With the end of the Paleolithic we move over into the Neolithic now lithic is still Stone Age with L-I-T-H-I-C, Ic. So you still have of stone or with stone however Neolithic neo means new now new is a relative term but still this part of prehistory is when people begin was settling down becoming sedentary agrarian they are able to grow their own crops they domesticate animals they are no longer hunter-gatherers because they're no longer moving from one place to another constantly in search of food now naturally this doesn't happen overnight which is why in between the Paleolithic and Neolithic like we talked before there's a transition period the transition period is known as the Mesolithic that's that approximately thousand years when there's transition is happening when people are beginning to learn about farming they're teaching each other about growing and storing crops we actually know a little bit about that thanks to art work again the things people make teach us about their culture and society the Mesolithic age we begin getting glimpses of different types of hunting we begin getting images of the first ploughs of the domestication of animals painted on the walls of caves and shelters which gives us an insight of the transition that's gradually happening across culture images like this one this shows the domestication of animals from what we can see most likely cattle and deer and there's something worth noting in these Mesolithic images something that's going to keep haunting us throughout this class in these early images it appears that the domestication of animals and children is both strongly connected with the role of females in society in the image that you're looking at on your screen right now you'll see a lot of women in the area surrounded by these animals there are no men in this area which implies to us that whether men were involved in this or not the Association the connection is with females being the domesticators now that's going to come back haunt us in a really big way later because women are depicted as the ones who bring civilization domestication so there is wild untamed area and there's strength in that wildness there's strength and power in the untamed but at the same time mankind is desperately longing for order for civilization and that comes from domestication that domestication that taming is the domain of women in art and you're going to see that over and over again so keep in mind that women are the domesticators men represent the power and the strength the wildness now these domestication's become cities and small collections groupings of people as I said we see the rise of Agriculture that picture on the upper right is actually an image of farming that strange thing connected to the two horses is actually a plow used for tilling the soil putting seeds into the ground we've just recently found even earlier storage of grain than we had previously been aware of so these Neolithic peoples are learning to farm they're learning to grow crops to store seed and they're learning to use animals to a system in that as well as for food we see images of dogs being domesticated here and we also believe that this is where the domestication of cats begins we believe that cats originally started out living with humans to protect grain storage in the Neolithic period basically rats other vermin would come in and eat all of the grain in the silo and we believe that felines cats were able to defend those grain stores and help people make sure that there were food there was food now these Neolithic peoples are going to begin settling down and learning new skills from one another not only farming but new methods of manufacture of defending themselves and as they settle down together we begin to get a glimpse of the world's very first cities now these Neolithic cities probably popped up all across the world but we don't have the remnants of a lot of them mostly because of environmental factors for example we know that there were some mud-brick cities in England and northern France the problem is if you're using mud bricks in an environment where there's a lot of rain a lot of swampland we know the city was there because we actually have the chemical deposits but other than that we really don't have a lot of remnants of that city where we do have remnants of these Neolithic cities that give us a glimpse into this culture are largely in the Middle East for example one of the first known Neolithic cities was actually the city of Jericho there are multiple cities of Jericho stacked on top of one another that happens with a lot of cities you'll see that later on when we get to Rome where an earlier city is conquered falls apart falls down and they simply build a newer version of the city basically they wrecked the stuff and then add new layers on top Jericho is one of those examples where you have multiple layers of city built one on top of the other the earliest layers we found of Jericho date from approximately 10,000 to 7500 BCE that city was a fortified walled city and a highly impressive one as well we found the version of Jericho probably the second version of the city possibly the third which we date from about 9,000 to 8000 BCE in that version of the city we found the remnants of a massive rock-cut ditch with a huge mud brick wall behind it so basically think of it like a moat with a fortified city what we've got left of that version of the city was surrounded by approximately a five foot thick stone wall and we have that stone wall up about 13 feet now it was probably higher than that but we only have about 13 feet left of it now that's unbelievable and at regular intervals are massive towers in the picture on your right that circular shape is actually what's left of one of these huge towers along the wall and that square thing is actually a climb through like a ladder that a watchman would have climbed up to get to the top of that tower now just the sheer manpower and effort