Original subtitles

12 ,000 years ago, early Europeans lived a hard life in nomadic bands.

It was a way of life that had lasted for 100 ,000 years.

Sheltering deep in their caves, they painted images of wild animals they

for food.

For hundreds of generations, they had followed the herds, depending on them

survival.

Now, they are about to face a new challenge.

they will confront a different people from a different world.

It will change them and all human life forever.

The challenge started here, on the green hills of the Middle East.

Unlike Europe, the climate of the fertile crescent produced abundant food

the way from Israel to Iraq.

Here, the hunter -gatherers lived very well, and they had learned to hunt with

dogs.

Dogs have been sitting in the sun with people for at least 12 ,000 years.

They're our oldest companions on the human journey.

So close, we're not even sure whether we tamed them or they tamed us.

Dogs were a part of life and death.

Inside a hut at Ain Malacha, In Israel, archaeologists found a woman buried 11

,000 years ago under the floor.

Beside her head was a puppy.

Whoever covered them took the trouble to place the woman's hand over the dog's

body.

The Ayn Malaha burials and the dogs really signal a shift in that human

relationship between what had been a wild species, maybe an adversary, and

something that had become part of daily life, and as a matter of fact, even

something that merits burial with the dead.

And that's a big shift indeed.

The dogs were even more attracted to humans once they built huts.

Dog domestication comes with human sedentism.

with people settling down and creating trash heaps and so on that are a lure

an attractant to the dogs.

But it does set some sort of a precedent of bringing animals from the wild

closer in to that human sphere of life.

The relationship with dogs must have set people thinking, why not control other

animals?

It would provide a ready supply of meat and cut down on the hunting.

But it took a crisis to push them forward.

The Middle East was hit with over a thousand years of drought.

It was caused by a short ice age called the Younger Dryas, which brought

glaciers to Europe.

and famine to the fertile crescent.

It was a climate catastrophe.

Deep in the sand and suffering, the hunters changed their way of life.

Some people escaped to the few oases with water and good soil.

Here, they learnt to plant crops.

and became the world's first farmers.

Others searched desperately for game across their traditional hunting lands,

the drought made the animals scarce.

To save themselves, they took possession of their prey.

The fireplaces of these hunters reveal the bones of goats, which were kept in

herds.

They were the very first domesticated farm animals.

Archaeologist Melinda Rader is tracking the way goats changed as they were

domesticated.

Her evidence comes from a huge collection of bones gathered from across

entire Middle East.

The changes are most obvious in the horns.

You can see on this big guy here from the highlands of Iran a wild bezoar

He's got a very large horn. It's sharply keeled. It's rounded in its sort of

profile here.

And it goes back in what they call a scimitar shape.

And this is very distinctive of the wild goat.

It's quite different from what we see in this fellow here, this domestic goat.

where the horn is now flattened on the inside, it's twisted, and obviously it's

quite a bit smaller.

Now, the reason for that is that in the wild, this kind of a horn gives the

males a competitive advantage in competing for females.

In the domestic situation, the males aren't competing for females, but the

herder is selecting who breeds with whom.

So there's really no need for this large equipment.

Today in the Middle East people are still herding goats in the same way.

The first herders selected smaller and less aggressive animals, removing the

very trays the animals needed to survive in the wild.

In return, the herders provided food and protection.

They soon added other animals to their herds.

This one small part of the world supplied almost all our domesticated

Alongside goats and sheep were pigs.

This pottery figure from Turkey is 8 ,000 years old.

Cows were early beasts of burden.

We tend to look at domestication of animals as a big lose -lose situation

the animals.

But really, from a Darwinian perspective, it's a big win -win,

animals, through their collaboration with humans, are able to out -compete

wild progenitors.

For the humans, obviously, they're obtaining resources, either plant or

It may not be as nutritious.

or even as necessarily as bountiful a diet as they were getting from hunting

gathering. But there is an element of security and predictability that this

of resource provides.

