OK, we've been talking about early agriculture in the near east.

So let's concentrate on one site and see what we can learn from it. Let's look at Catalhoyuk. Um... I'd better write that down. Catalhoyuk, that's about as close as we get in English.It's Turkish, really.  The site's in modern day Turkey, and who knows what the original inhabitants called it. Anyway, uh... Catalhoyuk wasn't the first agricultural settlement in the near east, but it was pretty early, settled about 9000 years ago in the Neolithic period. And... um... the settlement... uh... town really, lasted about a thousand years and grew to a size of about eight or ten thousand people.That certainly makes it one of the largest towns in the world at that time.

One of the things that makes the settlement of this size impressive is the time period.It's the Neolithic, remember, the late Stone Age.So the people that lived there had only stone tools, no metals.So everything they accomplished, like building this town, they did with just stone, plus wood, bricks, that sort of thing. But you got to remember that it wasn't just any stone they had, they had obsidian. And um... obsidian is a black, volcanic, well, almost like glass.It flakes very nicely into really sharp points.The sharpest tools of the entire Stone Age were made of obsidian.And uh... the people of Catalhoyuk got theirs from further inland, from central Turkey, traded for it, probably.