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03:04Now although this axe is all that they left us, for me it says as much as a letter or
03:10a poem.
03:11There's a sense of beauty here and perhaps a curiosity about why things are as they are.
03:17And that's what fascinates me. Recorded history only goes back 5,000 years and I want to know what happened
03:24before that.
03:26We're going to be going on a quest, a journey backwards through 2 million years of prehistory to give a
03:33voice to our Stone Age ancestors.
03:40It's in the Middle East that conventional history begins, with the dawn of writing around 3,100 BC.
03:48That's where we'll start too, though our journey will take us not forwards but back in time.
03:56Architecture, mathematics, medicine and writing, the benchmarks of civilisation.
04:05In Egypt and neighbouring Mesopotamia they seem to appear out of thin air some 5,000 years ago.
04:13And wherever there is a vacuum, a thousand wacky theories become bestsellers that the Egyptians got their knowledge from visiting
04:21astronauts or from some vanished super race.
04:27The truth is simple but breathtaking. The knowledge of the Egyptians didn't come out of nowhere. It came from other
04:36human beings who'd lived before them.
04:40For me, the evolution of the pyramids themselves gives a small clue to the bigger picture.
04:46But we have to know how to read the evidence of the stones.
04:50What we need to do is look beneath the surface. And we can do that because the facing that once
04:55covered the pyramids has crumbled away.
04:58And the structure underneath reveals the true historical background to the civilisation of ancient Egypt.
05:08What we need to do is look beneath the surface finish of the Great Pyramid.
05:11Beneath the surface finish of the Great Pyramid, the separate layers of its construction are obvious.
05:17Going back just a hundred years earlier, we find out where that building technique came from.
05:25This is the Step Pyramid at the City of the Dead at Saqqara. Just as this was the forerunner of
05:32the Great Pyramid, so it too had something which came before it.
05:41And just two hundred years earlier, we find the basic building block for them all.
05:47This is the foundation upon which all the pyramids were built.
05:51The mastaba, or bench tomb, appears from the first dynasty. And without it, none of the architectural wonders of Egypt
05:59would have been possible.
06:03The tombs of the pharaohs didn't appear overnight. They developed and grew over hundreds of years.
06:09And what is true of the pyramids applies on a much bigger scale to the whole of Egyptian civilisation.
06:16It sits at the meeting point of many layers of knowledge that stretch all the way down through prehistory.
06:22It wasn't aliens or super beings from the lost continent of Atlantis that helped the Egyptians build the pyramids.
06:30They taught themselves, building on the knowledge of earlier generations.
06:36To seek out the roots of human ingenuity, we need to embark on a journey.
06:41A journey that begins at the dawn of history and takes us back through an immeasurable expanse of time.
06:54From their earliest beginnings in Africa, humankind had been on the move.
07:00For more than two million years, they'd been hunters and gatherers, taking food where they could find it, making their
07:07bed where they chose.
07:10But ten thousand years ago, there was a revolution.
07:29Our journey in this programme covers the five thousand years of the Neolithic or New Stone Age.
07:35This was when prehistoric people began to make permanent settlements and to farm.
07:41The repercussions of that still affect us all.
07:52Before this time, people didn't keep animals or grow crops.
07:56They ate wild plants and berries, and their meat came from whatever they could hunt and kill.
08:05But as they settled down, they began to cultivate regular harvests and breed livestock.
08:13Cereal and milk, bacon and eggs, bread and butter, they're all the gifts of our Neolithic ancestors.
08:20They were innovators.
08:22In England, their genius would produce Stonehenge.
08:25And long before the Egyptians, they'd already built monuments that challenge us, even today.
08:44These are the oldest stone buildings anywhere in the world.
08:50Prehistoric temples on the tiny Mediterranean islands of Malta and Gozo.
08:58This is the first landfall in our journey back through time.
09:06The first settlers here made the 50-mile crossing from Sicily around 5000 BC.
09:13They led the Egyptians in sailing and navigation, and they had agriculture too.
09:19They brought cattle, sheep and seeds for wheat and barley.
