Civilization #1: Explaining Humanity's Transition to Agriculture

Okay, so in this first lecture I want to ask a question. The question is: why did humanity transition from hunter-gatherer society to agriculture? In the traditional paradigm (paradigm is a very sophisticated English word, and all it means is story or model or understanding), in the traditional story, we were first hunter-gatherers and we lived in groups of about 20 to 50 people and we roamed the land looking for food. It was uncertain, it was unstable, and then suddenly there was a revolution: we discovered farming, and farming provided a stable source of food that we could control. The word we use is domestication. Domestication just means that we bring it under our control. And because of farming we can now create more food than we need. The word we use for this is surplus. And because there's a surplus, people now could do things besides farming. So for example, we could have leaders, which creates the idea of politics. We could also have priests, which introduces the idea of religion. And then we can have creative people, which gives us arts. And slowly over time these villages grew into cities, and because there were a lot of people and a lot of surplus, we could now have literature, reading and writing, so we can now store knowledge and then pass it from generation to generation and across cultures.

We can now have science and technology, and slowly over the course of this process we create modernity, which is the world that we live in today. So the pivotal step towards modernity was this transition into agriculture, and this is traditionally what we believed about the world. Unfortunately there's no evidence for this, and in fact the more evidence we collect, the more we realize this is not true. What we now know is it was actually stupid to transition from hunter-gatherer into farming, for a variety of reasons.

The first reason is that when you're a hunter-gatherer it's actually a pretty easy life, because there's food everywhere. When you're a farmer it's a hard life because you have to grow that food. So maybe as a hunter-gatherer you're working maybe an hour a day, but as a farmer you were working six, seven hours a day. It was very hard to grow that food. So in the book Sapiens, by the Israeli historian named Yuval Harari, he's very famous, Sapiens is also a very famous book, there's a very famous sentence. The sentence is like this: we did not domesticate wheat, wheat domesticated us.

We thought that we made wheat, the food wheat, into our slave, but in reality wheat made us its slave. And the reasoning for this is this: out in nature, if you're wheat and you want to survive, you have to make yourself attractive to other people and to animals. So you have to be tasty and you have to be easy to find; you have to do a lot of work. But when you're on a farm and you're wheat, you can just lay back, do nothing, and make humans do all the work. So it was a bad deal for humans and a very good deal for wheat. So that's the first problem: you actually do more work on the farm than you do as a hunter-gatherer, which means that now you have to have more children, right? You need to have labor to do all that work, which creates a problem of overpopulation, which means that you are using too much land, and then eventually the land becomes dead, or not arable anymore.

So that's the first problem. The second problem is that we're able to dig up the skeletons of hunter-gatherers and farmers, and what we see is that hunter-gatherers are a lot taller than farmers.

Protein, right? Food. As a hunter-gatherer you have access to meat, you have access to fruits and nuts and vegetables. Your diet is varied and very nutritious. But as a farmer you're eating only what you grow, which is mainly wheat and some vegetables, so you're not getting that much nutrition.

Then the third problem is that as a farmer you are much more likely to die early than if you're a hunter-gatherer. Why? Have you guys been to a farm? What's the problem on a farm? Exactly, thank you: pigs, right? Animals, they're everywhere. Plus where do you put the garbage? Where do you go to the restroom? So because people are together in a very unclean place, it's much more likely to contract disease and die. So for these three reasons the transition from hunter-gatherer to farming makes no sense, and even today we are not able to explain to you why this happened. We don't know why. So the only thing we can do is construct theories as to why this might have happened. Even though we can't go in the past and look at why we did this, we can do some research and collect evidence and then create theories as to why this might have happened.

There are four different disciplines from which we can collect evidence.

The first discipline is called archaeology. Archaeology is just the study of the past. So basically you go and you dig stuff up and you see what you can find. Maybe you can dig up someone's house, or you can take up someone's skeleton or someone's clothing, and from that you're able to figure out what happened in the past. The three pieces of evidence from archaeology we will look at today are Göbekli Tepe, Jericho and Çatalhöyük. These are places that we've actually dug up, and we know what life is like in these three places. So that's archaeology.

The second discipline we can look at is anthropology, and anthropology is the study of other cultures. In other words, there are places still on this planet where people live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, maybe in the Amazon, maybe in Australia, maybe in Africa, and so we're able to go and study these people to understand how and why we might have transitioned into farming. So that's anthropology. The third field that we can look at is psychology or neuroscience, basically how the brain works.

