The site of Catal Huyuk, 32 miles south-east of Konya in the southern part of central Anatolia (present-day Turkey), is one of the most spectacular examples of Neolithic civilisation yet discovered. Covering an area of more that 20 hectares, this large Neolithic town -- some, including its excavator James Mellaart, have described it as a city--has been estimated to have supported a populaiton of 7,000 people. Founded more than 8,000 years ago, Catal Huyuk seems to have been a thriving community for a thousand years or more.
There are more than 40 Neolithic stone temples on Malta and Gozo, the second largest island in the Maltese archipelago. These examples of Maltese sacred architecture belong to the period 4500 to 2500 BC and demonstrate how a people without the use of any metal tools were able to construct monumental buildings using blocks of stone weighing as much as 50 tons.
Of equal dramatic power to the major Neolithic temples of Malta is the Hypogeum of Hal Safliene (built in stages from 3600 to 2500 BC), near the Tarxien temple. Hypogeum is the name given by archaeologists to rock-cut chamber tombs, and the complex at Hal Safflieni is a remarkable example of this kind of monument. Hal Saflieni is a conglomeration of numerous simple single tombs that have been linked by passages, stairways and subterranean halls. This labyrinthine complex covers 480 square metres and was cut into the top of a limestone hill using stone mallets and horn or antler picks. . . . As in many of the temples, female figurines have also been found in the Hypogeum. One such work of art, which has been hailed as a masterpiece, is a 12-centimetre-long terracotta figurine known as the "Sleeping Lady" of the Hypogeum (Plate V).
The Yayoi period began about 400 BC and its distinguishing features were agriculture and the use of iron, both of which were imported cultural traits from China. Thus Japan shifted directly from the Stone Age Jomon culture to an iron-using culture. . .
Renfrew suggests that the various proto-languages that are said to belong to the Nostratic group could have dispersed from the zone in which agriculture seems to have first developed, namely in the Near East and Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). In this scenario the expansion of these languages beyond the region would be directly associated with the spread of farming. The parent language, Proto-Nostratic would thus be located somewhere in the core region and obviously to a time preceding the origins of agriculture. Renfrew proposes a date of around 15,000 BP {Libra} for this ancestral language. He considered and rejected the idea that Nostratic could be traced back to the Gravettian period of the Upper Palaeolithic. The Gravettian period, around 25,000 years ago, is distinguished by both the distinctive technology of its stone tool-kits and also by its art, which is epitomised by the discovery of numberous female figurines of a broadly similar style fround across Europe from France to the Ukaraine. Both the tool technologies and these artistic objects (commonly known as Venus figurins: for further information on the importance of these objects, see Chapter l4) are sufficiently distinct for archaeologists to identify the Gravettian cultural complex to be an extremely widespread phenomenon that suggest that communication must have taken place between western and eastern Europe at this time. It is for this reason that some shared language group can be suggested for the Gravettian cultural complex. Renfrew rejected the idea that Nostratic languages might have been spoken amoung the various Gravettian communities on a number of grounds, including the fact that the Gravettian period was simply too early for the apparent emergence of Nostratic around 10,000 years later.
If any of the proposed macro-families of languages might be plausibly linked to the Gravettian, then Renfrew felt it was something akin to the Dene-Sino-Caucasian reconstruction, or Proto-Dene-Caucasian as he calls it. In this very tentative reconstruction of events, Renfrew suggests that such languages might have been spoken in various parts of Europe and northern and central Asia and then subsequently been overlain by the Nostratic languages emanating from the Near East and Anatolia. He suggests that the early language of the Sumerians (which is not one of the languages included in the Nostratic macro-family) may date back to the Upper Palaeolithic period and have provided the spoken background to what was later to be written down as the first written script some 5,000 years ago. . .Colin Renfrew has been the leading figure in bringing these linguistic findings into the sphere of archaeology and has shown that to ignore them is to miss out on a completely new tool for the prehistorian to use.
In 1969 Bordes reported that some Upper Palaeolithic artefacts of the Soutrean period (about 21,000 to 18,000 PB) had clearly been subjected to heat treatment.