of painted pottery, and potentially a shift from household-to communal-sized storage areas (Akkermans, 2013; Nieuwenhuyse, 2013; Rooijakkers, 2012; Russell, 2010; van der Plicht et al., 2011).” 

#García‑Escárzaga et al. Human forager response to abrupt climate change at 8.2 ka on the Atlantic coast of Europe. Nature Scientific Reports. 2022.  

https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_3378987_2/component/file_3378996/content 

Quote:“Previous studies in western Europe have hotly debated the impact of the 8.2 ka event, and its associated environmental changes, on human behaviour16,52. On the Iberian Peninsula, Bicho et al.20 reported changes in subsistence strategies, human settlement and technology in the coastal areas of central Portugal after the 8.2 ka event. In addition, research conducted in the Ebro Valley basin showed that, although not all of the valley was depopulated, several settlements were abandoned in the central part of the valley due to colder and drier climate conditions during the 8.2 ka event. This abandonment has been associated with a migration of Mesolithic populations towards less climate sensitive areas located in other parts of the Ebro Valley53 and/or along the Mediterranean coast54,55. In northern Iberia, archaeological sites located in the mountainous inland areas seem to have been occupied with lower intensity during the harsher period of the 8.2 ka event. The site of El Espertín does not report robust evidence of occupation from 8.4 to 8.056. Only after 8.0 ka cal BP does a clear signal of human occupation emerge in the mountain areas located to the south of the Cantabrian region56,57. Given the higher levels of human predation on littoral resources observed during this time at El Mazo, it seems highly likely that the northern Iberian coast, a less climatically sensitive region than the nearby mountain areas46 and Ebro river basin54,55, provided a refuge for humans moving from inland regions. A similar scenario has also been argued for this region during the Last Glacial Maximum58 when northern Iberia became a refugium for forager groups. Population migrations from adjacent areas are also in agreement with the growing presence of geometric microliths seen in northern Iberia from ca. 8.0–8.2 ka cal BP59,60. Increasing human pressure on coastal environments during the 8.2 ka event is suggested by decreasing mollusc size, as well as evidence for the growing”

#González-Sampériz et al. Patterns of human occupation during the early Holocene in the Central Ebro Basin (NE Spain) in response to the 8.2 ka climatic event. Quaternary Research. 2009.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0033589408001336 

Quote: “Abrupt climate changes conducive to large changes in water availability have caused a concomitant reduction of archaeological sites in several regions. Thus, Lateglacial and Holocene human occupation of the Puna de Atacama Desert in Chile follows the alternation of dry/wet periods (Núñez et al., 2002). Particularly significant is the “silencio arqueológico,” a period without human occupation that has been related to the well-documented Mid Holocene aridity crisis in the Chilean Altiplano (Grosjean et al., 2005). In Europe, the transition between the Bronze-Iron Age in the Netherlands was associated to a cold and humid period around 2650 cal yr BP that also caused an important migration to higher altitudes due to the expansion of wetlands in low areas (Van Geel et al., 1996). In the Bajo Aragón the influence of climatic conditions on human occupation appears as a very plausible explanation for the ‘archaeological silence’ between 8000 and 7300 cal yr BP. On the other hand, the settlements located in the North Ebro persisted, likely due to more favourable conditions. In addition, new occupations occur in the Maestrazgo area at about this time (Olaria et al., 2005; FernándezLópez de Pablo, 2006) supporting the hypothesis that Bajo Aragón hunter-gatherers migrated to more humid habitats in the southern Iberian Range mountains. The existence of an exclusive style of “Levantine rock art” in the Maestrazgo, that it is exactly the same as in the Bajo Aragón (Utrilla, 2005; Utrilla and Martínez Bea, 2006), supports the migration and cultural connections from both areas.

#Tan et al. Cultural responses to the 8.2 ka climatic event in North China: Insights from the Jiahu archaeological site. Quaternary Environments and Humans. 2025. 

