The Sanctuary-The World's Oldest Temple and the Dawn of Civilization

Elif Batuman - The New Yorker
Dept. of Archaeology - 26 December 2011

Hunter Gatherers are believed to have lacked...
1) complex symbolic systems
2) social hierarchies
3) the division of labor.
...three things probably needed to build mega temples

The 22 acre mega temple at Gobelki Tepe in Turkey suggests that the need to build a sacred site might have obliged the hunter gatherers to mobilize a workforce, secure a stable food supply and spend long periods of time in one place

Hunter-gatherers weren't supposed to make large scale human representation sculptures because it conflicts with the animistic, non-hierarchical point of view.

The Neolithic Revolution, coined by V. Gordon Childe believed that the hunter-gatherers transition to subsistence and ultimately domestication was a result of climate changes.

Jacques Cauvin in the 70's proposed that a cult of the bull and fertility goddess, an ancient religion, had fostered a fertility oriented world view that engendered a shift to agriculture.
Gobelki Tepe may support this theory of an ideological trigger.

Studies of Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers shows that they spend about 20 hours a week gathering food, while farmers toiled all day. Paleoarchaeological data shows that early farmers had more anemia and vitamin deficiencies, died younger, had worse teeth, and were more prone to infectious diseases from close proximity to people and animals.
Why would people choose to be farmers?

Hunter-gatherers had it good until population growth caught up with increased food production, so they had to spend more time producing food to keep everyone alive. The farmers, because they were larger in number, killed off other hunter-gatherers or drove them off the land.
Was this the beginning of social and sexual inequality?

Some pople think Gobelki Temple is the Garden of Eden

Eve: "pain of childbirth....your husband will rule over you..." may refer to the decline of women's health and the need to produce babies to work the land.

Cain kills Abel and founds the first city.
Is this the beginning of terriotorial feuds, sibling rivalry, the constant threat of exile?