How do we feel, what motivates us, why do we behave the way we behave? So that's the third field we can look at. The last field we can look at is primatology, the study of primates, monkeys, because guess what, guys, we're monkeys. We're primates. 99% of our DNA is monkey DNA. So we can look at certain groups of monkeys to understand how they behave, and there are three types of primates that we look at very closely. The first is gorillas, we also look at chimpanzees, and we look at bonobos. Chimpanzees and bonobos are very close to us genetically; they're the closest to us of all the primates.

So by looking at these four different fields we're able to collect evidence to construct theories as to why we transitioned from hunter-gatherer into farming. Now I will share some of these theories with you, and again, what's really important to understand is we don't know what happened. We can only guess about what happened. So the first theory is the idea of coercion, and what this basically means is that there's an elite group of people who didn't want to work, so they made everyone else work. So that's coercion, and the evidence for this is that, well, guess what, gorillas do this.

If you study gorillas you will see that they always have an alpha male, the male who's bigger than everyone else and who makes everyone do all the work. He just sits and naps every day, but he gets all the girls and he gets all the food. So gorillas, that's the first theory.

The second theory is war, and the idea here is that if you are on a farm it's easier to protect yourself in a time of war than if you're out in the forest. You can build walls around your farm, you can defend yourself a lot easier, you can see the enemy coming. So war. The evidence for this is that chimpanzees, again, who are like us, they go to war a lot, they're very violent, they're always fighting each other. So the argument here is that we human beings are just a violent people who are always at war and we must be afraid of each other, and therefore when we have the chance we'll settle down, build fortifications, build walls, and fight each other. That's the second theory, and again the evidence for this is chimpanzees.

The third theory is respect for elders, meaning that as a hunter-gatherer it's very hard on old people, right?

So at a certain point you're going to have to leave the old people to just stay there and die, and maybe we as human beings are biologically programmed to take care of elders for whatever reason. And again the evidence for this is anthropology, where every culture respects its elders. So that's the third theory.

The last theory is religion, meaning that we settled down in order to celebrate a religion, to practice a religion. And just to be clear, there's evidence and arguments for all four theories, and there are scholars who argued for different theories. But the consensus, what most people agree on today, most scholars, not every scholar but most scholars, is religion. So let me explain why we think the answer has to be religion, slowly.

All right, so coercion. While it is true that with gorillas there's an alpha male who controls everything, the problem is that if you look at gorillas, the alpha male is huge, and males are a lot bigger than females, so it's possible for one gorilla to exert force and pressure on the others. With human beings that's harder, right? Because let's just say a 9 foot giant human being comes into this room and says, "I'm now your boss, you have to grow food for me, you have to give me all your women."

What can we do as a class? Beat the crap out of him. You understand? Because we have big brains, and these big brains allow us to cooperate together. So at first we're afraid of him so we let him do whatever he wants, but then he goes to bed and then we as a class discuss, hey, what can we do? Well, we can make weapons, or we can trap him, or we can trick him, we can give him poisoned food. So coercion among humans is very, very hard to do. The worst case scenario, we can't beat them up, what we'll do is just run away. Does that make sense? So we don't think coercion is the explanation, because there's so many ways for us to fight back and to rebel against bigger people. So coercion doesn't really work.

War. We don't think war is a good explanation either. It is true that chimpanzees are naturally violent, they're always beating the crap out of each other, but guess what, bonobos, who are actually closer to us genetically than chimpanzees, are actually very peaceful.

They don't fight each other. So there's no evidence that we human beings are naturally violent. Also, if it is war then we should be able to find weapons, and we don't really find weapons. In archaeology we don't really find weapons of early humans. Now, there is a lot of violence in early human history. There's human sacrifice, there's group burial where a group of people are killed, but that's basically violence within a group. We don't find evidence of large violence among different groups. We don't find that. So war we don't really think is a possibility. Now, it's possible that in the future we'll find evidence, but I'm just saying that right now in archaeology and anthropology we do not have any evidence.

The last, then, we look at respect for elders, and even though this is a theory, there's an argument that back then they didn't really care about dying that much. The reason why is that for most of human history we human beings have seen life history as a circle. So for example, right now it's summer, it's going to turn into fall, then winter, then spring, then summer again.

