Does civilization have to be this way? The mystery of Çatalhöyük and the power of storytelling
How are we to value technological civilization and the idea of progress? After 25+ years working in technology and innovation, I’ve decided I honestly don’t know.
Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of darkness and chaos. Werner Herzog
Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces. Jacques Rousseau
“The worst mistake in the history of the human race”?
As if a melting planet, the 6th Great Extinction, pandemics, food insecurity and fascism weren’t enough threats to deal with this century. Since Feb. 24 2022 we can now add the non-absurd possibility of WWIII around the corner. So while many of us worry civilization may not survive the century, it’s worth remembering there is an ancient tradition of thinking it was a mistake to begin with.
That’s not to say vaccines and Mars rovers, the Brandenburg Concertos or van Gogh’s sunflowers, not to mention this laptop and the coffee machine next to it, aren’t deeply appreciated. But just as with every successful Ponzi scheme, we’re blind to the costs of the good life until the bill comes. And if the definition of privilege is being able to pass one’s bill to another, the signs are everywhere that this historical wonder we call global technological civilization is approaching its peak privilege.
Our surreal century so far is bracketed by the twin facts that a) our species on the whole has never had it so good and b) we’re on track for a historic collapse of civilization, if not worse. For some odd reason, we tend to focus on only one or the other, and treat them as mutually exclusive (as, for example, in this Munk debate from 2015 between Steven Pinker, Malcom Gladwell and colleagues) That both can be simultaneously true only seems like a paradox until you remember that’s exactly how exponential growth works.
As is often pointed out, the vertical part of the hockey stick of progress that humanity is now on — aka the post-WWII Great Acceleration — is very recent. History up to this point hasn’t been at all like this. However dystopian-bad the human condition often seems to us today (and yes, rapidly getting worse), the great majority of people born within written history had it worse still.
That’s true even without cataclysmic wars, famine and slavery. Even as late as the 19th century, more than 90% of the world lived in extreme poverty, while every second to third child died before the age of five. Even rich, cultivated and powerful Europe lived with 12% literacy and died of smallpox at a rate of 400,000 a year. And of course, almost everyone everywhere lived under the boot of someone’s authoritarian system. All in all, war, violence, disease, oppression and mass starvation have been more or less par for the course since the beginning of civilization.
Fans of technological progress rightly point out that what changed all of this was not political revolution but the scientific and industrial revolutions. Sure, social movements and high-minded ideologies make great history. But it was advances in food and energy production, medicine, manufacturing, logistics and communications that finally lifted the majority of humankind out of perpetual destitution. Particularly in the globalized, technology-driven 20th century, human lifespan, disease, education and poverty all made heroic progress around the world. And thankfully many of these trends still continue today.
So how are we to value technological civilization and the idea of progress? After 25+ years working in technology and innovation, I’ve decided I honestly don’t know. Perhaps humans are just perennial worriers and whiners and should be thankful for how far civilization has brought us. Or perhaps civilization itself has always been the problem and it will be our doom. For what it’s worth, my former field of sustainable development sort of splits the middle. It recognizes the downsides and dangers of technological progress, but places bets that “appropriate” technologies and business models will save us before it’s too late.
At various times in my professional life I’ve veered towards all of these views and more, which probably is why I don’t think of them anymore as mutually exclusive. Instead they’re just gravely incomplete. Despite my long-standing bias to see most things in terms of technology and its social impact, I’ve come to believe that focusing on such end points looks causally too far downstream. Namely, that the currents moving people and cultures to behave as they do appear to begin at a deeper computational level within us. To see what these currents might be, we might look further upstream to a time before our perspectives were skewed by the bounties and burdens of uncontrolled exponential growth.
To start with, let’s remember that our regret over leaving the campfire for city life and trading spears for plowshares — what we now call the Neolithic revolution and more generally, technological civilization — is surprisingly ancient. Poets and philosophers have been lamenting a lost paradise of our Paleolithic ancestors since at least the allegories of the Garden of Eden and Greek Golden Age. Modern era writers from Rousseau to Emerson to the current anarcho-primitivist movement have all bemoaned what they’ve seen as a lost morality, spirituality and connection with nature.