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2950236525000362 

Quote:“However, the sudden 8.2 ka event led to significant depopulation in many regions, with some groups likely buffered risk via residential mobility. More compelling evidence points to population packing into better-resourced refugia, located in mixed and better-watered environments, with diverse food resources in both aquatic and terrestrial ecotones, e.g. Jiahu settlement in the broader context of a wetland setting. Situated in the Shaying River Plain, Jiahu had great rainfall and temperature conditions, along with abundant natural resources that provided a stable food supply.”

— We know that during this time all over the world migration towards rivers and lakes sped up – bringing agriculture and technology with them. Some of the most consequential journeys led into the Nile Valley, where farming villages took root and slowly laid the ground for the rich civilization that would one day rise there.

#Mączyńska. The Nile Delta in the Predynastic period. Lower Egyptian Communities and Their Interactions with Southern Levant in the 4th Millennium BC. 2016.

https://books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeum/catalog/book/39
Quote: “The prevailing view among archeologists is the hypothesis identifying southern Levant as the origin of Egyptian agriculture and animal breeding (Hendrickx & Vermeersch 2000: 37; Wengrow 2006: 44; Hendrickx et al. 2010: 19). The new subsistence system could have reached Lower Egypt via Sinai, together with materials imported from the east, e.g. shells from the Red Sea and turquoise (acculturation model). Alternatively, it might have come together with Levantine farmers migrating as a result of climate changes (demic diffusion model) (Borgoginini Tarli & Manzi 1998: 36). According to F. Hassan (1984b: 222), farming was introduced to the Delta by migrants from the east. However, their movement was not linked to the mass migrations from southwest Asia. Lower Egypt is claimed to have been gradually infiltrated by drifters and refugees over a relatively long period of time (some 500 years or more). In his opinion, the change in subsistence was almost imperceptible, and thus peaceful and gradual. Levantine farmers easily adapted to local hunter-gatherers, which was facilitated by the flexible social organization and the probably exogamous marriage pattern followed by autochthonous communities (Hassan 1984b: 222).”

#Köhler, E. Christiana, 'Prehistoric Egypt', in Karen Radner, Nadine Moeller, and D. T. Potts (eds), The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East: Volume I: From the Beginnings to Old Kingdom Egypt and the Dynasty of Akkad (New York, 2020; online edn, Oxford Academic, 17 Sept. 2020)
https://academic.oup.com/book/37433/chapter-abstract/331531745?redirectedFrom=fulltext

#Morez Jacobs et al. Whole-genome ancestry of an Old Kingdom Egyptian. Nature. 2025.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09195-5

#Britannica. The Nile valley. Sept 2026
https://www.britannica.com/topic/agriculture/The-Nile-valley

#Xiaoshuang Zhao, David Kaniewski, Yanna Wang, Nick Marriner, Alaa Salem, et al.. On the long and winding road: unravelling the late emergence of Neolithic agriculture in the Nile Delta. Quaternary Science Reviews, 2025, 359, pp.109368. https://amu.hal.science/hal-05075539v1/document

#Kuper R, Kröpelin S. Climate-controlled Holocene occupation in the Sahara: motor of Africa's evolution. Science. 2006 https://www.science.org/cms/asset/e235ed21-5223-4b02-8046-9da0e1d2aaf4/pap.pdf

#Holdaway, Simon, and Rebecca Phillipps, 'Human-Environmental Interrelationships and the Origins of Agriculture in Egypt and Sudan' (29 Mar. 2017), in Hank Shugart (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/61750/chapter-abstract/542840231?redirectedFrom=fulltext

— And in Mesopotamia, something remarkable began – over the generations communities started to bend the rivers to their will: digging canals, steering water onto their fields, storing the grain it produced. It was one of the great leaps in human organisation — and over the long run it would make them the richest people of their age, their surpluses feeding a population boom that, much later, would give rise to the first true city states.