For the herders, it was a brilliant idea.

By keeping the animals alive and breeding them, they guaranteed the

meat.

The long drought of the Ice Age ended around 11 ,500 years ago.

The world came back to life.

Now, something

truly remarkable happened.

Two distinct ways of surviving, the herders and the cereal farmers, came

together.

They each had half of the puzzle.

The herders had the animals, while the farmers were growing grain to feed the

stock.

For the first time in history, a ready supply of meat was brought together with

cereals.

Now the farming way of life was complete.

This must have been a challenging meeting.

Herding and cultivating were very different ways of life.

They both had to adapt.

Not all communities took up this new way of life.

Some hill villages stayed with grain, but left no evidence of animal herding.

By comparing sites, archaeologists can see the remarkable difference animals

soon made to farming life.

Below the huts in the valley was a community which was much larger and more

prosperous.

The difference here was made by the humble goat.

These animals were really the catalyst for urban life as we know it today.

People came together in large communities.

Extended families could work together.

They were now secure and could plan for the future.

Reliable grain and regular meat.

But there was a downside.

People and animals were crammed together.

They created hygiene problems and new diseases.

The pressure was on to organize, to keep everything apart.

To do that, They needed new towns built in a new way.

They began to spread down the valleys of Jordan as the population increased.

There's a transformation that's taking place and they're beginning to get many

more settlements than there were before.

So quite clearly there's an expanding population completely reliant on

agriculture. They're then moving away from the places which suited them as...

hunter -gatherers or part -hunter -gatherers and settling down in the

areas of Plains.

Archaeologists are picking over the ruins stone by stone, tracking the

of architecture.

The foundations reveal the very earliest building, reconstructed as a simple

round house like this.

The walls in the original were made from stones dragged from the riverbeds.

Beneath these modern desert villages are the very first examples of the building

methods still used today.

They are separated by five metres of rubble and 9 ,000 years.

Here, the builders discovered that the walls of rectangular rooms are stronger

than circular ones.

so they learnt to make straight walls and corners.

4 ,000 years before the pyramids, they used stone chisels to shape windows

and doorways.

Archaeologists have found the place where this surge of creativity actually

began, Jaf al -Akhmar in Syria.

It's the first complex farming town.

Here, they mapped laneways and cramped houses 10 ,000 years old.

Daniel Stoddard's research was a race against time. In four years, the waters

a rising dam destroyed the site forever.

In the site of Jaffel Ahmad, we can have all the architectural evolution

of the house, the domestic architecture, with fur.

Circular houses, then oval houses with interior rectilinear walls.

And finally, true, real rectangular houses.

The rectangular shapes of Jerf spread.

New villagers grew with the new ideas.

Mohamed Najjar.

has been excavating a village which shows just how sophisticated these Stone

architects were.

A small plaza led to shaped steps on the central

street.

Doorways opened to family houses on each side.

Najjar found enigmatic tunnels in the walls of the houses, which turned out to

be Stone Age air conditioning shafts.

There is a shaft coming through the wall and opening at the floor level, so it's

empty from outside.

Some of these shafts inside the wall are connected.

I'm not sure that you can see from this side, but we have another shaft here.

The opening is here.

And because the wall was broken here, in this spot you can see the shaft from

here, from the top.

At that time I would say the village was a very beautiful village. I mean,

imagine all these houses.

one -story houses, two -story houses covered with plaster, with plaster from

outside and from the inside, and painted red in certain points. I mean, if you

can imagine that, that must be a very beautiful village at that time.

These new villagers bustled with life.

They had plenty of food.

Now some people could be freed from the grind of farming.

They developed their talents into specialised jobs.

Knife makers collected special rose -coloured flint for their finest blades.

The first potters learnt to make containers from clay which was dried in

sun.

Archaeologists have found the remains of baskets intended for trade.

Some were sealed with a lining made with clay or bitumen.

