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One of the oldest New Stone Age settlements was at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia (modern Turkey). It thrived from around 6500 BC to 5650 BC. Interestingly, the people of Çatalhöyük appear to have had no fortifications or war gods — they seem to have been a truly peaceful people. They mastered textiles, basketry, and simple pottery (the potter’s wheel hadn’t been invented yet), and built rectangular, mud-brick homes with doors in the roofs (they climbed into their houses from the top like sailors entering a submarine). Other characteristics of their houses include

 Multipurpose features: Each house had two or more elevated, multipurpose platforms, one of which was always painted red. The platform served as a table, workbench, bed, and bier (a bed for corpses — in this case, skeletons). Çatalhöyük inhabitants let vultures eat the flesh off their dead before burying them. That must’ve put a damper on funeral attendance.

 Decoration: Some of the rooms in Çatalhöyük homes included paintings and sculptures. Çatalhöyük paintings frequently feature stick-form men who are usually hunting; hardly any women appear in the paintings. But the female figure shows up in Çatalhöyük sculptures with Woman of Willendorf features and dimensions (see “Flirting with Fertility Goddesses” earlier in this chapter), apparently as a fertility symbol or earth mother.

Göbekli Tepe (which means “belly hill”), a Neolithic temple or sanctuary, is an even earlier Neolithic structure in southeastern Anatolia, erected between 9500 and 8000 BC. The roughly 22-acre complex is built with elaborately carved megaliths (huge stones some over 16 feet high and weighing up to 10 tons) arranged in layered, circular formations connected by walls of small, stacked stones. But no signs of settlement exist around Göbekli Tepe, suggesting that those who created it were still hunter-gatherers. The site challenges the old assumption that humans built permanent settlements before they constructed temples. Göbekli Tepe suggests that man made places of worship predate the first villages.

In Skara Brae, a later Neolithic community (around 3000 BC) in the northerly Orkney Islands of Scotland, the homes included a fireplace, stone tanks (possibly used for storing live fish, because they were a seafaring folk), and built-in stone furniture (beds, chairs, tables, and shelves). The only art we have from Skara Brae are the simple designs carved into the stone pottery and some of the stone beds.