#Geyer and Monchambert. Canals and water supply in the lower Euphrates valley. Canals and water supply in the lower Euphrates valley. Water History. 2015.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12685-014-0108-4
Quote: “In the lower Euphrates valley, a region subject to strong bioclimatic constraints, irrigation appears to have been tried out very early, probably in the Halaf period (6000–5100 BC), because of a change in the dynamics of the river.”

#David S. Sandeford; Organizational complexity and demographic scale in primary states. R. Soc. Open Sci. 1 May 2018
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article/5/5/171137/94437/Organizational-complexity-and-demographic-scale-in
Quote: “Agricultural villages emerged on the southern Mesopotamian alluvial plain during the sixth millennium BCE. For the next 1000 years, the region was characterized by an ‘extremely low population and settlement density’ of no more than 15 autonomous villages ‘widely and fairly evenly dispersed’ across the plain. This pattern prevailed until roughly the end of the fifth millennium BCE when a ‘striking increase in population’ following the collapse of the Susa state and mass emigration from the Susiana plain [24, pp. 453–59] kick-started what Adams describes as ‘the processes of precocious growth that (led to) the development in southern Mesopotamia of the world’s earliest civilization’ [59, pp. 55–60].

As the population of the southern alluvium grew by a factor of roughly eight over the next millennium (r = 0.005), the region sequentially developed two, three and four levels of settlement hierarchy, marked social stratification, and institutions of bureaucratic governance [60, pp. 65–127]. The Uruk population was distributed among 77 large villages, 18 supravillages, five small centers, and the city of Uruk yielding a span of control of 4.17.2 The average size of the large village in southern Mesopotamia was approximately 150 persons.1 The archaeologically estimated population of Uruk is 54 070 to 108 140 persons. The complex network model predicts a population of 59 441 persons and a span of control of 3.85 to 4.26 (figure 3)”

#Murphy, Denis J., 'Evolution of agrourban cultures: I The Near East', People, Plants and Genes: The Story of Crops and Humanity (Oxford, 2007; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Sept. 2007)
https://academic.oup.com/book/5636/chapter-abstract/148662898?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Quote: “In the Near East, farming started in the Levant and northern Mesopotamia and, by 9,000 BP, was established across much of the region. Farming villages grew into towns that gradually increased in size and techno-social complexity. This development was punctuated by at least three serious aridification events in 8,200, 5,200, and 4,200 BP that led to the partial abandonment of rainfed farming and dramatic reductions in social complexity. A momentous development was the invention of irrigation by the Samarrans after 8,000 BP. This allowed the colonization of southern Mesopotamia and the evolution of the first true urban cultures in Sumerian centres such as Ur and Uruk. Sumerian agriculture was dominated by intensively farmed barley monocultures controlled by elites who developed writing, organized warfare, imperialism, and ruled over an increasingly coercively managed subject population.”

– Around the year 5000 of the human era, 7000 years ago, the speed of progress changes and so does the pace of our story now. A steady food supply allows populations to grow, some villages expand to impressive sizes.

#Stevenson. Neolithic Age Europe. EBSCO. 2022. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/anthropology/neolithic-age-europe#history
Quote: “The Neolithic Age occurred earliest in southeastern and latest in northwestern Europe, and the transition was most likely somewhat different in each region. In southeastern Europe, the Neolithic transition may have started about 8000 B.C.E., although more probably in most places around 6500 B.C.E. and was most likely derived from Neolithic communities in southwest Asia. Early sites reflect a mobile lifestyle with annual reoccupation of central sites, and buildings and structures slowly became more permanent. By 6000 B.C.E., Neolithic communities extended to the Hungarian plain and northeast to the Carpathians. By 5500 to 4000 B.C.E., smaller sites coalesced into larger tells and in some cases expanded into new zones. Whether this was caused by growing populations or acculturation of Mesolithic peoples is not clear. Copper working and gold working were introduced and developed. From 4000 to 3500 B.C.E., tells were abandoned, and the settlements that followed tended to be smaller and dispersed, often situated on defendable hills.“