So the world history moves in a cycle. Well, human life also moves in a cycle: you're born, you die, then you're reborn, then you die again, then you're reborn again. So back then they really didn't care if you die. In fact, if you're an old person you're probably like, "You know what, I'd rather be dead, and if I die I'll either be reborn or I'll go into the spirit world." So they didn't really fear death, or they really didn't see death like the way we see it. Yeah, that's a great question. The evidence for this is what we understand about their religion, which we will discuss later on and in the next class.

All right, the last. That leaves religion as the most likely possibility, and again this is what most scholars believe happened. So we're going to look at three different archaeological sites. The first is Göbekli Tepe, the second is Jericho, and the third is Çatalhöyük. All right, so we'll first see a picture of... and guys, these places were only discovered in the past few decades, so these are new places. We're only starting to understand these places.

This place is in Turkey, in central Turkey, and this dates back about 9500 BC, so this is over 11,000 years old, and we don't even think this is the oldest place. If you did your research you will know that this is basically a place of religious worship. You can see that they constructed this place so that there are these T-shaped pillars, and these things are huge. This is a human being and this is a T-shaped pillar. We think, again this is all theory, this is all what we know, we don't know that much because this is all recent, but we think that these T-shapes represent human beings, and within these T-shapes are animals. You can see that they've built this T-shape in a way that they can practice a ritual or a worship. So the people who were leading this were probably who we call shamans, or religious leaders that help us bridge our world with the animal world and the spirit world. So Göbekli Tepe is a place of religious worship. Now what's interesting about Göbekli Tepe is that the religious site is the oldest, but we also find houses that are built later on.

So what we think might have happened here is that hunter-gatherers would come to a place now and then to practice religion, because ultimately as human beings, and we discussed this last class, we have a yearning, or we have a need, to understand why, and religion solves this problem for us. Also as a hunter-gatherer you need to associate with other hunter-gatherers in order to find mates, to find husbands and wives to reproduce, and so this sort of religious center is a great time to come and practice your religion, but it's also a great time to feast and to meet someone you can marry and have children with. So that was the original function of the temple.

Now these places are often led by shamans, and what makes them special is that they are charismatic leaders. Charismatic leaders are people like Madonna, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton. They're people who for whatever reason people just love them and want to follow them. And so maybe what happened was that these charismatic leaders built this place and they became like celebrities, and people came from all over to meet them, to hear them, to hear the religion, and to meet other people.

And over time some people even chose to stay with them and build houses to celebrate them, and then when they died, what happened was they still worshiped them in their death, and so this place became a temple. Does that make sense? So that's the theory about Göbekli Tepe. There are other theories. There are some people who will tell you that space aliens came down and built this place because it's so sophisticated. So there are different theories, but the one that scholars most agree with today is that it was a religious center.

Any questions before I move on? Before I move on, this leaders, religions or Hors... okay, that's a great question. Where does religion come from? And this is something that we will look at very closely next class, and the answer is this: even though we all have the need for religion, we don't all have the ability to produce religion. So who these charismatic leaders are, are people who have visions or dreams of God or the spirit world, and then they present their visions to other people. And we have people like this throughout human history. So think of Jesus, think of Muhammad, think of Buddha, think of Confucius.

These are people who have these visions of God or of spirituality or of a new world and present them to people, and because they're charismatic they're able to attract followers and spread their religion. And that's what probably happened here as well, because as you can see from this picture it was very hard work to build this temple. This is 11,000 years ago, they didn't have bulldozers, they didn't have shovels, this was all by hand. So for them to want to dedicate their lives to building this temple, because it took a long, long time, it took years and years and hundreds of people, well, you needed something called religious devotion, right? Faith. Does that make sense? And again throughout human history we've seen this. So think of Christians, think of Buddhists, think of Muslims: religious faith. So that's what built this. So does that answer your question? Any more questions before I... yeah, okay.

That's a good question: why is a temple structured like this? And the answer is that there's cosmological significance to the structure, meaning that on a certain time of the year what will happen is that the sun will hit this place in a certain way, so it's almost like a clock.

Does that make sense to you guys? They designed this in a way so they can tell time, but their intention was not to tell time, their intention was to connect with the outer world. Does that make sense, you guys? So they were extremely sophisticated, they knew a lot about the way the stars worked. So basically for them this is science. Today we say this is a religion, but their science back then is no different from our science today. Does that answer your question?