Other baskets were woven from local grasses and reeds.

for a host of different tasks.

The same skills were used to develop the first woven fabrics.

To do this, they created perhaps the earliest piece of complex technology

devised.

They designed the first looms, still found in villages today.

They developed a soft cloth from native flax and made linen.

Households grew to take in extended families.

Kitchens were separated from bedrooms and the need for privacy was growing.

The architecture goes way beyond what you need just for a simple shelter.

People are using architecture, just like modern architects use architecture, to

express ideas about not just form and volume and so forth, but about how the

world is and how we should live in it and how we relate to that world. They're

creating an artificial built environment.

They paid as much attention to the beauty of their domestic objects.

For the first time in human history, we've seen people who behave like us.

do it because they can.

It makes a richer life. It makes a richer world. It makes for deeper

understanding.

I think we underestimate just homemaking.

For us, it's a very deeply felt need, so deeply felt that mostly we don't think

about it.

But what we're seeing are the very first people who are engaging in that kind of

activity, where in the interior of their house, they're turning it into their

little home.

9 ,000 years ago, they invented the first artificial building material.

Smooth, clean and waterproof, it was instantly popular.

Plaster.

I don't think it's entirely utilitarian or functional.

It's to do with ideas of home as opposed to just having a house to live in. It's

making a place which has all sorts of formal and symbolic values attached to

Just indeed as the houses we live in have all sorts of ways,

keys which tell you how you should behave in this room. Shall we eat in the

kitchen? Very informal.

Let's have supper in the dining room.

And it's quite different.

Plaster was extremely versatile and turns up in many sites.

In 1974, Jordanians digging a main road to Amman discovered the stone age ruins

of Ain Ghazal.

Here, Gary Rolotson was able to document on film the story of plaster.

What we're looking at...

is a Neolithic house with a beautiful plaster floor with a central hearth for

heating and for cooking and for light.

The plaster is of excellent quality, very sophisticated.

Angazal was a large, impressive town with hundreds of houses.

Plaster was part of its dazzle.

Every house had to have a lime plaster floor. That's expensive.

It's expensive because lime does not exist as a natural resource.

Lime has to be manufactured and among the first artificial materials that were

ever produced by humans It comes from burning limestone And in

order to burn limestone you have to reach high temperatures the temperatures

have to be sustained for long periods of time and this requires a lot of fuel

Every

time that you make a floor at these 50 -square -metre houses, we figure that

you're using at least six trees.

In these houses, Rolofsen found evidence of a traditional burial.

The plaster covered a body with no skull, a ritual developed 3 ,000 years

earlier.

They buried the body beneath the floor and came back sometime later.

opened up the burial pit again and then removed the skull.

Bodies were also ritually exposed to birds of prey outside the town.

Then they used building plaster in a new way to preserve images of the dead.

The faith was recreated.

A portrait was...

was made of the deceased using plaster that was modeled and molded into those

particular characteristics that identify grandfather from uncle from aunt.

It's an ancestor veneration cult, if you will, that we have a sequence of these

people who are being selected in order to establish this connection with the

past, this connection with the land, and perhaps then the connection with the

house.

The Smiths, for example, will be able to trace their genealogy back from this

ancestor to this ancestor to this ancestor all the way back into time.

Eventually, you come to this very dim past where even if there's a name out

there, you're not really sure what the name means anymore.

You get back into this mystical, foggy area that's so far back in time

that you're not really...

certain how the connections work anymore.

These mythic landmines we think we've found.

In the laboratory, researchers removed the rubble hiding the statues.

After 8 ,000 years, they revealed life -size figures,

just the way they were made.

There's a gift for simplicity.

which takes these figures beyond the portraits of known ancestors.

Instead of being the real ancestors, we think they're the mythical ancestors of

the people who lived at Angazal, if not in the entire region.

We see at least three pairs of statues that have two heads.