#Salavert, Aurélie, 'Agricultural Dispersals in Mediterranean and Temperate Europe' (22 Aug. 2017), in Hank Shugart (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/61750/chapter-abstract/542837885?redirectedFrom=fulltext#542837885

#Parkinson EW, Stoddart S, Sparacello V, Bertoldi F, Fonzo O, Malone C, Marini E, Martinet F, Moggi-Cecchi J, Pacciani E, Raiteri L, Stock JT. Multiproxy bioarchaeological data reveals interplay between growth, diet and population dynamics across the transition to farming in the central Mediterranean. Sci Rep. 2023 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10713518/#Abs1

– By around 6,000 years ago, in what is now Ukraine, people of Trypillia culture built true mega-settlements – places like Talianky, vast concentric rings of houses, home to thousands of people farming wheat, barley and peas, and keeping animals. 

#Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. Trypillia Mega-sites: Cucuteni-Trypillia Neolithic-Chalcolithic. 2023.
https://www.sfb1266.uni-kiel.de/en/projects/cluster-c/d1-population-agglomerations-at-tripolye-cucuteni-mega-sites/trypillia-megasites
Quote: “Around 4100 BCE, we recognise a phenomenon that is unique for European prehistory: in the area of the Central Ukrainian forest steppe, mega-sites develop. With the largest sites of up to 3.2 km² in size, and 2800 simultaneously existing houses, these mega-sites represent the oldest urban structures in Europe.”

#Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. Trypillia Mega-sites: The example Maidanetske: Planning, settlement system and demography. 2023.
https://www.sfb1266.uni-kiel.de/en/projects/cluster-c/d1-population-agglomerations-at-tripolye-cucuteni-mega-sites/trypillia-megasites/maidanedske/maidanedske
Quote: “At 15 km distance west of Maidanetske, Talianki (3.20 km²) is a site with a similar layout, but without special mega-structures. Geophysical features of 2200 houses are known, of which 50 houses were excavated from 1989-2018. As the whole area was not surveyed, an interpolation results in ca. 1800 houses that probably existed at Talianki. 15 km to the west, the mega-site Dobrovody (210 km²) has been partly surveyed and a mega-structure was excavated.”

#Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. Trypillia Mega-sites:Mega-economy. 2023.
https://www.sfb1266.uni-kiel.de/en/projects/cluster-c/d1-population-agglomerations-at-tripolye-cucuteni-mega-sites/trypillia-megasites/mega-economy
Quote: “Cattle, caprovids and pigs are kept as primary domestic animals. Instead of a highly organised economy, the resources of the forest steppe are used for livestock grazing. Arable farming and horticulture with wheat, barley and legumes are practised in the immediate vicinity of the houses and settlements. The use of wild resources plays only a minor role.”

#Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. Deciphered: Europe’s earliest cities relied on fertiliser and plant protein. 2023.
https://www.uni-kiel.de/en/research/details/news/316-crc1266-pnas
Quote: “Peas: The protein source of early agriculture
Even the early Trypillia farmers, who lived almost 7,000 years ago in what is now Ukraine and Moldova, valued a diet consisting mainly of grain and peas, which allowed them to largely do without meat. This is shown by the recent study by Kiel University, which was carried out under the direction of the archaeologist Professor Johannes Müller together with researchers from Ukraine and Moldova as part of the latest investigations into Trypillia societies.”

#UNESCO: Cucuteni-Trypillia Civilization (Ukraine). Retrieved July 2026.
https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/7016/
Quote: “The Cucuteni-Trypillia Civilization, a serial transnational property known as the most important cultural phenomenon of European prehistory, reflects the development of complex sedentary farming communities during the Copper Age (Eneolithic/Chalcolithic), between approximately 5000 and 3300 BC, across the territories of Romania, the Republic of Moldova, and Ukraine. At the height of their territorial expansion, this cultural complex covered an area of over 200,000 km2.