09:25This was to be their new world.
09:37Today, Malta is one of the most densely populated spaces in Europe.
09:43Back then, it was covered in undergrowth and was home to red deer and bear.
09:52That's all gone.
09:55Soil erosion has laid bare the limestone that is the island's bedrock.
10:05It's from this limestone that the prehistoric settlers of Malta built their temples,
10:12using massive stones weighing up to 50 tonnes each.
10:20They were building 1,000 years before the Egyptians, but matched them for sophistication without the use of any metal
10:28tools.
10:31For pickaxes, they used antlers.
10:34And for their other implements, they imported hard stone from abroad,
10:38flints from Sicily, and greenstone axe heads all the way from the Alps.
10:48These people combine genius with true resourcefulness,
10:52but they're so mysterious that we still only know them as the temple builders.
11:17So how could a Neolithic people who just had stone tools and bone and antler picks at their disposal,
11:23make megalithic buildings on this scale?
11:25Well, the answer is that's not all they had.
11:28They had a lot of technical know-how.
11:29And one of their most ingenious ideas was using round stones such as these,
11:34putting the slabs on top and then moving them around like this.
11:37This is far better than using rollers, because with rollers you can only go in straight lines,
11:42whereas they were able to manoeuvre in all kinds of ways.
11:45So by this method they were able to move even the bigger stones.
11:53So it was by using this technique that even huge megaliths like this could actually be put up.
11:59And you can see here there's a socket.
12:01And one of these round stones would have been in place here originally.
12:07But this stone actually shows us something else too.
12:10It shows us the true height of the temple as it must have been in ancient times.
12:16Because what we see here is only half the story.
12:20All the plaster working, the painting, the woodworking, it hasn't survived.
12:27But the fact that this much has survived is more than adequate testimony to the master masons of prehistory.
12:39It's estimated that temples like the one at Hajarim were three times higher than the remains we see today.
12:48But 5,000 years of exposure leaves a lot to the imagination.
12:58Some stones, like this one, do look distinctly phallic.
13:02But it's kind of an occupational hazard among archaeologists and anthropologists.
13:06Because they do tend to see willies pretty much everywhere.
13:18The temple ruins are the bare bones of an entire culture.
13:23One that was alive and vibrant.
13:26Traces of pigment and plaster show the interior walls were smooth and painted red.
13:31With carvings of plants, animals and spirals.
13:35Their religion was no flash in the pan.
13:38They were building and using these sacred places for 2,000 years.
13:47The temple was for the whole community, but it's not quite that simple.
13:51And in fact, these post holes here reveal the true story.
13:56Because it's quite obvious that some kind of screen was put across here,
13:59so that the community outside couldn't see the secret rites being performed by the priesthood here in the Holy of
14:06Holies.
14:11And who were these secret ceremonies intended for?
14:22This is one big earth mother.
14:29The image to which this Stone Age people prayed was not that of God the Father, but God the Mother.
14:35The giver of food, the earth herself.
14:41Her fertility could mean the difference between feast and famine.
14:46Everything had a purpose which was embodied in their architecture.
14:57One has to remove from one's mind the idea that these were primitive people.
15:03We have here, what I would like to think, is an architect's drawing.
15:09Not exactly computer generated, but pretty sophisticated for its time.
15:13And we have a pretty clear indication of the language of the architecture of the time, which these people were
15:22using.
15:23Now we can see that in terms of the plan, there seems to be a relationship with the earth goddess
15:28herself.
15:30The idea of walking through, into the body.
15:34Look at these walls here.
15:36The way the stones are actually put together.
15:39The sheer size of these individual slabs.
15:42And the precision of a doorway, carved out of one monolithic stone.
15:48I mean, this is extremely sophisticated and it's a magnificent, I mean, even it's sheer tactile.
15:56I mean, I feel as a contemporary architect, I want to touch these walls and listen to the wisdom of
16:02these stones.
16:03One can almost have an energy of learning, coming back, something which we have lost in time.
16:18It isn't time that separates us from the temple builders, it's the way we look at the world.
16:25Some of their limestone figurines show people we could almost recognise.