required to build a five foot thick stone wall 13 to 20 feet tall around an entire city with these massive towers is unbelievable and it tells us again something very important about these early civilizations these early people who built the city they were not pacifists and they were concerned about defending themselves there have been ideas that these early Neolithic cultures were peaceful a number of theories have said that they were female dominated matriarchal and of course according to these theorists women are just naturally peaceful and they would never get involved in wars I think the people who come up with these theories have never worked in a workplace full of women I have but they claim that these early civilizations were very peaceful and basically the evidence tells us that's not accurate walls structures like Jericho it's highly unlikely that anyone would build something of that size and scale to prevent animals from getting in this is an early indication of violence and warfare between human groups now the city of Jericho is interesting for a number of other reasons as well including what we believe may be an indication of ancestor worship there was an investigation into Jericho digging up those early cities back in the 1960's and 1970's and one day right before the expedition was about to leave one of the archaeologists went out to do some final digging just a last little bit of work underneath the the floor of one of the houses now as she began to do this last little bit of digging and excavation she noticed something wedged underneath the floor of the neolithic house that she was actually digging up and as she began to look closer and excavate it what she discovered was remarkable what she discovered was a human skull covered in clay, sculpted to look like a face with seashells as eyes this by the way is one of the reasons I will never be an archaeologist just just saying now for the archaeologists though this was an amazing discovery and as other groups came back and began to continue to excavate Jericho they found more and more of these skulls all sculpted over with clay to resemble human faces they were all either in cavities underneath the house or actually on little shelves and niches within the buildings all of the skulls the clay sculpted over it was flattened on the bottom and the belief is that these skulls were actually intended as display pieces now these are not apparently enemy skulls they don't seem to have been damaged in some way as they would have been in a battle if they've been defeated and what many scholars believe is that these skulls are actually the skulls of dead family and dead relatives of these people in this Neolithic City we believe that these people actually took the skulls of the dead and sculpted clay to resemble the facial features of the departed the shells that were used for eyes were a valuable commodity something that was rare in a desert area like this and they were used as eyes to give these skulls life this tells us that these people unlike us believed that it was important and comforting for the dead to watch over them and to have some sort of physical talisman of their dead relatives some scholars as I've said believed that this is a form of ancestor worship others simply believe that it is a physical representation of this desire for the dead to continue to walk out watch over the people a blurring of the barrier between life and death if you will something that is very different than the way most modern people in our culture view death we tend to isolate it to put it away in graveyards not to have this watching over us in our home as these ancient Neolithic peoples did now Jericho is a more typical City what we would think of streets walls buildings but not all early cities follow that pattern it's actually one of the cool things about Neolithic cities they don't have a set pattern there is no way of building a city yet it's not accepted and we see a variety of really unique and creative solutions to city building that remarkable innovation and city building is visible in the city of Catal Huyuk I have to practice every semester before I say that Catal Huyuk is a little bit later than Jericho it's dated to about 7500 to 5,700 BCE and it is in what would today be Turkey now part of what makes Catal Huyuk so fascinating is the fact that it isn't like into a modern city there aren't streets and with buildings in between instead Catal Huyuk built its buildings sharing one another's walls so in other words as you can see in the picture one building would share a wall with the next they would built be built directly next to each other instead of streets going between the buildings the people of Catal Huyuk had openings on their rooms that they would use to access the rooftops and the rooftops were actually the city streets rather than separations between the buildings now we believe that Catal Huyuk like Jericho was highly defensible simply because there were no streets you couldn't come into the city through open passageways because all of the city buildings were directly connected to one another that direct connection made Catal Huyuk very secure very safe and it also fascinates us because again it's early city building it's people experimenting it's finding different and unique ways of building these structures and trying to find out what works well and what does not work as well these Neolithic people are finding their way as they come together and live in larger and larger communities they're experimenting they're learning new ways of building new ways of creating these structures these openings and the cities themselves now in Catal Huyuk we find several temples in amongst those buildings that are all connected together those temples have two primary focuses now again there isn't writing here so we're guessing the two temples seem to be grouped around male focused temples and female focused temples now this goes back to what I was