Its importance is evident in the high degree of development achieved by its communities, denoting an optimal adaptation to the natural environment, an effective exploitation of natural resources, the complexity of their spiritual and material life, and their social and hierarchical structure. As such, the Cucuteni–Trypillia civilization constitutes a key testimony to the development of complex prehistoric societies in Eastern Europe during the Copper Age.”

#Marris. Who built Europe’s first cities? Clues about the urban revolution emerge. Nature. 2025.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-04216-1
Quote: “This ceramic piece is in a museum, but not in any modern wing. Found as fragments in 2006 at an archaeological site in Poduri, Romania, the vase is the work of an unknown artist from some 6,000 years ago. The restored artefact is on display in a museum in northwestern Romania.

The potter who created it was a member of the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture, a pre-Bronze Age society that thrived in what is now Romania, Moldova and Ukraine, where several ‘megasites’ held thousands of homes.
To some archaeologists, these giant settlements are among the world’s first cities, whereas others debate whether they qualify as urban centres. In either case, they represent the largest assemblages of people in early Europe and are one of the first experiments in the urban revolution.”

#Videico. “The ‘disappearance’of Trypillia culture”. Documenta Praehistorica. 2011.
https://journals.uni-lj.si/DocumentaPraehistorica/article/view/38.29/1661
Quote: “Before the beginning of the changes in the second half of millennium BC Trypillia culture consisted of several local types with different structures (Figs.1 and 2). It was a period in which large settlements flourished. Researchers are now aware of the exis-tence of almost 200 Trypillian settlements with an area of over 10ha, and with the help of a magnetic survey and aerial photographs, the development of almost forty of them have been ascertained (Videi-ko 2007.251–276). They are known not only in the interfluve of the Southern Bug and the Dnieper, but also between the Bug and the Dnister; even in Mol-dova a few dozen such settlements were even found in Moldova (Fig. 4). As a special phenomenon, large settlements existed from the second half of the 5th millennium until the first half of the 3rdmillenniumBC, i.e.for more than one and a half thousand years.Thus we are dealing not with some accidental epi-sode, but a phenomenon in the history of this part of Europe, which deserves thorough research. The largest of them is situated between the villages of Talyanky and Lehedzine; its area is almost 400ha.”

#Videiko, M. (2011). The ‘disappearance’ of Trypillia culture. Documenta Praehistorica, 38, 373-382.
https://journals.uni-lj.si/DocumentaPraehistorica/article/view/38.29

– As these centers of humanity grow and become more and more common, trade between them explodes. With materials and goods, ideas are being exchanged and progress picks up pace again: copper, the plow, the wheel.

#Gaydarska B, Nebbia M, Chapman J. Trypillia Megasites in Context: Independent Urban Development in Chalcolithic Eastern Europe. Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 2020;30(1):97-121. doi:10.1017/S0959774319000301
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/trypillia-megasites-in-context-independent-urban-development-in-chalcolithic-eastern-europe/C33D85AF4EE4BA2D61AAB77D3E399E4D

#van Willigen, S., Ozainne, S., Guélat, M. et al. New evidence for prehistoric ploughing in Europe. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11, 372 (2024). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-02837-5#Sec10
Quote: “During the 6th millennium BCE, continental Europe was marked by a fundamental innovation in the development of the producing mode of subsistence. Based on cereal farming and livestock breeding, this “Neolithic Revolution” (Childe, 1936) was followed by a series of important technical innovations, such as copper metallurgy and the introduction of animal traction. The latter was part of what Andrew Sherratt has described as the “Secondary Products Revolution”, i.e., the exploitation of “renewable“ animal resources (physical strength, milk, wool and manure) that did not involve killing the animal (Sherratt, 1981, 1983). From this perspective, the “animal traction complex” is a late phenomenon directly linked to socio-economic changes that occurred in Europe during the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE. Despite the criticism it has provoked (Vosteen, 1996), this model continues to enliven discussions on the “Neolithic Revolution”, the subsequent innovations and their social consequences (Bogaard, 2004; Greenfield, 2010; Gaastra et al., 2018; Kamjan et al., 2022).”
……
Our research has provided a solid chronological framework for the earliest known plough marks in Europe, dated between 5100 and 4700 BCE. These remains demonstrate that the use of animal power appeared quite soon after the first evidence of a production economy in the Alps. The new data indicate that the use of animal traction did not develop during a late phase of the Neolithic in Europe but was probably an integral part of the initial processes of the continent’s Neolithisation.”