16:31Others, like these two fat ladies on a couch, seem a celebration of life.
16:36But we are not like them.
16:41In their world, no trace has been found of weapons or warfare.
16:50The key to their mindset is in the architecture.
16:53It's ruled, not by straight lines, but by curves.
17:01The shape of the temples reflects that of the earth goddess and her endless cycle of birth, life, death and
17:09rebirth.
17:20The earth goddess guided the temple builders in life and in death, she embraced them.
17:29Beneath the modern streets, a chance discovery revealed the depth of their ancient beliefs.
17:41What happened here was that at about the turn of the century, the whole thing collapsed.
17:48What came to light was a mass burial chamber, a hypogeum of Hal Safliani.
17:56The goddess is sleeping, her skirts gathered round her, an image of serenity and peace.
18:07It took 1100 years to make this place.
18:11Almost 2000 tonnes of rock chiselled out by hand.
18:16It could hold 6000 bodies and it mirrors the temples above ground in every detail.
18:25You can almost feel the spirit of the temple builders down here.
18:30The red spirals on the tomb walls make it feel like a giant birth canal.
18:36In the carved chamber known as the Oracle Room, every sound seems to anticipate a response from the goddess.
18:44Here, we're in the so-called Oracle Room, and there's these remarkable remains of red ochre on the ceiling, but
18:57what's particularly curious about this room is that the natural echoes have actually been deliberately contrived in certain areas.
19:07There seems to be a very conscious effort to produce certain effects, particularly with the carving out of this niche.
19:30So what we have here is the ultimate space within the womb of Mother Earth herself.
19:44If you were commissioned to produce something like this today, how would you go about it?
19:50I don't think we have the spirit to produce this.
19:53I mean, we might have the technology, but we don't have the soul.
20:00The temple builders' lives are as tantalising and elusive as the echoes in their tomb.
20:09What were people at that time like as flesh and blood?
20:23What I've always dreamed of is to meet our Stone Age ancestors face to face.
20:28And now I can.
20:31To do so, I must leave Malta and travel a thousand miles north.
20:36It was from here, in the Alps, that the temple builders got their green stone axes.
20:42And it's here that I hope to find the reality of life and death for Neolithic people.
20:51The snow and ice of the Alps are a world away from the Mediterranean.
20:57But it's certain that the temple builders of Malta knew of this place.
21:03Among the tools that they imported to construct their architecture were axe heads of green alpine stone,
21:09which we know came from these mountains.
21:17Trade and travel were the lifeblood of Stone Age people, just as they are for us.
21:24On our journey back through time, we've seen how a sophisticated Neolithic civilization evolved way before the Egyptians.
21:33Now I'm looking to discover how the everyday lives of prehistoric people involve the communication of ideas.
21:42Hunters, farmers and traders were swapping thoughts on these rocky heights as early as 6,000 years ago.
21:50Modern travel has come for a special reason.
21:54This small Italian town, Bolzano, has become home to one of the world's greatest prehistoric wonders.
22:07You will encounter him for the first time.
22:11It isn't gold or treasure, it's the body of an ordinary man, who died on a journey 5,000 years
22:19ago.
22:24It was in 1991, 10,000 feet up, that the melting of an alpine glacier brought the Iceman back to
22:32light.
22:33He lay face down, his left arm locked across his chest, as if asleep.
22:40The ice didn't release him lightly.
22:42It had preserved him so well, that at first he was assumed to be a modern climber.
22:49To free the corpse, the rescue team resorted to ice picks and brute force.
23:02Only a laboratory examination would reveal the truth.
23:06The victim had died 3,300 years BC.
23:23They nicknamed him Urtsi, after the slopes where he was found.
23:28And now people throughout the Alps visit him.
23:33He's on show in a specially built refrigeration chamber, to recreate the conditions of the glacier that preserved him.
23:49To meet Urtsi is an unforgettable experience.
23:54He may have lost his hair, and his features are lopsided from the pressure of the ice.
23:59But his humanity is very moving.
24:04For me, this is what makes him special.