As it happens, modern archaeology and anthropology apparently support the picture of an epic blunder, but for more down-to-Earth reasons. It’s now widely recognized that this particular revolution starting around 11,000 years ago was in many ways a terrible trade in lifestyle for those who lived it. The transition saw not only the rise of oppressive social structures, large scale warfare and natural habitat destruction. Even as populations rose, ancient skeletons tend to show a general decline in nutrition, health and lifespan. Reduced height, tooth decay, mineral deficiency, infectious disease, famine and infant mortality became common features of civilized humans everywhere. Some suggest that childbirth first became dangerous when carbohydrate rich diets made for fatter babies and shorter mothers with smaller birth canals. And it wasn’t just temporary. Overall, the decline in health and well-being was so drastic and enduring that only since the late industrial age has the average human regained the ground lost from the Paleolithic.
As geographer Jared Diamond (of Guns, Germs and Steel fame) wrote at the end of the last century in a much-cited article titled “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”
Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism that curse our existence.
Making the contrast even sharper is the fact that life for the average early hunter-gatherer was apparently not quite the nasty, brutish and short that Thomas Hobbes imagined. They may not have “lived like gods without sorrow of heart” as the Greek poet Hesiod wrote in The Ages of Man. They certainly knew famine and violence. But their estimated life expectancy of 33 years may have actually been longer than for most of human history. To be sure, there never is and never was one hunter-gatherer culture for 300,000 years, but countless variety in lifestyle, health and social organization. Some flourished more in their environment than others. Nevertheless, if modern hunter-gatherers like the San of the Kalahari (probably the oldest cohesive human population on the planet) are anything to go by, Paleolithic folk were not only well-fed; they had lots of leisure time and lived in relatively egalitarian societies. Which invites at least one obvious question: if the Neolithic revolution was so terrible for everyone, why did they do it anyway?
No doubt trying to understand human decision making, let alone from 11,000 years ago, will always be a hopeless riddle wrapped in an enigma. Understandably, anthropologists generally take of the more tractable approach and look outside the human mind for external factors. Climate shifts, wild grain mutations and herd migrations are all commonly cited push-pull forces that seemed to have put us on the path to settling and domesticating.
Still, these forces only represented possibilities, not mandates. The genus homo has been successfully migrating to different climates and biotopes since leaving Africa two million years ago. Whenever the pickings got slim in one area, or perhaps when they simply got curious, our ancestors were masterful at moving on and adapting. So why did Neolithic humans nevertheless choose to settle in to such a terrible way of life? Or why, once they surely realized their mistake, did they still continue?
Whatever external factors were important, the best answer might be staring at us in the mirror. This century we’re seeing our own epic blunders from culture wars to climate change unfold in real time. This time we’re more than aware of what we’re doing, so why are we doing it anyway?
Because just like today, civilization has never been the work of one person or one generation. Rather, we’re all caught in a perpetual, invisible feedback loop between society, technology and the environment. Any one generation is aware of only a tiny fraction of this massive loop, and controls even less of it. Just like today, our Neolithic ancestors must have collectively fallen into their trap one step at a time, with each new generation no doubt wondering: how did we get here?
But were the pathologies of civilization really inevitable?
One standard answer is that we were doomed by the Neolithic revolution and the bullet point version of the story goes something like this. The Paleolithic had neither the population nor material means for war, oppression or environmental destruction. That all changed in the Neolithic when farming made land ownership and control the prime directive of society. Because populations grow but land stays limited, land became the source of exclusive wealth and power. Voilá, ruling elites. As societies grew, so did their complexity and need to control everything from infrastructure and labor to birthing, ritual and religion. Presto, multi-layered inequality and oppressive social structures. All of which made for a great source of violent conflict with jealous neighbors, which put a new premium on fighting technology and armies. So yes, mass scale human suffering and the basic shape of civilization ever since.
Exhibit A in this origin story could be the site of Arslantepe in eastern Turkey, sometimes called the cradle of civilization in Anatolia. The earliest known permanent settlements date to the 6th millennium BCE, during the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age. Large palace complexes and temples from the later Uruk period predate their more famous peers at Thebes and Knossos by almost two thousand years. The UNESCO World Heritage site is also famous for recently revealing the earliest known metal swords. These beautiful works, some with decorative silver inlays, were made of arsenic and copper — an early form of bronze before tin became the alloy of choice. Palaces and swords this early in the archaeological record mean the site’s real significance is as a special milestone along the journey of homo sapiens.