talking about before with the images the pictures we have with the domestication of animals and then being very strongly associated with the female the female temples that we find have images like the one on the upper left that image shares some things that you saw with the Paleolithic Venus figures the large breasts the rotund stomach but you'll notice something that is very pronounced in that sculpture the female figure appears to be seated on a throne and under both of her arms are animal heads we believe again as we saw in the cave paintings and shelter paintings that the female is associated with domestication and civilization the female figure is the domesticator of animals the bringer of order the male-dominated temples are very different the one on the picture on the lower right depicts images sculptures from some of the male temples at Catal Huyuk male temples seem to be associated with horned animals beasts like bulls with these powerful horns and that association of the masculine with bulls and with horned animals is not going away remember this both the female associated with domestication and the male associated with the horned animals particularly Bulls because you're going to be hearing that for weeks in this class it's going to come up over and over and over again in later cultures which is why we feel pretty confident in saying it in early civilizations like Catal Huyuk I should say early cities like Catal Huyuk where we see these symbols but we don't have any writing to correlate them we see similar symbols and later cultures where they're better explained and so we kind of look backward and assume that this is similar the male images are associated with Bulls largely because of strength and fertility both are massive powerful creatures incredibly strong and bulls are also very strongly associated with fertility they are extremely well endowed and we believe that the Association with masculinity is tied there and we see it even in these early temples so female domestication and civilization male power and fertility these structures whether you're talking about Jericho or Catal Huyuk are also an architectural experiment I mean these people don't have set specific ways of building these structures creating open space to live and so they're trying different methods now the two main methods that you will see in neolithic and even in Bronze Age buildings are through two things known as post and lintel structures and corbelled structures now post and lintel construction has two vertical openings and then a flat lintel or top piece you've seen post and lintel construction in so many places I view doors in your house they probably use post and lintel construction the other method is something called a corbelled opening which essentially takes bricks or stones and places them almost like an upside-down staircase where each one extends slightly out from the one below it this creates kind of a stair-step arch and is very strong as part of a wall it also allows you to create spaces that are not simply square or rectangular now let's look at post and lintel and corbelled in a little bit more detail as far as strengths and weaknesses are concerned post and lintel construction uses two posts with a flat lintel across the top the strength of post and lintel construction is that if you use a single piece lintel a large piece of wood a large piece of stone post and lintel construction is incredibly strong all of the weight from the lintel goes directly downward because it is simply a flat piece placed on top of two vertical pieces post and lintel structure construction can be very strong but the problem is it is limited and it is limited by the width of a lintel you can only make that large single wide piece so wide for two reasons number one it's going to cause a lot of pressure in the middle it's gonna want to fall inward in the center of the opening and number two you're only going to be able to find a stone or a piece of wood of certain width today we can manufacture steel i-beams that are extremely wide and allow large post and lintel construction but prior to steel i-beams you didn't have that luxury therefore post and lintel construction when it gets wider begins to have a problem as it gets wider the centerpiece of the lintel is going to want to shatter downward as all of the weight presses downward into that opening now this is really important to understand and keep in mind and you can have a question on a quiz on this the limitation of post and lintel is in the width the wider you make your posts those two vertical supports the weaker the lintel structure is going to be the more it's going to want to fall inward you're going to see this over and over and over in ancient buildings all of those pretty columns like in ancient Greece those are not just for aesthetics they're not just because they look good those are actually holding up the weight of a roof in a post and lintel construction they're preventing it from breaking in the middle and collapsing downward you can actually see this breakage and lentils on ancient structures that centerpiece begins to break down or fall inward because of all the weight pushing directly downward on that horizontal lintel construction corbelled openings are stronger because they do not actually push all the weight straight downward now whether or not they're stronger depends on what kind of a building they're in as I said that solid lintel is almost unbreakable the problem is when you make those posts and lintel construction wider or when you begin using a series of stones in post and lintel instead of just a single piece of wood or stone corbelled openings have a great deal of strength when they're actually part of a wall because post and lintel openings push everything straight downward whereas corbelled openings actually push everything out at an angle at a diagonal angle now that diagonal angle allows the weight of the structure to be pushed downward