The Intimate Bond by Brian Fagan Page B

reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Syria and Turkey. Dja’de and Çayönü, both villages of the ninth millennium BCE , lie less than 250 kilometers (155 miles) apart. Between 8800 and 8200 BCE , the inhabitants relied more and more on cattle at the expense of hunting. Hundreds of fragmentary bones from the two villages may document a gradual process of domestication.
    Once domesticated, these cattle spread rapidly across Southwest Asia, a consequence, in part, of the need for nutritious grazing, and, perhaps,of trading. They may even have been tamed in northeastern China as early as 8700 BCE , but the evidence is not unequivocal. What is certain, however, is that cattle were in widespread use in China, Mongolia, and Korea by 3000 BCE , when the first cities and civilizations appeared in Mesopotamia and along the Nile. Domestic cattle abounded in the Nile Valley well before founding of Egyptian civilization in 3100 BCE and are known from sites occupied at least two thousand years earlier. Farmers brought cattle and other farm animals with them as they spread across Europe in about 5500 BCE . The humped zebu (
Bos indicus
) was domesticated, most likely in the Indus River Valley of South Asia, by about 5000 BCE and spread widely into southern China and Southeast Asia.
    â€œGoods to Think With”
    By 7500 BCE , farming villages, even some small towns, flourished over a wide area of the Near East. One of the larger settlements, Çatal Höyük, on Turkey’s Anatolian Plateau, gives us a clear portrait of the increasingly sophisticated relationships between cattle and humans. 4 Here, every aspect of daily life, whether secular or ritual, unfolded not in great public buildings, but in houses occupied for many generations. They were literally “history houses” that commemorated ancestors, lavishly decorated with wall paintings that displayed elaborate symbolism. There were paintings of humans. Dangerous animals and bulls were everywhere. Ox skulls modeled with plaster features adorned houses from their moment of first occupation. Bull’s horns projected from walls and benches. Plastered skulls of revered ancestors and ancestral burials lay under the floors. Çatal Höyük’s history houses were vibrant archives with a status that involved control of history, religion, and interaction with ancestors. They may also have played an important role in ceremonial feasts involving wild bulls that had mythical and spiritual associations. Ancestors, animal and human, protected the occupants of the house, part of a strong motif of continuity that permeated early farming societies throughout Southwest Asia, where farming life revolved around the endless passage of the seasons (see sidebar “Disengaging from Nature?”).
    Disengaging from Nature?
    Domesticating animals was most emphatically not a one-sided relationship, where people were in charge, set the conditions for taming, and then exploited their beasts. Rather, humans were participants in a broad process, part of a profound shift in the human relationship to the natural environment. Some French scholars such as Jacques Cauvin argue that farming settled people on the land and “disengaged” them from nature, making them distinctive and, as it were, on a higher plane than animals. 5 Cauvin believes that a dramatic shift in human consciousness resulted.
    There was a florescence of animal imagery just before farming began, which endured for some time, reflected in shrines like those of Göbekli Tepe and Çatal Höyük, with their routine depictions of foxes, vultures, and other ferocious beasts.
    Göbekli Tepe, in southeastern Turkey, lies on a hill where a series of circular structures were cut into the underlying limestone in about 9600 BCE . 6 They are almost cryptlike, adorned with rectangular stone pillars up to 2.4 meters (8 feet) high, bearing carvings of aurochs, gazelle, wild boar, snakes,