As the UNESCO writes: “Arslantepe [is] an exceptional testimony to crucial stages in the human history: the birth of hierarchical societies, that of the first centralized political and economic systems, the origin of bureaucracy and its first working system, the rise of a systematic control on human labour, in other words, the origin of power and the State.”
Just to be clear, and Hesiod and Rousseau aside, no one claims life in the Paleolithic was paradise. For one thing, it was clearly not entirely peaceful. How not-peaceful is hard to tell since spears, clubs, knives and axes don’t distinguish between human and animal flesh. Gruesome witness to the earliest known human massacre is the 10,000 year old site of Naturuk near Lake Turkana in Kenya. Here a dozen male and female skeletons from the time show all manner of blunt force trauma and lesions, one with a projectile still embedded. Parts of what make the site surprising are the surrounding circumstances. This region in the early Holocene was a lush garden of diverse flora and fauna; hardly a place of scarce resources to compete over (Agriculture didn’t arrive in East Africa until the Bantu expansion around 1,000 BCE.) And the massacre was apparently not a random encounter gone bad. The types of weapons used, bone damage and positioning suggest to the archaeologists leading the dig that the attack was deliberate and planned.
The prevalence of violence during the Paleolithic is still hotly disputed. Steven Pinker in his best-seller The Better Angels of Our Nature, for example, tabulates copious amounts of data showing horrific rates of violent death. Others, like anthropologists Brian Ferguson and Douglas Fry claim this data is cherry picked and that the broader record shows no such thing. Given the political agendas involved and the black art that is statistics, the dispute may never resolve. But personally I find it at least intriguing that Paleolithic cave art, for all the life-and-death drama it often depicts, rarely if ever shows violence among humans.
Either way, wealth inequality among modern hunter-gatherers may be far less than for most of us but it’s not non-existent (One survey compares some of the less-equal hunter-gatherer cultures to modern Scandinavia.) Even slavery was not unknown among hunter-gatherers. The Haida people near Vancouver Island, whose ancestors may have been in the first wave populating the Americas, lived for millennia directly off the lush abundance of the Pacific Northwest. They were skilled seafarers and traders, but also highly stratified and regularly practiced violence, piracy and slavery. In that they were much like the Vikings who at times also lived partly as hunter-gatherers. For that matter, history knows many highly stratified and warlike cultures, e.g. the Yamnaya, Scythians, Huns and Mongols, that didn’t farm or settle permanently. And as if things weren’t complicated enough, it’s now recognized that some hunter-gatherers in the Levant opted for permanent settlements centuries before they bothered domesticating and producing their own food.
In fact, it seems that many practices are associated with the rise of oppressive hierarchy and inequality — farming, animal domestication, pottery, metals, writing, art, large organized communal living, labor specialization, the practice of feasting and trade. But the deeper one dives into the literature, the more it seems no single cultural practice seems necessary or sufficient to explain it.
Perhaps the simple answer is this. Bad behavior simply comes with humans in large groups regardless of where they live or what they eat. If small bands of hunter-gatherers treat each other and the environment better because daily survival depends on it, that’s wonderful for them. But lots of people making lots of stuff will always have lots to fight over. And with lots of people, a sustainable environment is just another nice-to-have. So we’re doomed with technology to make ourselves and the planet miserable just because that’s what human civilization is?
And that would be a tidy story except for one huge and ancient loose end that I only came across a few years ago.
The mystery of Çatalhöyük
Less than 700 kilometers west of Arslantepe is a still older site that had all the ingredients for the self-inflicted miseries of civilization. A large and dense settlement; farming, manufacturing and trading; wealth, artwork and comfort. But instead of looking like another “worst mistake”, the evidence points to Çatalhöyük as a community of relative peace, abundance and egalitarianism for centuries, perhaps more than a millennium.
Some 9,000 years ago, one area overlooking the sprawling plateau region of south-central Anatolia was a thriving settlement of as many as 8,000 souls. If that number strikes us as small, it’s similar to Paris during Roman times with its markets, monuments, temples, and public baths. But instead of a maze of streets and separate homes like in ancient Lutetia, the residents of Çatalhöyük chose the ultimate in crowded urban living: apartments honeycombed together in a contiguous mass. Without any streets between them, apartment entrances were via ladders leading up through the ceilings. It was a design presumably around cooling the interiors. In any case, the result was an unusual but charming innovation in city planning: Neighbors met on the rooftops. Public life was en plein air.