And you had a question. Okay, so if you talk to any religious people, they saw it. They were there, they talked to God. So we're like, well, you know, that doesn't make any sense, but they really believe it, and that's why they're able to convince their followers. So in the future we will look at someone like Muhammad, who had religious visions in a cave, and you're like, did he really see an angel? Well, he thought he really did. And in fact in our research what we discovered is that people who use something called psychedelics... do you know what psychedelics are?

Psychedelics are drugs. What these drugs do is they shift the neural system so that you see the world in a different way. When you do that you're able to have different visions. But we also know that if you go hungry for a long time, or if you meditate for a long time, you're able to see different things. So from their perspective they actually saw this thing, even though we don't think it actually happened. Does that make sense? For them it's true, but maybe for us it's not so true.

All right, any more questions before I go on? So these are great questions, and keep on asking them. These are hard questions that we will go over in the next few classes. So let me show you another picture. This is what is in the pillars at Göbekli Tepe. Now what's really interesting about these pictures is that these are animals in the motion of hunting. So the fox, the way the fox hunts is the fox jumps up in the air and then goes down and attacks the prey, so this is in the motion of attack. Why would they do that? What's the point of having animals on these pillars?

Why would they do that? Good. Okay, yes. So what's really important to understand is that back then, and again I'll explain to you over the next couple weeks, back then we human beings did not see ourselves as separate from the other world. Does that make sense? Animals, trees, humans, all equal. So first of all, if you're going to kill these animals you need to ask for their forgiveness, otherwise their spirit, their soul, will haunt you. They'll take revenge on you. So if you kill them you must ask for their forgiveness, and the one way to do that is by paying tribute to them. That's number one. Number two is that we can learn from these animals. They're the best hunters in the world, so before we go on a hunting trip we might have a ceremony to channel their energy and power and wisdom. Does that make sense? And the third thing is basically to appease them or to become their friends, because we don't want to hunt foxes, we want to hunt gazelle. There's more meat in a gazelle, they're easier to capture, but we want to be friends with the gazelle, we want to be friends with the lion.

We don't want to be enemies, so it's a sign of respect to the animals. So that was basically their religion, and coming together, the religious festival, was about celebrating the relationship with these animals as well as channeling their power, their energy and their wisdom, so that they could go hunt as well. Does that make sense? So this is probably one of the earlier religions that we have. Is this clear to you guys so far? All right, let's move on.

So now this is Jericho, and Jericho is part of something called the Natufian culture. The Natufian culture appeared about 13,000 years ago, or even more, actually maybe 15,000 years ago, in a place we call the Levant. The Levant is basically the Middle East, Israel and Syria. What was special about the Natufian culture are three things. First of all they were sedentary. Sedentary basically means that they stayed in one place. Remember, hunter-gatherers roamed around, they moved from place to place, but these were hunter-gatherers who were sedentary. They were not farmers, they were hunter-gatherers, but they stayed in one place. And the reason why we know, there's a lot of evidence, but one reason why we know is that they basically hunted gazelle.

Gazelles are like deer, and the thing about gazelles is their teeth color is different according to the season, so in the summer and in the winter, because they eat different foods. So the teeth color is different, so we're able to dig up these gazelle bones, look at their teeth and recognize that, oh, they were hunting gazelle in this area both in the summer and the winter, which meant they did not move. So they were sedentary. That's the first thing.

Second thing is that they had crops, and the reason why we know is we're able to dig up seeds of crops, vegetables and wheat and barley, which meant that they had the capacity, the technology, to farm, but they chose not to farm. Does that make sense? So basically the way they developed this technology is for gardening. They were hunting and gathering most of the time, but some of them, for fun, for pleasure, had their own garden, and that's how they developed the technology.

And the third thing that was very important is what I call the Cult of the... So they probably worshiped animals, but they also worshiped ancestors, and the reason why we think so is we're able to find a in these places.

They basically took someone's head, skull, and put clay on it to protect it, and they put it in their houses to worship it. So this is the beginning of ancestor worship. Does that make sense to you guys?