#Did globalisation already begin in the Neolithic? Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. May 2023.
https://www.uni-kiel.de/en/details/news/121-copper-globalisation
Quote: ”Copper use and knowledge exchange

The first integration of copper metallurgy and the use of copper objects in Neolithic societies in northern Central Europe and southern Scandinavia should not be seen as a purely technological advance. Archaeologists also interpret them as part of a broader development. “These developments included the emergence of new communication and exchange networks, as well as changes in the subsistence economy and new technologies such as the introduction of the hook plough or wheel and wagon,” explains Prof. Dr. Johannes Müller, spokesperson of CRC 1266, because in addition to objects made of metal and jadeite, knowledge of new types of grain and ideas of architecture, for example, were also transported to the north.

Where did the copper come from?

For the early Neolithic artefacts of the north (c. 4100-3300 BCE), people probably used metal from the copper ore deposits in south-eastern Europe. In particular, the Serbian mining areas are a possibility. The most probable copper sources for the few Middle Neolithic artefacts (c. 3300-2800 BCE) seem to come from the Slovakian Ore Mountains, the Serbian mining areas and the Eastern Alps. Artefacts from the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age (c. 2300-1700 BCE) were probably made using deposits from the Slovakian Ore Mountains and in the Alpine region. For the artefacts that the researchers dated to after 2000 BCE, the Great Orme mine in Wales also seems to have been one of the sources of copper for the metals studied.”

#Brozio JP, Stos-Gale Z, Müller J, Müller-Scheeßel N, Schultrich S, Fritsch B, et al. The origin of Neolithic copper on the central Northern European plain and in Southern Scandinavia: Connectivities on a European scale. PLoS ONE 2023.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0283007
Quote: “While local metallurgical processing techniques were already present from 3800 BC at the latest, the role and meaning of copper artefacts was not the trigger of a social transformation of the northern societies. This phenomenon is also visible in the development of copper metallurgy in the Balkans (ca. 5000 BC). This also seems to have had very little impact on societies there, while the subsequent establishment of production and distribution of metal mainly influenced the identity of groups and individuals through common practices and cooperation. For the Vinča culture, in particular, an increase in wealth due to metallurgy is assumed, but other areas of life, such as the economy or demography, do not seem to have been affected to a higher degree [128]. The first integration of copper metallurgy and the use of copper objects in Neolithic societies in Northern Central Europe and Southern Scandinavia was therefore part of a wider development. This included communication and exchange networks as well as changes in the subsistence economy and new technologies, like the introduction of the ard [85] or wheel and wagon [129], as partial aspects of transformation processes in the 4th millennium BC [130]. The early consolidation of copper metallurgy was not a sustainable process as a consequence, even if sensu strictu we are dealing with Chalcolithic societies. Not until the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age did Nordic societies integrate copper metallurgy in their economic system in such a way that these societies reached a point of no return with respect to metallurgy, increasingly using more metal artefacts as tools in the subsistence economy as well as for the display of power structures [11, 29, 30, 131].”

Fig 6. The sites of the sampled objects of Group 2 (ca. 3500–3300 BC and 3300-3000/2800 BC) in the study area and the regions of origin of the copper (cf. S1 Table) based on the analyses of this study [IMAGINE TIFF support, copyright 1991–1999 by ERDAS, Inc.


– We are now traveling to Uruk in the year 6800. One of the first real cities in the history of the world. It houses tens of thousands, has monumental temples and genuine urban life. A village can live from memory, a city can not – so a new social class emerges: Administrators. They count the grain, distribute resources, collect taxes that enable the expansion of their cities. 