24:07He's just like us.
24:19His clothes were well preserved.
24:22A cap, tunic, cloak and shoes, fashioned from woven grass, fur and leather.
24:29They showed signs of being carefully repaired.
24:33He was a man well used to travelling.
24:36And he carried the essential minimum.
24:39An axe, a dagger and a bow, its arrows still unfinished.
24:45In his backpack he had a supply of grains and berries.
24:49And for his campfire, fresh embers wrapped in damp leaves.
24:58But what could his body tell us?
25:01After 5,000 years, Urtsi finally got a post-mortem.
25:10Some 600 separate tests, revealing every physical ailment.
25:16They established he was around 46 when he died.
25:20He had broken ribs and frostbite.
25:23But there were also signs of more long-standing problems.
25:26Rheumatic pains in his back and hips.
25:31And there remained one mystery.
25:33A series of tattoos on Urtsi's back and legs.
25:38To the investigators, the streaks and crosses appeared almost random.
25:43But one specialist recognised them immediately.
25:47They suggest that Urtsi's world had a sophisticated medical knowledge
25:51that was previously thought to originate only in the Far East.
25:56Acupuncture.
26:02If Urtsi would come with his rheumatic problems, today in my praxis, I would treat him nearly 90% of
26:12the same points.
26:14So when did you first realise that Urtsi had actually received acupuncture?
26:19It seems very strange to me.
26:20We always think of acupuncture in relation to China.
26:23Exactly. It was very strange for me too.
26:26We have seen the tattoo marks on his skin, on his backside, but also in the ankle area of his
26:35feet.
26:36So I realised that these are not any points on the body, but these have been very exact acupuncture points.
26:44We know Urtsi through x-rays and laboratory experiments very, very exactly what diseases he had.
26:53And we know that mainly he had rheumatic problems in his back area, in his hip area.
27:00And he has been treated with local points, which are quite good.
27:05But the very interesting and astonishing part is that he has had needles in far away points.
27:14And these far away points are master points against pain and master points against rheumatic arthritis.
27:22What are your feelings about Urtsi from your point of view as a medical man?
27:26I think Urtsi must be admired.
27:29He was high up in the mountain area and still he must have suffered from rheumatic arthritis, but he was
27:38a fighter.
27:39So I am full of admiration for him, but even more for his doctor.
27:46He did not only treat his patient, but he gave him a sort of a letter to the next doctor
27:54who would treat him.
27:56That was the sense behind the tattoos to show the next one where the points are to be treated.
28:02So it is a sort of a letter of the prehistoric age.
28:08A doctor's letter written on the patient's skin.
28:12Primitive or simply ingenious.
28:17Urtsi's people had a knowledge of acupuncture that is still sophisticated today.
28:22But they were imaginative and down to earth in passing it on.
28:32The urge to communicate is unstoppable.
28:36Throughout prehistory people use signs and pictures to share their thoughts.
28:41When one to one just isn't enough, we improvise.
28:49So why should writing be different?
28:52Its first appearance 5,000 years ago is so important that for conventional history it marks the dawn of civilization.
29:00Yet, we are told, this was one invention that appeared out of thin air.
29:06I have always thought this was dubious and recent work now shows that writing has prehistoric roots going back 10
29:13,000 years.
29:17It's beginnings lie in these simple clay tokens used by Neolithic farmers to settle their business.
29:25We have to say, tokens lead to writing.
29:31You and I write every day with the alphabet.
29:35But we can trace the origins of communication to these tokens.
29:49So, cones and spheres stood for measures of grain.
30:00This was a very simple but great invention because it was precise record keeping.
30:09If we make a deal, I tell you two bushels or I tell you two litters of grain, two little
30:16baskets of grain.
30:17When the harvest comes, you have your two tokens, I have my two tokens.
30:21There is no quarrel possible. You know, it is specific.
30:26What was to stop people cheating on the deal?
30:29At that time, the security system is interesting.
30:33It is just taking a ball of clay, you know, making a cup of clay.
30:42So, you say two, you will give me two baskets of grain at the harvest.
30:49I put those in.