Built on mounds of loose flood deposit clay, Çatalhöyük was nevertheless no mash up of bare mud pits. Walls were smoothly plastered and decoratively painted with murals. One has even been interpreted as the oldest known landscape painting, showing a volcano erupting over the settlement. A typical apartment consisted of 2–3 separate rooms with raised floors and included a hearth and cooking area. Various sculptures and figurines have been found, including the famous “seated woman” who may or may not represent a mother goddess. Common everywhere are wall-mounted horned bull heads.
Although hunting was still part of their meal plan, they grew and cultivated wheat, barely, peas, nuts and fruits. They had domesticated sheep and cattle. They manufactured pottery, textiles, obsidian tools and possibly metals. Based on sea shells and flint from Syria, they were apparently part of a trading network that extended at least to the Mediterranean.
But conspicuously missing from Çatalhöyük are the typical signs of social hierarchy. Not only was there no grand palace for a high ruler; there weren’t even executive suites for affluent elites. All apartments uncovered to date were more or less the same in size and contents.
Equality appears to have applied not only across families, but to both genders. Although some have argued for a matriarchal society based on a number of female figurine deities found, leading archaeologist Ian Hodder summarizes his assessment as “When we look at what they eat and drink and at their social statues, we see that men and women had the same social status.”
Çatalhöyük may not have been quite the perpetually peaceful anarcho-communist utopia it’s been described as. Stone axes and maces — presumably weapons — have been unearthed there. The downside of civilization’s signature carbohydrate-heavy diet is visible in their teeth and bones. There are also at least hints of some level of growing inequality over time, like the distribution of large grinding stones. But even if so, they held on to their essentially egalitarian lifestyle many centuries longer than the ill-fated and short-lived experiments of the modern era.
However long it lasted, Çatalhöyük’s lack of civilization’s signature “haves and have-nots” seems nothing short of astonishing in light of its population size. Egalitarianism may be intuitive for small bands of hunter-gatherers. Hierarchy for them is not only inefficient, but fostering jealousy is a huge social risk when everyone’s survival depends on everyone else. But egalitarianism applied to a community of several thousand requires cohesiveness between people who don’t know each other.
Since the work of anthropologist Robert Dunbar and others we know that the human brain can maintain 150 or so personal relationships before it’s computationally overtaxed. That is also about the maximum size of mobile hunter-gather bands as well as many modern corporate and military units. So how did the people of Çatalhöyük pull this off for so long? No doubt this particular riddle inside an enigma is also hidden somewhere in the mirror. But the story it might be trying to tell us could be one we’re not used to hearing in our post-Neolithic age.
Culture is all about our storytelling
Before Kurt Vonnegut became one of the great storytellers of the 20th century, he studied anthropology. His Master’s Thesis (rejected, apparently for being unduly innovative) compared storytelling across human cultures from hunter-gatherers to the industrial 20th century. In some of his signature speeches on the topic, Vonnegut pointed out that our love of the grand narrative — stories with long arcs about great heroes, epic battles between good and evil, fateful tragedies and triumphs, etc. — is not necessarily human nature. It seems to be a phenomenon of post-Neolithic civilization.
The idea of the great hero who stands in some way above society and whose fate is more important than others is central to our earliest written literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh is the journey of a king who battles monsters, mingles with the gods and suffers great loss to finally gain wisdom and eternal fame. The story dates back to at least the 3rd millennium BCE, but its basic shape hasn’t changed from Homer to Harry Potter.
Traditional stories of the San people of the Kalahari read quite differently. In The Children are Sent to Throw the Sleeping Sun into the Sky, for example, the Sun is awakened to do his job of warming the Earth by children grabbing him by the armpits (the Sun appears as a ‘he’ in this translated version). During the night the Sun knifes the Moon to pieces and leaves the disembodied spine for the children. The story doesn’t reveal the Sun’s motivation, but the Moon hobbles home in pain to return at some point as the new Moon in the sky. Like in all myths and legends, San folklore is full fantastic things happening. Human and non-human actors alike love, fight and shape the world. But these stories are told in a remarkably straightforward, matter-of-fact way. There is no sense of grand arc of destiny in them. Things just happen and that is that.