and outward and when that happens you need support because when you push downward and outward things want to flip up so in other words think about it think about having something at a 45 degree angle if you push down on the top of it the other side flips upward like a teeter totter or seesaw in order to make a corbelled opening really strong you need external weight so where as post and lintel openings are good on their own corbelled openings work most effectively as part of an actual wall now post and lintel construction is going to be our earliest construction and again we often see post and lintel construction as standalone structures these standalone structures are often found in the countryside and they are often two vertical pieces your posts made of stone topped with a single horizontal lintel made of a massive piece of stone these structures are what are known as Dolmen now weirdly enough the largest concentration of Dolmen is not where you might think they are most people see this early stone construction and they think England they think Ireland the largest concentration of dolmen actually is in of all places Korea we believe these Dolmen structures were actually four-sided structures originally you can see in the picture on your screen there are three sides but you can actually see the collapse stone that would have covered the front of the structure therefore because that massive fourth stone would have covered the opening we don't believe that these are actually living structures residential structures it would have been almost impossible to open and close them with a fourth massive stone in front instead we believe that these Dolmens are actually burial sites they were ancient tombs where bodies were located and these massive stone structures would have protected them from scavengers from any kind of problem and again we believe that these people put forth this effort as a burial again as a respect for their dead they may have come back and revisited it they may have come back and opened these structures and buried more of their dead in them now these Dolmens can be absolutely massive and they fascinate us because again we're not exactly sure how they were built this particular Dolmen is located in the United Kingdom and it represents the single largest capstone that large top piece that huge single stone you're seeing balanced across the other stones weighs approximately a hundred and fifty tons for people who don't have power moving equipment the ability to raise and balance a hundred and fifty ton flat stone and of course to transport that hundred and fifty tons stone to this location to start with is an absolutely mind-boggling mystery now someone's always trying to tell me it's aliens but we don't actually believe that there are a number of modern scholars who have actually figured out ways to move massive weights like that and we believe that the early peoples these Neolithic peoples probably used a series of ramps animal power manpower and a whole lot of ingenuity in order to create these structures which must have been incredibly important to them to put in this much effort again these early people are primitive they're using rocks and stuff but still they are incredibly intelligent and innovative and what they're able to accomplish now we do believe these Dolmens are tomb structures but tomb structures only become more complex as time goes on there's a new type of tomb or burial site that comes around later on in the Neolithic era that burial site is something called a Passage Tomb and a passage tomb is a huge structure often round with a passage going through it passage - yeah it's like that and then a central area for a burial tomb site one of the best-preserved of these is actually in Newgrange in Ireland and these passage tombs are still around today they're tourist locations today you can see in the picture on the screen a group of tourists about to enter the passage in the passage tomb now what you're looking at on the screen is dated to approximately 3200 BCE that puts it at a thousand years older than the current version of Stonehenge these tombs are huge the one on your screen is approximately 300 feet in diameter that's like a football field across there built of structured stones that create the passage in the central burial chamber and then those stones are covered in rocks and dirt to create this rounded hill with a man-made opening inside now this particular passage tomb actually contains a long passage that extends in with the central round burial chamber you can see here in the cross section that that long passageway created of these vertical stones goes back around 118 feet and then you can see that there's this almost beehive shaped central area that goes high up above the passage that's actually the burial site and again like the tombs the skulls under the floors of the homes in Jericho it seems that people came and visited these passage tombs on a regular basis there was not the separation between the graveyard and the home that we see in today's culture instead it seems these people are quite casual and possibly quite passionate about visiting their dead on a regular basis modern scholars suggest that this passageway in a passage tomb is aligned with a Solstice in this case the winter solstice and there are scholars and studies that's mark how far the winter solstice light goes into the tomb and they say it goes further into a passage tomb at that winter solstice then the light enters at any other points in the year other scholars call complete and total BS on that they say it is a big coincidence we honestly don't know we're still working on it we may be able to confirm or debunk that idea of these aligned with the Solstice but we'll have to wait and see until perhaps you can find more passage tombs and do more research now the central area the place where the burial chamber is the place where people would visit and possibly hold rituals that area