Message #149202

[Bianca]

Indeed, recent microscopic studies of how cereal ears break apart naturally and the different way they shatter during harvest have provided a way to tell cultivated from uncultivated grains, and confirmed that several varieties of wheat had been domesticated at nearby Çayönü, a Neolithic site to the northeast, by the second half of the ninth millennium BC—the oldest convincing signs of cultivated wheat. Schmidt acknowledges that cultivation may have been under way at the time that religious ceremonies associated with Göbekli Tepe were unfolding, but he is uncertain as to its extent. He directs my gaze to a range of low hills to the northeast, the Karacadag Mountains, where Çayönü is nestled. Einkorn, the earliest species of cultivated wheat, is found there in both wild and domesticated form, he explains. One theory, in line with that of Simon Fraser University’s Hayden, is that people traveling to the Karacadag Mountains to gather einkorn dropped some near Göbekli Tepe, where religious revelers noticed it sprouting. This led them to think about growing einkorn there rather than traveling so far to find it.

Traditionally, theories of the origins of food production have been based on human need: response to population pressures or other causes of resource imbalances. But as studies have advanced, no evidence of resource stress or malnutrition has been found in places where farming has bloomed, fueling new theories and debates.

But there’s little debate that the Neolithic period was truly a time of revolutionary change for humankind, not only in technology and ways of life, but religiously and spiritually. Jacques Cauvin, the late director emeritus of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, a leading scholar of the early Neolithic period in the Near East, called it a complete restructuring of human mentality, expressed in new religious ideas and symbols. Göbekli Tepe was front and center in that timeline.

The Neolithic revolution saw both highly developed religious ideology and mixed farming take a firm hold throughout the Middle East. Cauvin viewed the finds at Göbekli Tepe and the later sites of Çayönü and Nevali Çori as evidence of rooted communities with a religious bent. “We encounter for the first time simultaneous evidence for public buildings and for the collective ceremonies of a religious character that took place in them. These must have served as a strong cement for the psychological cohesion of these sedentary human groups,” he wrote in The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture. “It is also quite probable that they were addressing … a personal divinity.”

As agriculture took root, it had a powerful impact on these religious themes. “It seems probable that at sites such as Göbekli Tepe and ‘Ain Ghazal [an early Neolithic village in Jordan], myths featured protagonists who mediated the hunting/farming dichotomy…,” write David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce.

The switch from pure hunting and gathering to farming was surely a profound change. Says another Neolithic researcher, Peter Bellwood of Australian National University, “There are obviously many aspects of mobile hunter-gatherer society that are antithetical to adoption of the sedentary lifestyle of the cultivator. On top of this, we have the attitudes of the farming and pastoralist societies themselves, often ranked and status-conscious, with whom some of the ethnographic hunter-gatherers have come into contact and by whom many have eventually been encapsulated.”