One of the biggest transitions in human history is the transition from hunting and gathering to herding and cereal agriculture and what we realize now is that we're really talking about change and it's not necessarily all good, all positive, all forward-looking. It's an issue of trade-offs. Aşıklıhöyük is the oldest settlement in the east of Central Anatolia, known as Cappadocia.
It was founded 10,400 years ago. It has a thousand-year history of settlement. Its importance is already based on the fact that it is a place that shows the local and farm life from the hunting and gathering lifestyle to the farming lifestyle. We are in an area that is 11 years old. There is a round or oval-shaped house up there.
This is its stove, for example. The most important thing between these layers is this yellowish layer. It was understood that these have animal excrement with micromorphological and chemical analyses. The top layer is the animal excrement of this coniferous animal. There are footprints.
The most important evidence is that the sheep and the goat were kept in the settlement from the 8300s onwards. provide the economic basis for the emergence of more complex societies in later prehistory and early history. So it really allows us to understand the pace and development of human cultural evolution. If you are a mobile population, you can get up and move and leave everything behind. But if you are living in an area where you have permanent houses, where you're living in close proximity to animals, the potential for disease is certainly great.
One of the things that happened with the Neolithic is we are changing the genomes of other animals. And while doing so, we are creating these new ecologies. And that...
whole ecology is creating, attracting new type of life, including all the parasites and pathogens that would otherwise not be able to flourish. You know, there are lots of reasons to think that in many ways hunter-gatherers may have been healthier than early Neolithic people. It is possible that things like teeth decay, some issues with bone development may be increased.
in Neolithic populations as compared to the hunter-gatherer populations. And in fact, it is also plausible the things that we are dealing with right now, like obesity and diabetes and several other metabolic disorders, may be because our diets have changed dramatically starting with the Neolithic transition. I think we're overwhelmed with the idea of progress. When we look at the hunter-gatherer and even the early farming populations, you're looking at societies where the differences in status, power and wealth were relatively limited.
And when we look today and, you know, a half dozen billionaires own more than the rest of the world, that's the sort of thing that just didn't happen. Things like World War I and World War II are unthinkable without the complex societies that farming produced. Their understanding of the hunter-gatherers as this monolithic entity where everybody there, this egalitarian, peace-loving, nice people that are doing their own thing and like, you know, hunting and gathering peacefully in, you know, in line with nature.
That's probably not the case. You know, there may be some hunter-gatherer societies exactly like that and there may be others that may be violent and... may have issues with that doesn't fit with our moral constructs of today.
What advantages did Neolithic people have? Ultimately, their populations grew faster, so there's strength in numbers. And again, it provided the basis for the emergence of progressively more complex societies.
It's a great thing that we managed to create all the science and technology and all the arts and literature that we managed to do. That kind of complicated cultural accomplishments. It would not have been possible without agriculture.
I think it is important to communicate the importance of major narratives. But even though we know a lot about the past, we don't know everything. And the more we know, the more complicated and diverse and interesting it becomes.