We mostly consulted the first two chapters of the following book for this part and the rest of the section about Uruk.

#Podany, Amanda H., 'Builders and Organizers', Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East. Retrieved 7 Sept. 2026.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190059040.003.0001
Quote: “Uruk was the first city of the Near East to have monumental architecture and a population of tens of thousands of inhabitants. It seems to have been the biggest city in the world in 3500 bce and it was the site of many innovations that had a lasting impact on the Near East and the world. A remarkable structure called the Stone Cone Temple provides a window into several aspects of the society and economy of the time. Although the temple was built before writing was invented, archaeologists can draw conclusions about its construction based on the material remains that survive. Innovation was prized, as seen in the new building materials, such as a form of concrete and stone cones used to create mosaics. The workforce was organized, as seen in the use of clay tokens, bullae, and cylinder seals for record-keeping and administration, and in the use of beveled-rim bowls, probably for distributing rations.
[...]
All of which is to say that, by the mid-fourth millennium BCE, the world was already a sophisticated place with plenty of history and tradition, and, in spite of the hot, dry climate, southern Mesopotamia was an excellent place to live.

People at the time had interests and skills, they no doubt talked about fascinating things, they loved their families, they worried about the crops, and they had expertise that most of us have long since lost. They knew how to store their grain so that it would be safe from vermin and insects. They knew how to spin flax into linen thread using a spindle whorl and how to weave the thread into fabric. They knew how to create a perfect blade by chipping a flint block just so.

Cities developed independently in other regions of the globe, of course, but, as far as we can tell, in 3500 BCE the largest city on Earth, and one of the earliest, was in southern Mesopotamia. The city’s name was Uruk. It was situated by the Euphrates River, right in that ideal area where basin irrigation produced abundant crops, around 120 kilometers (75 miles) from what was then the coast of the Gulf.⁵”

#Nissen HJ. Urbanization and the techniques of communication: the Mesopotamian city of Uruk during the fourth millennium BCE. In: Yoffee N, ed. The Cambridge World History. The Cambridge World History. Cambridge University Press; 2015:113-130.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-world-history/urbanization-and-the-techniques-of-communication-the-mesopotamian-city-of-uruk-during-the-fourth-millenniumbce/A032842054C7E3024A9D700B5DB6BDB9
Quote: “Uruk around 3300 bce
During the time of Level IVa, around 3300 bce, Uruk covered an area of at least 2.5 square kilometers and had a population of perhaps 50,000 inhabitants. On Map 6.2 the hatched area delineates the probable extent of the inhabited area. Presumably, Uruk was surrounded with a city wall built over during subsequent phases of city growth. Two distinct areas of the site seem to be relics of once separate settlements that had faced each other on opposite sides of the Euphrates. Some time before 3300, the river shifted its course around the city rather than separating the two parts. No information is available on the time of this change.
Around 3300 bce the first written documents appear. The large majority of them consist of administrative records of a large economic unit. Since they all were found within the precinct of Eanna, which later is known as both the cultic and the economic center of Uruk, this may also be true of the early periods.

As will be argued later, these records are directly linked to the development of the enormous size of this unit. Although we do not have written information from smaller institutional units or from private activities, it is most probable that such units and activities also existed.”

– To manage all that they invent the first accounting system. Marks on clay balls and tablets counting barley or sheep – slowly transforming into actual writing. It is here that the dark matter period of history ends: With a note scratched into wet clay – the first name in history. Kushim. A signature on a tablet recording barley for beer, handed over at a temple. It is not much – we don’t know anything else about Kushim, how he was feeling when he received the beer – if he had any of it that day – or what it tasted like. What his life was like in the first city to ever grace our planet. 