30:51It was a perfect way to separate those tokens.
30:56They cannot be lost, they cannot be spilled.
30:58Then you would have your set, I would have my set and there was no counterfeiting.
31:09Now, we have to mark on the outside what he is putting inside so that you can at all times
31:19read the impression
31:23and know how many tokens of what kind are in there.
31:31But then it became obvious that you could just do just as well by taking a ball of clay,
31:41make it into a solid cushion like this, a tablet, this is a tablet and mark on the outside.
31:51This is your first tablet, two baskets of grain.
32:00It was a great invention. It was writing.
32:11If writing does mark the dawn of civilization, the sun was up while the Egyptians were fast asleep.
32:24The beginning of writing has always been an artificial barrier between us and prehistoric people.
32:31It's time to wake up to the flow of living history that connects them to us.
32:4010,000 years can blur the detail.
32:43They might see little connection between their token system and the uses to which we put communication.
32:51And the strangeness of the settlements we choose to live in would be quite incomprehensible.
32:58Yet without their momentous decision to settle down, we wouldn't be living in the way we do today.
33:06So how did we get to be here?
33:12Today, 75% of the developed world lives in cities.
33:17We think of it as normal and call city life civilized.
33:21But for Neolithic people 10,000 years ago, the notion of settling in one place was a daring and bold
33:28experiment.
33:31For two million years, our ancestors and theirs had treated the whole world as their living space.
33:37So how did they adapt to this new life?
33:44To look for answers, we must turn to the volcanic landscape of central Turkey and the prehistoric people who chose
33:51to make their homes in its shadow.
34:05To be continued...
34:12To be continued...
34:14To be continued...
34:23The excavation at Chatelhoiuk has unearthed the most spectacular example of Stone Age civilization ever found.
34:31Layer upon layer of remains of what was once a vibrant, Neolithic new town of 10,000 people.
34:39This was the very first time so many people had ever lived so tightly packed together.
34:45They spanned two worlds.
34:46On the one hand, they were developing new ways of living.
34:49Keeping domestic animals.
34:52Growing crops.
34:53And on the other hand, they were maintaining an ancient lifestyle of hunting and gathering.
35:01A nomadic lifestyle is no preparation for setting up a city.
35:06They had no blueprint for their new life, but lived in a densely packed honeycomb of mud brick houses.
35:12Any space between the buildings they used for dumping waste and refuse.
35:17There were no streets and no conventional doorways.
35:21The only way home was through a hole in the roof, which also served as the chimney.
35:27Inside the dark interiors, the archaeologists found living spaces that were scrupulously clean.
35:34Each year, the walls and floors were re-plastered with white clay to become a canvas for astonishing images.
35:44Some of the abstract patterns still appear in the work of local weavers.
35:51Others are dark and dreamlike.
35:54Bulls' heads, hunting scenes, headless bodies.
36:02But it was beneath the floors that they made the most disturbing fights.
36:06Because it was here, under the living room, that the people of Châtel-Huyuk buried their dead.
36:19The word Huyuk means mound.
36:22Châtel-Huyuk is a mound made up of many generations of prehistoric people.
36:26For a thousand years they lived, died and were buried beneath the feet of their families.
36:34The town didn't expand outwards, instead it grew upwards.
36:38Old houses were demolished and new ones built above them.
36:42Their foundations resting on the graves of the ancestors.
36:48The earth bound the living to the dead.
36:55If the people of Châtel-Huyuk seem strange, it's because we don't have the keys to unlock their minds.
37:01In their fragile new world, survival depended on continuity and reproduction.
37:12It would have been a harsh life compared to what we're used to today.
37:16But what we find is that the newly born and the infants make up the majority of our skeleton remains.
37:25We discovered this small baby skeleton and we found that it was surprisingly undisturbed.
37:33But specially, we found the bracelets in situ around the wrists of the baby.
37:39And these bone beads around the anklets showing that they would have been decorated as well.
37:47And do you think that these necklaces and bracelets were worn in life as well?
37:52Yes, it's possible that they were the few items that were theirs for the very short period that they were
38:00alive.