So I want to show you this, and it's called the Tower of Jericho. When we first discovered this we thought, oh, this must be evidence that Jericho went to war, because it had walls and then a tower. The walls are to protect you from your enemies, the tower is to see your enemies coming. But then they did more research and realized that, oh no, no, no, this tower is a religious monument. It's the same as Göbekli Tepe, where it is cosmological, meaning that at the longest day of the year the mountain over here will cast a shadow over the tower, and the tower will cast a shadow over the entire village, covering it all up in darkness. Does that make sense, you guys? Why would they want to do that? What does that do for you, to have the entire village covered up in darkness? Guesses, why would they do that? Excuse me.

What do you mean by that? I know, but if that was the case you'd just move, right? So what's really important is that this is right after the last ice age, so it's actually pretty cold. They did this for religious reasons, because when you cover your village in darkness you feel as though you are in connection with the sky. Does that make sense? So they must have had a religious belief in which part of the worship is to cover the village in darkness. The village, that's a good question. So space is dark, you understand? So when you're dark you think, I'm bringing space to our village, so I'm collapsing the distance between space and my village. You make your village, you feel connected to... I understand that, but your village is bright anyway, and if you're able to make your village dark, that's magic. Do you understand? So they designed a tower in a certain way so that it would cover the village in darkness, and they could see that as magic, and that's evidence that your religion is correct. Because otherwise, how do you know religion is correct?

Only by performing magic can you show that this charismatic leader who came with this idea speaks to God. Does that make sense?

So let's look at certain pictures of skulls, because this was actually very common back then. Basically this is a skull they covered up with clay, and they carried it around with them all over the place, and this was true throughout the world at that time. An ancestor, right? So this is another picture of the skull. Let me ask you why they would do that. Their ancestor is dead. Why would they do that? Why would they have to carry it around? Where's the ancestor now? Where's that person? The spirit world, right? Some place in another world, and therefore having a skull around allows you to communicate with that world and learn its secrets. You understand? And some of the secrets may be like how to construct the tower in a way that you're able to cast a shadow over the village. So that's their method of scientific discovery. Does that make sense? To communicate with the spirit world through your ancestors. The point I'm trying to tell you is that their level of intelligence, or their understanding of the world, is just as sophisticated as our understanding.

You understand? We think that when we go to science class we're learning facts and knowledge, but guess what, maybe a thousand years from now people will look at our science, like the physics, and be like, oh, that was a religion too. Does that make sense? So in terms of intelligence they were just as creative and as sophisticated as we are today, but they just had a different set of beliefs.

All right, so the last place I want to look at is Çatalhöyük. Çatalhöyük is a huge place, in Turkey as well, pretty far from Göbekli Tepe but about the same area, and this goes back about 7500 BCE. As you can see it's a huge village, and we think that at its height, maybe this was around for about 2,000 years, but at its height of development of civilization, it had about 8,000 people. That's a lot of people, guys. And the thing about Çatalhöyük that stands out is, first of all, it's huge. Second of all, they didn't have a place of worship or government, meaning that all the houses were the same. It was a very egalitarian society.

Everyone was the same. What's even more interesting is that you go to every house, there's a site, the living room is basically a temple unto itself. It was a place of worship and religion, meaning that Çatalhöyük is a place where religion permeated every place they were. So we think that Çatalhöyük is one of the first communities... remember that before, religious sites were places you went to maybe once in your lifetime or maybe once a year, but it wasn't part of your everyday life, whereas in Çatalhöyük religion was in your life from birth to death. Does that make sense? And the thing about Çatalhöyük that's very interesting is that at this point their religion is extremely sophisticated, meaning that they can explain everything using their religion. So their everyday life and their religion were completely aligned together.

So let me show you some evidence of this. This is a painting that you will see in every house, or most houses, in Çatalhöyük. All right, so you're like, what is going on here? Again there are different theories, but let me explain to you what most scholars believe to be the accurate theory.

This is just a theory, we have no evidence for this, but this is what we believe. We believe that the people at Çatalhöyük worshiped a mother goddess, because a mother goddess is what gives life to everything. Think of Mother Nature, think of a woman giving birth to her child. So they worshiped a mother goddess, and the mother goddess is represented by the bird, because a bird flies all around the sky, so the sky belongs to the bird. Now the bird can take different forms. This is a vulture. So the mother goddess can also take the form of a vulture. So what's going on here? Why is a vulture with headless people? Because the way that they combine worship with their belief in the mother goddess is they believe that when a person dies, what they'll do is they'll put that person's dead body out in the open. It's a sky burial. You go to Tibet, they have sky burials. The vultures will come and eat all the flesh, and that is the tribute or the sacrifice made to the mother goddess. So the mother goddess basically cleans the body, and then you take the bones and you bury them back in your house, and you take the skull and you keep the skull in your living room to worship your ancestors.