of the tomb actually uses a corbelled structure here's a bottom view looking up there you go this is called a corbelled vault and you can see how the builders in the Neolithic period took these stones and created a corbelled opening where each stone juts out slightly from the one below it this also kind of showcases something a corbelled opening can do that a post and lintel cannot and that's creating a circular domed space post and lintel doesn't do that because post and lintel is very square very rectangular the corbelled opening lets you build stones in a variety of different shapes creating this unique opening this unique structure that creates the circular space in the center of the passage tomb now there are numerous passage tombs many of them in the United Kingdom others Newgrange there's also a location called Knowth where again these passage structures are created with massive stones they create a passageway into a central chamber in the tomb Knowth is worthy of note because it is one of the sites where we find the most carved stones from this era there are approximately 261 carved external stones what scholars call curb stones at knoweth those represent about 45% of the carved stones in all of Ireland and about a quarter of the carved stones from the Neolithic era in all of Europe this a tomb again this passage tomb is believed to line up with either a lunar or solar equinox and we think it may have actually been a site that was used to keep track of calendar years or passage of time one of the arguments for that is actually this stone one of the carved stones at Knowth now you can see how worn away the stone is it's thousands of years old but at the bottom is a rubbing a piece of paper that was put over the stone and rubbed to pick up the engraving in the stone it's a very odd pattern there's swirls and there's like a Halfmoon shape with different shapes carved at the edge of each one of the spokes or stars from that pattern many scholars believe that what you're actually seeing is in fact a calendar perhaps even a tracing of the moon cycles of the lunar calendar which would have been a very important for keeping track of time especially because we're in the Neolithic period which means these people are farmers they're trying to track farming they're trying to track their crops and having some sort of calendar cycle being able to keep track of the months of the year of the lunar cycles might have been extremely important for these people they would have been aligning than these tombs these passage tombs based on the sky on the Stars and possibly even on what do we today would call compass points we see those compass points used often in ancient buildings in ancient architecture and those compass points interestingly enough seemed to hold significance a scholar by the name of Joseph Campbell spent his entire lifetime studying mythology storytelling in different cultures all around the world and in a lifetime of studying mythology everywhere from the Arctic to North American tribes to Africa to Central America to the Middle East Joseph Campbell found that symbols are common across storytelling in cultures no matter where you are in the world and one of those symbols that he found were the four compass directions the cardinal directions of north south east and west because of that later scholarship tracing these stories and these myths many researchers and scholars believe that those ancient architects those builders used similar meanings or symbols for those four directions as we see in later stories and later architecture if that is the case then you have four different directions each one with its own meaning in those cardinal directions in mythology each of those directions has a symbol something it represents the North often stands for trials and testing in stories and legends when a hero goes off on a trial or journey he often goes north because that is the direction where he finds trials and tests South in the opposite direction often represents physical comfort safety and security it's a place of peace and comfort east and west are both incredibly significant east as the direction of the Sun coming up in the morning is associated with birth and new beginnings so East is birth new beginnings fresh start West that is where the Sun ends where the Sun sinks and therefore the West is often associated with death ending and the afterlife in early cultures often even when we get to Egypt later on you'll see that the Great Pyramids tombs for the dead are built on the western bank of the Nile River because the West is considered to be the direction of death and of the Dead those cardinal directions are often associated with these early passage tombs with the direction of the passage the way they line up with solar events but we don't know if those symbolisms apply all the way back in the neolithic period again we don't know we're going backwards based on later knowledge and guessing that that later knowledge originated here with these early people in these early cultures one of the places where that backward logic has been applied is in henges or large structures built of stones that many believe our calendar points or mark the cycles of the year henges generally are any structure that has these post and lintel stones with two large vertical stones and then the horizontal lintel across the top in a larger configuration in other words not a single in a one alone but multiple of these particular configurations the most famous is of course Stonehenge the version of Stonehenge that we know and are familiar with today is dated to approximately 2700 to 1500 BCE but we know that actually there were earlier stone henges that were built long before this one they're still investigating that actually a group of scholars is currently using modern sonar and radar to try and map out Stonehenge and look at the earlier versions that are no longer in existence you can find pictures of it online it's it's not