(birds chirping)
(cowbell ringing)
(owl hooting)
(footsteps)
(ominous music)
- If you had sort of rolled up to Çatalhöyük
over 9,000 years ago, as you came across the landscape
you see this great mound in, in the distance where
around 7,000 BC, about 8,000 people started to live together
in a very densely packed community.
They lived so closely together
that they had no streets
so they moved around on the, the roofs of houses and went
down ladders through the houses.
So much had to be invented.
All these processes that make up a city life.
We're just digging up for the moment, the first mirrors
you know, so people had to invent mirrors.
They
had to invent belt hooks.
They had to find ways of holding their hair together.
It's a very, very innovative time.
You know, you can see people trying things out
tinkering with what we take for granted.
I think the sort
of way that we see the environment was not possible
before Çatalhöyük because the main changes
the main interventions are
are to do with domestication of plants and animals.
Agriculture is the, the building block of civilization
as we understand it.
But it also was a trap into which humans got drawn.
(laughing)
You ready?
(soft music)
The story starts small scale,
but you'll have to talk to Dr. Ceren about why.
- You know how some people think little bunnies are cute.
That's the way I, I see my little plants.
We built up a dependency on them and
they built up a dependency on us and here we are.
How? Yeah okay. I'll try.
(laughing)
So you really understand it when you actually
see what happens to grass.
I've got domesticated and I've got wild.
Yeah. And this guy you don't really even have to pull at it.
It'll just fall and sort of break away.
Yeah.
And that's what shattering means
this is their wild seed dispersal mechanism.
They'll break away from the ear.
They'll fall in the ground and they'll dig themselves in.
But some small portion of the wild shattering ones
will actually have non shattering ears.
(soft music)
- The archaeobotanist's talk about that as a random event.
But then the question is, why did it become selected for
and that that's to do with humans.
If you're gathering plants from a field
the seed is what you want.
So you keep selecting ones that are
that are easy to collect.
You are less likely to collect the ones that are shattered.
They're all scattered over the place.
- [Dr. Ceren] Through time the non shattering ears
became more prevalent and that's what became domesticated.
- But as a sort of unintended offshoot of that
the plants couldn't reproduce themselves anymore.
The seeds got stuck onto the stalk of the plant.
- We actually have to physically go and pull the ears apart.
If you had a fully ripe ear and you didn't pick it
or you didn't harvest it, it might actually rot on the ear.
- So the plant is entirely now dependent on humans.
And so if humans want to continue, depending on that plant
they get drawn into planting it and looking after it.
The first entanglement,
sewing and plowing
and harvesting and, and winnowing and, you know
grinding it, it is, it's all just small work.
And one way of dealing with the problem
of needing more work is, is that you just increase
your population size.
All around the world, whether it's maze or yams.
Maybe you get agriculture
you get increases of people.
One way of looking at it is that what really is going
on here is that the domestic plants are doing really well
out of this.
And what they've done is they've domesticated us.
You know, they they've forced us to, to look after them.
Entanglement.
That dual process that started in the Neolithic.
We got dragged into doing things
and we had to work harder to do those things.
And in order to work harder, we invented new technologies.
And those technologies involved us working yet harder.
Or doing more complex things.
And therefore we had to create more technologies.
(somber music)
So there's a spiral between the humans and technologies.
Agriculture, it definitely comes with its negatives.
Urbanism.
Pollution
- Environmental degradation.
You know, as soon as we got agriculture you see
that a decline in health on the skeletons.
Partly to do with the, the less diverse diet,
but it's also to do with diseases jumping across
from animals.
These incredible negatives, but they just carry
on doing the same thing.
On and on, in an endless spiral.
(shovel scraping)
- It's between 7,000, 6,000 BC.
This specific person
I would not know what to pinpoint an exact date, but
long long time.
Humans started to modify their environment.
The domestication of both plants and animals.
Yeah. Big changes that
of course affects culturally biologically, all of us.
(soft music)
You think about your position
with respect of all the millennia that preceded us
and you wonder about possible changes on the future.
You cannot stop this ability of our species to change.
It's pretty much like trying to stop a river.
(soft music)
- You know, I think, I think we have to accept that
that's one of the distinctive things about us
is that we are sort of manically concerned
with temporality and change.
And so, you know
we do things and then the consequences emerge later.
(somber music)
So from a young person, is it?
- Well, it's looks like a male, maybe about
maybe 30.
- The question is whether we can go
on finding a technological solution.
That's the great worry is that sustainable long term.
(tractor rattling)
The lesson from Çatalhöyük
is that humans are are very good inventing things, but they're very
very bad at working out what the implications are.
You know we don't have a long term vision,
particularly nowadays.
We don't have a sense of the long term impacts
of what we do.
And I think that's something that archeologists
can really point to.
Really long term.
(laughing)
(indistinct talking)
(hammering)
Do we sort of pull back from this
and say, you know, technological change is not
gonna be the answer we have to change ourselves.
We've got to change our way of being
to reorient ourselves and and what our wants and demands are
and trying to reevaluate what it is to be,
to lead a fulfilled and happy life.
And, and maybe one that has instant change and
and activity is, is not ... isn't as good
as one that has more stability and, and, and continuity.
(somber music)
(birds chirping)
(cow bell ringing)