Does that make sense? So in other words it is an extremely comprehensive or complete religion, understanding the world. Is that clear to you guys, what the religion is? Any questions so far? Again, by the way, guys, it's a theory, but right now it's the most useful theory that we have about this place. Any questions before I move on?

So what's going on here? Now this again also is in Çatalhöyük, in many houses. So what's going on here? Different scholars have different interpretations of this. Clearly this is a hunt, and some people believe that these human beings, who are part of the Çatalhöyük people, are mocking or taunting or laughing at the animals as a way to subdue them, to tame them, to domesticate them. That's one theory. But another theory is that what they're really doing is dancing, because they are worshiping or paying tribute to these animals they're about to kill. So this goes back to Göbekli Tepe, where they're trying to respect the animals: dance with you, we're friends, I'm sorry I have to kill you, but hey, we're only taking your meat, your soul is still going to be born, or it's going to go to the spirit world.

So this is a way of paying tribute or respecting the animals they're about to kill or about to hunt, to maintain the harmony of nature and the relationship with nature. Does that make sense, guys? Again, what's really important is that this is a pretty complete religion that explains everything to these people, and that's why it's so attractive to people. If you're a human being, you want to know why, and the religion at Çatalhöyük explains why. Does that make sense so far? Any more?

Okay, so this is a picture of the mother goddess. Again we have debate about what this is. Some people believe that it's just a fertility goddess, but other people believe this is the mother goddess, and if you think about it, if you are in a place like Çatalhöyük you're most concerned about giving birth, because giving birth is what rejuvenates your society. So it makes sense that your god, the person you worship the most, would be a mother goddess. Okay, this is clearly a bull.

If you see pictures of Çatalhöyük you will see that they have many, many depictions or pictures of bulls in their house. And what we believe, again this is a theory, is that if the mother goddess represents life, giving life, the bull represents vitality, energy, and so it's the bull that gives the mother goddess the energy to give birth. Does that make sense? So the bull represents the male, the monus represents the female, but only if the male and the female conjoin, they come together, will you have life. So this is another picture. Clearly they're not hunting. Clearly they are worshiping the bull. Does that make sense? They're paying tribute to the bull.

So are we clear about this, how religion was a fundamental part of people's existence when they chose to become sedentary, or they chose to settle in one place? So let's go back to the original question, and I'll take questions. The original question is: why did people transition into agriculture? And the theory that most scholars believe is because of religion. It was because people had a religious need that they came together to have these religious festivals.

There are some charismatic leaders who were so brilliant that people chose to settle down with them, and so they became sedentary. They developed a religion around the sedentary lifestyle, which included worship, but over time, because you're in one place, you're going to deplete the resources of the area around you, of the forest, which means that you must go to farming. Does that make sense? But then eventually, because you have so much population and you farm too much, you're forced to move somewhere else, and when you move somewhere else you actually bring your religion with you. And that's how we can explain the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture. There was no one spark or one moment when this happened. We think it took thousands of years, over time, because ultimately the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was so much more attractive to people, so much easier and attractive to people, than the farming lifestyle. But the benefit of the farming lifestyle is that you had a religion, and that's why people chose ultimately to farm. So that's it, and next class we'll continue this discussion about early religion and how people develop these religious visions. Next class we'll look at ice cave paintings that go back 40,000 years, meaning that they practiced this sort of religion or something like this religion 40 to 50,000 years ago, and we know through ice cave paintings.

So, questions before we finish class? Is this clear to you guys? Anything you're confused about? Any questions? Okay, do you see it more clearly? And again, this is all on the Internet, by the way, so you can go online and just read up more on Çatalhöyük. These places are very famous, we'll be discussing these places throughout the semester: Göbekli Tepe, Jericho and Çatalhöyük. Excuse me, we discussed all three, but I'm introducing you to these three places, and in future classes we'll go more in depth into these places, because Göbekli Tepe is a very interesting place, and we're only slowly discovering all that's there. We've basically uncovered about 5% of Tepe, so over the next few decades we'll know more. Any more questions? Okay, all right, so next class we will do ice cave paintings.