We already have the symbolism involved.

of the statues representing mythical ancestors altogether.

What we're beginning to see is that we have the Ein Gezal smiths and the

smiths being represented in the same body.

So we have two parts of the same line coming together symbolically.

These figures are tied into the spiritual life of the early farmers.

The evidence for their religion is pieced together from fragments scattered

across the region.

The origins of the puzzle are found at Jeff Alachmar.

In the middle of the town, Daniel Stauder found a completely unexpected

building.

It was much larger.

Not a house, but something else.

Massive wild cattle horns were found lying where they'd fallen from the wall.

Upturned headless humans were carved into a continuous bench.

Watching over them were the rearing figures of vultures.

This is the earliest known public building.

Poundspeople could gather together under one roof.

After 700 years of use, something terrible happened.

We found a skeleton that was almost complete but that

had no head.

No head.

The head was taken off.

It was the skeleton of a young girl, probably between 15 and 18 years.

And this...

This girl was not buried, just thrown up on the soil.

The girl's hands were twisted in rigor mortis.

Within hours of her death, the whole building caught fire and her body was

covered in burning timber.

It was a violent end for a mysterious place.

They're not normal houses. They're not meeting rooms for political debate.

They're some kind of special building in which some kind of special activities

go on.

So I think you probably have to think in terms of religious activity, religious

belief systems operating at all sorts of different levels.

People were coming together to worship.

They left small stone tokens with intricate designs.

Their meaning remains unknown.

We found associations of figures animal figures, and signs.

You can see, for example, here that you have a fox, a kind of snake,

undulated lines, and here, if I turn it, you have a vulture.

These combinations of figures tell a story, a myth,

associating death and a vulture.

Death and...

the bird of prey.

Big birds of prey are taking with them, up in the air, human bodies

without heads.

These images of death occur all across the region.

Vultures swoop on bodies, taking off the heads.

Centuries later, they spread as far as Gobekli Tepe, 800 kilometers away, in

Turkey.

Archaeologists are slowly digging away an entire hill.

They're finding groups of standing stones, twice human height.

They're beautifully carved with symbolic figures.

The bull.

The lion.

The snake.

And the fox.

The archaeologists puzzled over the function of these huge columns.

They could not hold up a roof.

The heights are different.

They now believe these columns are an ancient ritual platform where the dead

were exposed to vultures and the bones eaten clean.

As the birds of the air ate away the flesh, the spirit could be set free.

Here, for the first time, religion became a huge public drama.

Its rituals were played out in the open air at a special sanctuary.

There seemed to be no settlement.

This must be some kind of central ritual place for a number of surrounding

communities. And that suggests that communities really are networking, that

whatever they're doing in their own community, they're coming together with

people from all sorts of other communities to use one central site

share.

The journey from first farming to a shared religion took 1 ,000 years.

Now... It was time to move on.

Once you've got the whole package, then population's beginning to take a real

kick upwards, and then you need more territory.

So you're beginning to get groups colonising new land.

Maybe they're having to modify the way they live in order to colonise as they

go, but colonising new land, so you begin to get the spread of agricultural

colonists.

Between 8 ,000 and 7 ,000 years ago, Colonizing farmers spread out from the

Middle East through Turkey and into southern Europe.

The journeys were pioneered by traders who made sea voyages in small boats.

Now the farmers set out with some seeds, a few animals, and the idea of fun.

they found a vast continent.

They faced the challenge of a new landscape and a new climate.

The forest was impenetrable, so they moved up the major rivers.

They're coming in in very small numbers into a continent that he's already

inhabited. So there are lots of people already living there, and it's not as if

there was a great frontier of movement and all the natives had been cleared out

of the way. These first farmers are really inserting themselves around the

more powerful established communities who are already present. And these

Mesolithic natives, the hunters and gatherers whose ancestors had been

there since the Ice Age, were probably there in much greater numbers.

The hunter -gatherers living here never found grains which could be farmed or

the right herd animals to domesticate.

