smilodon
skull courtesy of Enchanted Learning.com
The
smilodon is better known as the saber-toothed cat.
First
Came The Mammoth.
For
a treasure trove of information on mammoths, see the website of the Royal British
Columbia Museum.
Then Came Architecture.
3
click
photo to visit the Field Museum
Until
recently, students of prehistory were taught that the first cities were those
which appeared between the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in roughly
3,500 BC--Ur, Uruk, Adab, Eridu, Isin, Kish, Kullab, Lagash, Larsa, and Nippur.
But by the time these Sumerian metropolises arrived, city-building was already
old-hat. Humankind had been creating urban centers for a full 5,000 years.
Humans began building clusters of homes 15,000 years ago, during the Ice Age. The reconstruction above from the Field Museum in Chicago shows what the first architecture of the Ukraine was like. The struts were made of mammoth bones and tusks. The covering was made of mammoth hide.
Drawing
courtesy of Ancient Inventions of Ukraine by Andrew Gregorovich.
i
Click
here for a visual tour of prehistoric housing.
The mammoth-skin-and-bone hut in the second picture was found near Kiev in the Ukraine. Long before the rise of capitalism, Ice Age society was already replete with inequalities. Some families lived in elaborate bone and hide palaces. Others lived in comparative poverty nearby. The wealthy were buried in splendor. Their clothes were embellished with mammoth-ivory beadwork each of whose hundreds of beads apparently took days or weeks for the poorer citizens to craft. The common folk, on the other hand, were given plain burials befitting their humble state.
Ten thousand years ago the ice sheets thawed, leaving a lush landscape rich in natural plants and animals. Red deer and stalks of grass with nourishing seeds sprung up in abundance, especially in the middle east. Human tribes had enriched their lives with trade for two million years, but now long-distance commerce grew at a furious pace. Merchants carrying goods over hundreds of miles needed comfortable lodging and a ready supply of water, not to mention protection from marauders. An unknown band of entrepreneurs occupied the rich oasis at As-Sultan near today's Jordan River, invented a revolutionary defensive technology--the stone wall--and went into the hotel trade. Their town--the first ever--is known to us as Jericho.
Photo
of the walls of Jericho courtesy Bryn Mawr College
click photo for
more on Neolithic Jericho
Jericho's
stone walls were over 20 feet high. A ditch nine feet deep and 27' across ymade
storming these fortifications even more treacherous.
Other towns and cities sprang up in rapid succession--Tel Mureybit with its stone houses, Jarmo with its farming tools and its stones for milling grain, Hacilar with its plastered walls and floors, Suberde, with its production facilities for specialized hunting weapons, and, perhaps the most impressive of them all, Catal Huyuk in today's Turkey. Over eight thousand years ago, Catal Huyuk was already a city of 6,000 inhabitants. Catal Huyuk's sprawling mud-brick buildings were laid out like modern apartment complexes. Each family lived in an almost-identical three-room unit with a sleeping space, sitting nooks, a storage area, and a kitchen.
a small portion of the 32 acres of housing
at Catal Huyuk
Catal Huyuk's products were many. The city had neighborhoods for bead makers, pottery makers, and basket weavers. Its obsidian craftsmen turned out magnificent weapons, high-grade tools, and luxury goods. The town thrived on the import/export business, bringing in exotic raw materials from as far away as Russia. However its largest industry may have been religion. One out of three of Catal Huyuk's apartments was a shrine. It's been proposed that raveling traders stopped off at Catal Huyuk not only to buy and sell, but to commune with the city's numerous priests and their goddesses or gods.
One out of every three rooms at Catal Huyuk
was a shrine. Each of these worship-rooms was different, but all had the masculine
motif of the bull and a feminine motif. Some chapels had molded plaster breasts
protruding from the walls, others had murals of women giving birth.
i
click here for a 3D VRML visit to a Catal Huyuk Bull Shrine.
Feminine figurine from Catal Huyuk.
Feminine figurines from Malta.
Roughly 2,500 years after the founding of Catal
Huyuk, the farmers of Malta settled in villages. Long before the pyramids, these
little-heralded Stone Agers created the first stone monuments, crafting elaborate
temples--at least 43 of them.
And there were more goddesses--or Stone Age
centerfolds--no one really knows.
The beauties above date from roughly 3,000
BC.
for
more information on the temples of Malta, click photo
Malta's
Mjandra Neolithic temple
click here for yet more information on the Maltese
Temples
for the tale of how
early cities altered the human mind, order
Global Brain
The Evolution
of Mass Mind From the Big Bang
to the 21st Century
and
for
the darkness that lurks in nature, evolution, and
the human heart, order
The
Lucifer Principle
A Scientific
Expedition Into the Forces of History
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