#Denise Schmandt–Besserat. From Accounting to Writing. April 2015.
https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/from-accounting-to-writing/
Quote:”—CA. 3350 —3100 BC
The early city states still used tokens to control the levy of dues. When individuals could not pay, the tokens representing the amount of their debts were kept in a round clay envelope. In order to be able to verify the content of the envelope without breaking it, the tokens were impressed on the surface before enclosing them. A cone left a wedge–shaped mark and a disc a circular one. (fig. 5)
Reducing the three–dimensional tokens to two–dimensional signs proved revolutionary: It was the invention of writing. The tokens enclosed in hollow envelopes were replaced by their markings impressed on clay tablets. (fig. 6) After 5000 years, the old accounting system that used clay tokens came to an end and writing started its own long journey. However, both the last tokens enclosed in envelopes and the first signs impressed on tablets kept the same function – accounting. The impressed notations continued to record the same quantities of the same goods, mostly barley and animals, for the same granaries and sheepfolds of the Mesopotamian temple.”

#Renn, Jürgen (2019). Learning from Kushim About the Origins of Writing and Farming. In: Culture and Cognition: Essays in Honor of Peter Damerow. Berlin: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften.
https://www.mprl-series.mpg.de/proceedings/11/2/index.html
Quote: “Kushim, or the scribe who was assigned to note down the calculations for him, was simply going about his duties as a SANGA: the head of an administrative unit (a term later used as a designation for a priest). Kushim was in charge of a large facility that stored the basic ingredients for the production of beer and other cereal commodities. This was no medium-size enterprise: at one point, he had to administer around 135,000 liters of barley. The tablet printed above contains calculations of the ingredients needed to produce nine different cereal products and eight different kinds of beer. The scribe working for Kushim calculates, for instance, the amount of barley groats needed to produce thirty units of a certain cereal product, the amount of barley groats and malt needed to produce five jugs of a certain beer, and the amount of barley needed for 1,800 cereal rations. In one of the calculations, the sign for “1” is written erroneously for the sign for “10,” but otherwise the calculation is correct.2

Kushim’s duties formed part of a larger administrative context of the earliest Mesopotamian cities. The administration was responsible for collecting and redistributing the agricultural products on which their wealth was mainly based. It was the agricultural surplus of this production that had enabled the development of the hierarchically stratified societies of these cities, including the division between manual and intellectual labor that gave Kushim his position in the first place. While he and his like planned the labor, and appropriated and administered its fruits, others had to do the real work. No wonder, then, that the intellectual work of Kushim, as documented by twenty-one extant clay tablets, was concerned exclusively with the economic aspects of contemporary life.”

#First surviving personal name. Guinness World Records. Retrieved Sept 2026.
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.de/world-records/first-surviving-personal-name
Quote: “An example of a document that Kushim signed off on is a tablet now known as MS 1717, held in the Schøyen Collection in Oslo, Sweden. It consists of only a few symbols (two sets of numbers, Kushim's mark, and symbols for a container of barley and a brewery) but from the context in which it was found it can be translated as "134,813 litres of barley to be delivered over 37 months to the government official kushim responsible for the brewery at the Inanna Temple in Uruk".

It is possible that "Kushim" may have been an official title, rather than a personal name, but the identification with a specific person is the more commonly accepted view. This is backed by the fact that in a few tablets his name is preceded by the word "Sanga", which is known to have been a job title (an administrator of a temple or palace).”

#Basu, Sudipta and Waymire, Gregory B., Recordkeeping and Human Evolution (November 8, 2005). Emory Law and Economics Research Paper No. 05-13 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=762004
Quote: “Figure 3: A pictographic tablet depicting beer production records at the Inanna temple in Uruk, Iraq from about 3100 B.C. The signs indicate that 134,813 litres of barley are to be delivered over 37 months to the government official in charge of the brewery at the Inanna temple, KUSHIM (or KUSHIN). The dimensions of the tablet are 6.8 × 7.2 × 1.9 cm. (1 inch = 2.5 cm.) Nissen et al. (1993, 36-7) translate this tablet as shown below. The color photo is from http://www.nb.no/baser/schoyen/5/5.21/ms1717.jpg