38:01And it may have been a ritual to have been buried with these personal items.
38:12In a community with many infant deaths, fertility is prized.
38:21Nearly 4,000 years before the temple builders of Malta, the people of Châtel-Huyuk built their religion around a
38:27mother goddess.
38:29She spans the two worlds of the hunter and the farmer.
38:34Seated on a throne, she gives birth whilst holding a leopard on either side.
38:43As in Malta, this was a peaceful society.
38:47The enthroned goddess suggests that women may have had the dominant role.
38:51While men are most often shown hunting.
38:57This was a long period of transition.
39:00Men and women may have responded differently.
39:05Bone analysis suggests they might even have had different diets,
39:09with men getting more of their protein from wild animals,
39:12whilst women took theirs from the new domesticated breeds.
39:18As in Malta, this was a long period of time.
39:19Intriguingly, some male skeletons had their heads removed,
39:22reflecting the bizarre imagery inside the houses,
39:26where vultures tear the flesh from headless corpses.
39:34Whatever happened here was crucial in the development of settled communities.
39:38But 9,000 years on...
39:46How can we make sense of it?
39:49The life of the people who lived here is, at the same time, alien and familiar.
39:55Because, just like us, they had their families and they had their neighbours.
39:59They also swept their floors, and they plastered their walls.
40:03They even emptied their rubbish bins, just like we do.
40:06But their religion, with its strange and wonderful symbols,
40:09is something much more difficult for us to grasp.
40:12What we have to understand, is not only did they build their houses out of the earth,
40:18but their whole sense of the spiritual world was formed and moulded by it.
40:30This was a people with a mystical bond to their Mother Earth.
40:35Their houses were built from mud brick, because the marshy plains offered nothing else.
40:41We don't know what brought them here, but what this Stone Age people found,
40:46was a place with no stones at all.
40:49Every piece was imported.
40:53Flint, basalt, andesite and marble, painstakingly carried from mountains 60 miles away.
41:01But there was one stone that was special to them.
41:05It may be our best clue to what made them tick.
41:08A gift from the belly of the earth itself.
41:12Obsidian.
41:20Obsidian is volcanic glass, a rare phenomenon caused by the rapid cooling of lava.
41:26It's among the hardest natural materials known to man.
41:30Here, it seems to have been charged with magical power.
41:34They made razor sharp blades, but also crafted it into mysterious objects of astonishing precision,
41:42including the world's earliest mirrors.
41:49Today, thousands of fragments of shiny black obsidian litter Schädelhäuert,
41:54all of it brought here by the people of prehistory.
41:58But we're still discovering how they worked with it.
42:05It may not look terribly interesting, but I can assure you that this material here has had me leafing up
42:10and down over the last few days.
42:14Here, for the first time, we actually had an in-situ scatter of material relating to the napping of these
42:21quite small, fine blades.
42:25And what were they using it for?
42:28Primarily cutting implements.
42:30When you have a freshly napped piece of obsidian, it's sharper than surgical steel.
42:35It's quite remarkable.
42:36You can actually play jigsaw with this material and show that some of this material joins back to each other.
42:43What astounded me was the way that they were able to make obsidian mirrors that are highly polished.
42:49How did they do that?
42:50We don't know.
42:52They are a remarkable technical achievement because, as you know, obsidian is a natural glass.
42:57As you can see here, it has a naturally polished glass surface.
43:00In the production of these mirrors, they're taking large blocks and grinding it down, and then they're managing to regain
43:06a polish.
43:07We simply don't know how it's been done.
43:13There are many layers of mystery around our ancestors at Chatelhoiuk, but obsidian cuts to the heart of them.
43:21Its volcanic origins made it a direct gift of their Mother Earth.
43:27How important that was may be seen in an extraordinary wall painting discovered on the site.
43:32It seems to show the town dominated by an erupting volcano.
43:37One problem.
43:39The Twin Peak volcano, it appears to picture, Hassan Dagh, is nowhere near the place.
43:45What we're looking at here is the first town plan in history found on one of the walls of the
43:50site.