The shift to farming just hadn't been possible.

One of the traps we have to avoid, I think, is that we shouldn't think that

people back in those times, were dumber, not so bright, not so intelligent.

So far as we know, they had brains exactly like ours. And if they survived

the conditions in which they lived, they were probably a lot smarter on their

feet than most of us are today.

Clan by clan across southern Europe, the native hunter -gatherers were

confronted by change.

By 7 ,000 years ago, the travellers were in contact with fishing people at

Lepenski Vir in Slovakia.

Here, archaeologists can see how the hunter -gatherers and farmers confronted

the challenge.

They would meet together to trade. The hunter -gatherers offered horn and furs.

The farmers brought the necessary animals and seeds to allow the Europeans

develop.

They carried the idea of farming.

Two ways of life were coming

together, transferring knowledge and forming bonds.

The explorers pressed on to find good farming land nearby.

The families became neighbours.

The hunter -gatherers would soon become farmers.

When we say farming, let's be very clear what is moving into Europe at the time,

because the image of farmers is one that has many...

contemporary resonances which are really quite irrelevant.

These are simple peasants who are using only a basic range of crops.

They were settling in small patches of land that were appropriate for growing

the crops that they brought with them and they were constantly adapting to

new environment.

But they were also changing it because they were moving into a forested

environment and forests don't allow crops to grow.

To the early farmers, the forest must have been a fearful place.

It was easy to get lost.

There were bears and wolves.

Perhaps the forest had its own spirits.

the farmers did something that would change the face of Europe forever.

They began to systematically clear the forest.

They needed to let in the sun.

They sought off in Southeast Europe with small actors of the kind that they'd

use in the Near East and as they move into the great forests of Central

you see the technology getting larger so that they can tackle these very large

standing forests.

The techniques depended on the forest.

Some places could be burned, but large amounts went down with nothing more than

stone axes.

I think you have to think of scattered patches of human occupation, often

quite distant one from another, but forming a chain of connections all the

across the continent.

So it's not as if a swathe has been cut and clear felled from coast to coast.

It's very much more that individual groups of people have set up their homes

the woodlands and are gradually expanding around these original

As these pioneers built their own way of life in Europe, they lost touch with

the Middle East.

Behind them... In the fertile crescent, the old way of life was in crisis.

Over 2 ,000 years, villagers had slowly changed the land.

Before villages got established, there was very little human impact on the

environment at all.

People were moving around. They didn't stay in one place for very long. They

didn't have the opportunity to impact the environment.

But now, as people are settled in one place...

The impacts they do have can build on each other, and they can continue to

affect the environment generation after generation after generation.

At Angazal, Rolofson found evidence of the crisis in the wooden posts that held

up their rooms.

The posts that started out at up to 60 centimeters in diameter decreased

gradually in size, and we think this reflects...

the absolute decrease in large trees that are in close proximity to Ein Gezal

itself.

Then the plaster began to suffer, even though they loved it.

It appears to be a mixture of mud and perhaps pounded chalk. I suspect that

represents, again, the lack of available fuel for the use of plaster

manufacture.

In fact, in the hearths that the people were using for cooking their food, wood

is no longer found. The remains of wood charcoal is no longer found. Instead,

they were using animal dung as the fuel.

All the available wood grew on the nearby hills.

Slowly, it became harder and harder to reach.

Eventually, the supply could not keep up.

There is a deforestation that's radiating out away from the center of

settlement and wood that should be renewable as a resource.

But now we come into this problem with goats.

One of the things that goats love, a brush, and probably the sweetest brush

there is a tablet or seedling.

And so this is an irreversible deforestation. As long as you keep goats

those trees are never going to grow back.

For the first time, human communities were destroyed by environmental

which they themselves had caused.

The population of Ein Gazal dropped, it plummeted from what may have been its

height at 3 ,000, perhaps even more, down to several hundred people.