Equally striking is the fact that, of the 87 stories in the seminal 1911 compilation by Wilhelm H. I. Bleek and Lucy C. Lloyd, Specimens of Bushmen Folklore, human protagonists almost never appear by name (only twice by my own count). People, animals, heavenly bodies and personified natural forces do many brave and consequential things, but none are presented as anything like what we would consider heroes. They just do what they do and that is that.
If this all seems strange to our hero-worshiping sensibilities, it’s not inconsistent with the San tradition of “insulting the meat”. Whenever a hunter returns to camp with a special or extra-large amount of meat, the group collectively insults its quality or finds something else to complain about. It would be a bizarre tradition for cultures like ours fixated on distinguishing people based on their personal achievement. But for the San, this transparently faux ritual has, or at least had, a crucial survival function. They knew they couldn’t afford for their members to get arrogant and pretentious. As one San elder in the 1960s explained: “We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody.”
It’s hard not to wonder if this cultural stance goes back deep into the Paleolithic. When the 35,000 year old cave paintings at Chauvet in south-central France were discovered in the 1990s, their sophistication astounded. Far from simple stick-and-blob figures, the representations of Chauvet are remarkably life-like. Particularly in the famous lion mural, the animals are not only drawn in realistic proportions and forms, but each is portrayed as an individual. Which makes it all the more fascinating that the artists of Chauvet and elsewhere chose not to use their portrait skills to represent fellow humans. For that matter, humans are barely shown at all in the 60,000+ years of known Paleolithic art. When they do appear, it’s in hybrid mythological form like the Löwenmensch statue or wildly mis-proportioned fertility figurines.
Perhaps many prehistoric cultures and traditional San culture have understood what we all too easily forget in our world of technology marvels: that real power is not in the tools we wield, but in the stories we tell. And a culture’s stories are not like interchangeable apps running on a background operating system — stories are the cultural operating system. One person can oppress the other; both can build monuments; all can destroy the environment if and only if all share in the narrative. What Jared Diamond called the “curse of our existence” doesn’t come from what we eat or where we live, or even how many of us there are. It comes from the web of stories everyone buys into.
Particularly toxic, in my view at least, have always been our stories of hierarchy — an imagined Scala Naturae that was so evident in Arslantepe and hasn’t left us since. I am above you; we are above them; all of us are above all other life on Earth. Perhaps our brains have a natural bias toward such stories. Hierarchy is an incredibly powerful data compression tool, after all, which makes it worth its weight in gold for a brain desperate to make sense of an astronomically complex world. Perhaps that’s why the San feel they need to actively cultivate their social leveling mechanisms. Perhaps the artists of Chauvet found it equally important.
The people of Çatalhöyük lived thousands of years before the first writing, so until we invent time machines we’ll presumably never know what their stories were. Did things just happen in them, and did their protagonists have names? Did they have their own version of insulting the meat? Maybe they just looked at each other and knew how good the simple life can be? Whatever their stories were, they surely count among the great lost treasures of human civilization.
But maybe, just perhaps possibly, they reflected hard lessons learned from an even earlier culture not far away: the culture that existed around what is now the site of Göbekli Tepe. A millennium earlier, still at the dawn of the Neolithic 11,000 years ago, the people that built and worshiped at this now famous temple complex were still largely hunter-gatherers. That’s evident from the mass of excavated wild animal bones. Nevertheless the people there may have already been well on their way to making “the worst mistake”. The very presence of a temple with imposing vertical structures but designed for only a few, not to mention the specialization and organization required for such a massive building project, are certainly reminiscent of a stratified social order. According to the late Klaus Schmidt, the first lead archaeologist of the site, the engravings on the T-shape columns represent precisely this milestone in the history of our species. In Schmidt’s view, Göbekli Tepe might have been one of the first places where humans bought in a big way into the story of hierarchy.
Again, without a time machine, guessing is the best we can do. But it’s fascinating that the site was not only eventually abandoned (as almost all ancient sites were at some point), but purposely back filled. The effort to cover up such a large area must have been arduous, deliberate and planned. It was as if they were trying hard to forget that episode and what it represented to them. Was this one of those rare moments in history when people stood back and asked themselves: how did we get here?