43:52These are supposed to be the houses, and this is the twin volcanic peak of Hassan Dagh.
44:00But the fact is that the volcano is over 100 kilometres away and in fact can't really be seen from
44:06here.
44:13The only way to learn more is to go to the source of the Obsidian, the ancient volcanic region of
44:20Cappadocia.
44:25The volcanoes here are 25 million years old, ten times older than our oldest ancestors.
44:33Volcanic activity shaped this land, a thick layer of ash covered by molten lava and weathered by the wind.
44:43In this magical landscape, it's easy to understand the mystical link that the people of prehistory made between the earth,
44:51fertility and procreation.
44:58But Cappadocia is not what it seems.
45:04Backpackers come with their world in a rucksack, rather like Ötzi the Iceman.
45:09They're modern day hunter-gatherers looking for a laugh, but they only manage to patronise the past.
45:15We forget how we might appear from the perspective of prehistory.
45:22The Abba Dabba Dude.
45:27The laughs on them. The cave dwellings here have nothing to do with the Stone Age.
45:33Most were built as a refuge from war in what we call civilised times.
45:41This is the twin-peaked volcano of Hassan Dao.
45:47In the valley below, the soil is fertile.
45:50And now I'm back on the trail of the Neolithic.
45:56Here, there is another mound, or hoiuk, older than Shattelhoiuk by a full thousand years.
46:05The Shattelhoiuk was settled at the very beginning of the Neolithic Age, 8,000 years BC.
46:12The depth of the mound reflects the many generations who lived here.
46:23The site is smaller than Shattelhoiuk, but what's clear straight away is how similar it is.
46:30The houses of the same design, and were entered through the roof.
46:34Their walls were re-plastered every year, and everywhere underfoot there is obsidian.
46:45But do the connections go even further?
46:49This is the map from Shattelhoiuk, from the wall painting.
46:55Perhaps this is actually a map of this site, and not of Shattelhoiuk at all.
47:02There's quite clearly cultural links between the two settlements.
47:06So it's possible that some kind of folk memories are preserved at Shattelhoiuk,
47:11and that's why they made this painting, this representation of somewhere else.
47:18We can only speculate what such folk memories might be, but it may not be too fanciful to see the
47:25painting at Shattelhoiuk as the preservation of a powerful link between the people and their origins, of the place that
47:33their ancestors came from.
47:35And though they lived earlier than the people of Shattelhoiuk, the people of Ashukla were in no way inferior.
47:43Although Ashukla is a thousand years earlier than Shattelhoiuk, there are a lot of things in common.
47:48For example, the plastered mudrick buildings are the same, right down to the burials under the floor.
47:54But here there are some differences, because we have public areas such as this winding thoroughfare, and there's a wall
48:01made of stone surrounding the settlement.
48:04So just because this site is earlier doesn't mean we should look at it as a crude forerunner of Shattelhoiuk.
48:12Prehistory is not simply a one-way street to progress, and the further back we go, the more interesting and
48:18the more mysterious the journey becomes.
48:23Ten thousand years ago, in this place, men and women put the life of nomadic hunters behind them, and embarked
48:30on a new journey into an uncertain future.
48:33They had no idea where their experiment in settled life would lead.
48:38But while they couldn't foresee the future, prehistoric people had the humility to draw on the past, the old knowledge
48:46won by their ancestors over many thousands of years.
48:52What we today call civilization would never have been possible without the accumulated wisdom of prehistory.
49:04We have seen that before history began, there were thousands of years of Neolithic innovations.
49:09In architecture, in art, in technology and medicine.
49:14And the later civilizations built upon these.
49:18But even the Neolithic civilizations built on earlier Stone Age traditions.
49:23In order to find out what they were, we need to go back even further in time.
49:28Back to a time when the climate was much harsher.
49:32The time, we call, the Ice Age.
50:10Speaking of Misrapan stories and pes symmetriz südash.
50:10The spotlight — It seemed like to be located at Zen Age in reasons of prehistory art.
50:12The near future of creation...
50:21The Blindness is a number of millions of years ago.
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