Towns like Ein Gazal were finally abandoned.

The archaeological record almost disappears after two and a half thousand

of settlement.

Many of the survivors were forced to become nomadic herders ranging across

exposed highlands.

It would take another thousand years before farmers found a way to survive in

this landscape again.

In Europe, the advancing farmers were still trying to use methods from the

Middle East, but this world was very different.

A lot of the technologies needed to be rethought.

You needed to work out ways of constructing houses purely out of timber

of out of the mud that you'd used previously.

You needed to work out ways of dealing with dense forests.

As they moved north, they moved into a European climate.

The seasons were much more extreme.

Here, farming seemed to be impossible.

For a thousand years, they had no answer to winter.

They could go no further.

Finally, they succeeded, breaking through with a complete rethink of their

farming methods.

They realised that timing was critical.

and worked out exactly when to plant, how to grow and harvest before the

They learned how to use poorer soils.

So now farming is spreading to a whole range of soils which are not so

productive, and therefore you need to clear more and more and more of the

woodland in order to get the same sorts of yield from these poorer soils.

And so the plough arrived as a solution to a problem.

With a plough, the farmers could cultivate much larger areas.

It dug deeper to turn over these heavy northern soils.

It was a new and uniquely European farming lifestyle.

And it spread with amazing speed.

I think one of the reasons why it seems to spread so rapidly, it is

astonishingly fast, it's like dropping a match.

in a pile of dry hay.

And the dry hay is the problem, the fact that the farmers are having to

cultivate more and more land with their own efforts.

They changed so much, they created a new way of life.

Archaeologists call them the Longhouse People.

They lived together with their animals in these huge communal buildings.

Massive forest timbers, whole trees held up the roof.

Their possessions revealed a new kind of conformity. They all used one kind of

axe.

They had one style of pottery incised with lime.

Perhaps it was the only way for Stone Age farmers to absorb so much change and

finally adapt to a new landscape.

It was these longhouse people who perfected the use of the most European

animals, the dairy cow.

In only 300 years, farmers had spread east to Russia.

and west to northern France.

The continent was dotted with cleared fields.

The face of Europe had changed forever.

As they moved further north, the farmers found new groups of hunter -gatherers.

They had plenty of food in a hard climate where the farmers struggled.

These northern people had studied their world for 5 ,000 years.

They left little behind but their graves.

In Denmark, at Vedbeck, is a cemetery with 25 bodies.

They lie on the antlers of deer.

This woman died in childbirth.

Beside her, with a piece of flint, the baby lies on a swan's wing.

These people show no influence from the Middle East.

They retain their own hunter -gatherer culture.

The dead lie as they have been allowed to decay.

Their skulls remain with the things they loved in life.

These hunter -gatherers were able to coexist with the farmers.

They were useful to each other.

It seems that farmers and the last hunter -gatherers probably lived side by

for much longer than we previously thought, and all sorts of relationships

have developed between them.

But as the farmers became predominant, so the remnant hunters must have melted

away to join the farming populations. That was where the excitement was.

But the hunter -gatherers were creative and curious people.

They too could work out how to adapt farming to their particular landscape.

There's very little evidence that these two cultures clashed violently.

Mostly, they taught each other.

Europe wasn't that full. There were plenty of opportunities for people to

land to farm.

It was that the advantage slowly went from...

being a hunter and gatherer up in the hills to being down on the plain with

rest of the farmers, exchanging things with them, interacting with them, and

enjoying the excitement of human contact and being part of a larger group.

Ultimately, the decision was about food.

The hunter -gatherers abandoned a life with the fear of hungry times for the

secure harvests of settled farming.

Infusing, farmer and hunter created the culture which started our Western way of

life.

With their new energy, they achieved something extraordinary together.

They built the great monument of Standing Stone.

Their meditation into the mysteries of life and death.

land and spirit.

But this too would pass.

Another wind of change was coming from the Middle East.