funny but it's absolutely hysterical to me because essentially they have the equipment on like little 4x4 wheelers and golf carts that they're towing behind them so they don't mess up the site they don't damage any of the area around it and it just makes me laugh to see a bunch of archaeologists on four-wheelers like zipping around Stonehenge the earlier versions of Stonehenge were actually made of wood instead of stone which is why we no longer have them this current massive structure still doesn't represent represent the full span of the original Stonehenge we only have parts of the original henge still standing now what Stonehenge was and what it was originally used for is still a hot point of debate some people firmly believe that it was some sort of religious sacred site today I would not recommend going anywhere near Stonehenge on an equinox there are people who believe that they're carrying on early Celtic traditions druidic traditions which for the record we actually know very little about and they meet and have rituals at Stonehenge they're licensed to do it there's a lot of nudity and no quality control however we don't actually know the Stonehenge was that kind of a religious ritual site there have been a variety of different theories about Stonehenge one of them is that Stonehenge was actually a calendar or some sort of record-keeping site we found two stones at a distance that we call the heal stones and during the equinoxes the light comes through those heal stones and hits a center stone in the middle of Stonehenge that is often sometimes referred to as an altar step some people suggest that this is a calendar is a record-keeping kind of thing it allows that it would have allowed Neolithic peoples to be able to effectively track one particular point in the year other people have suggested that perhaps Stonehenge was used as sort of healing location or sight and the discovery of a type of stone called bluestone that again in later cultures were extrapolating backward in later cultures was believed to have healing properties it's not native to the area around Stonehenge but we found deposits of it remnants of this bluestone at Stonehenge and some people have suggested that Stonehenge was some sort of a healing site that idea has recently been bolstered by the discovery of ashes cremated human remains which again some people want to say it's a sacrificial site that's possible it's also possible that those are simply the remains of people who didn't make it at the healing site they weren't healed and it's possible that they were then buried at the site it would have been a basically a Stone Age Hospital we don't know we're still investigating but the complexity of this site the size of it the fact that it was sustained and taken care of for so many years continues to absolutely fascinate us and so we continue to study Stonehenge as one of the greatest of these structures of these henges that we've been able to find and we know about now as these Neolithic peoples begin settling down begin establishing cities they begin sharing knowledge and sharing culture and ultimately those Stonehenge cultures are going to grow into larger and larger groups of people living in a single area they're going to become what we call civilizations and those civilizations are where our records our knowledge of mankind really begins to pick up where we begin to drop the I think we might scholars believe and we begin to actually know something because these civilizations leave us written records there are four points where human beings settle down into larger civilizations and we will look at all four of them however we're going to look at two of them in more detail than the other two now let me explain why the four civilizations are the Yellow River civilization in China the Indus River civilization in India Mesopotamia and Egypt we're going to look at Mesopotamia and Egypt and a lot more detail than we are the Yellow River and the Indus River civilizations that is for a very simple reason and there are other reasons I'll go into them in more detail when we talk about those other two civilizations but the simple easy explanation is that as far as we can tell the Yellow River civilization in China does not have a written language so we can't read about what they believed what they thought what their culture was like because we don't have any written documentation that kind of limits us in what we know and we're back to we think and we believe the Indus Valley Civilisation in India is amazing I can show you some beautiful artwork later but the civilization has a writing system which we can't read oh goody which means that we can't actually understand a lot about the culture about what they believed about the way that their government worked because we cannot yet read their writing system until we do we can't talk about it in detail because again we're back to we think and we know the two cultures that we do know more about our Mesopotamia and Egypt and we're going to talk about both of those in a lot more detail although the two are contemporary they grow about the same time they progress in very different ways so we're gonna look at one of them and then the other to do that we're going to look at Mesopotamia first the land between the two rivers and that's where we'll go next Mesopotamia this land this Fertile Crescent between two rivers the rainfall the ability to grow crops goes from Mesopotamia along the coastline of the Mediterranean and dips down into Egypt along the Nile River these two civilizations actually get started fairly close to one another but they are so different from one another their geographic locations their access to water and the ability to farm and grow crops and the way that the farming is done in these two areas are very different and their geography where they're located shapes the cultures they shape the civilizations that grow and come into existence in the two separate locations