Awesome history

God: a Human History
by Reza Aslan

Halfway through I realized I wasn't very interested in the main theme of this book, which is about the humanization or de-humanization of the concept of God over the centuries. But I was absolutely mesmerized by his report on the scientific conversation about why humans made the switch from hunting-gathering to farming--

As the Israeli historian Yuval Harari observes, the bodies of Homo sapiens were adapted to running after game, not to clearing land and plowing fields. Surveys of ancient human skeletons show just how brutal the transition to agriculture was. Farmers were more susceptible than hunters to anemia and vitamin deficiency. The caught more infectious diseases and died younger. They had worse teeth and more broken bones. ...in the first few thousand years of the Neolithic Revolution, humans lost an average of six inches in height, largely as a result of their inadequate diet.

So why did they do it?  An old theory says that climate changes at the end of the last ice age (11,700 years ago) forced humans to learn to farm and herd. But the change in climate was slow, while the human transition appears to have occurred quickly. Other old theories suggest that population pressure or over hunting forced mankind to devise alternate sources for food. But the archeological record supports none of these hypotheses.

The trouble with most of these theories is that they are based on the widely held assumption that agriculture came first, and permanent settlement followed as a result.... However, the discovery of Gobekli Tepe and other ancient sites built by hunter-gatherers across the Levant has turned this idea on its head. We now know that permanent settlements came first, and then, many years later, farming arose.

The archeological site at Gobekli Tepe, north of Urfa in Turkey, reveals the earliest religious temple we know of, built sometime between 12,500 to 10,000 BCE.  It predates agriculture, the domestication of animals, Stonehenge, the pyramids, even the invention of the wheel. Semi-nomadic Stone Age hunter-gatherers wearing animal skins carried and carved limestone pillars on the top of a hill, with no nearby water sources and no nearby settlements. Some of the pillars are thought to represent stylized human figures; they are often covered with carvings of predatory animals. It appears to have been a sacred place exclusively for the performance of religious ceremonies.

Constructing these monuments would have brought people together in groups much larger than the typical hunter-gatherer band.  Did we fall captive to, as he puts it:

 an unconscious cognitive impulse to fashion the divine in our image--to give it our soul.

And did our need to build and hold ceremony around the divine shapes give rise to all that followed: cities, priesthoods, farming, and domestication of animals?

A National Geographic article says that scientists now believe that one center of agriculture arose in southern Turkey, well within trekking distance of Göbekli Tepe, at exactly the time the temple was at its height. From that article:

Some of the first evidence for plant domestication comes from Nevali Çori (pronounced nuh-vah-LUH CHO-ree), a settlement in the mountains scarcely 20 miles away. Like Göbekli Tepe, Nevali Çori came into existence right after the mini ice age, a time archaeologists describe with the unlovely term Pre-pottery Neolithic (PPN). Nevali Çori is now inundated by a recently created lake that provides electricity and irrigation water for the region. But before the waters shut down research, archaeologists found T-shaped pillars and animal images much like those Schmidt would later uncover at Göbekli Tepe. Similar pillars and images occurred in PPN settlements up to a hundred miles from Göbekli Tepe.

I'm not really competent to speak to the author's scholarship or the strength of his theories, but I will note that his writing is cautious and his bibliography is extensive and detailed. This book isn't the final word--and I'm sure he would agree with that--on the matter. But it's got a lot to say.