First Civilizations

Viewed from space,

it's easy to see the impact of civilization.

Every cluster of light is another city...

Millions of strangers

coexisting, cooperating,

sharing ideas.

The city is civilization.

But why are we compelled to live in such large groups?

What are the advantages of city life?

Cities act almost like collective brains,

where you have access to the viewpoints and talents of millions of people.

If you want your city to be successful,

you need people to be there.

You have to give them a piece of the pie.

These people were bursting with ingenuity,

and this really goes to show how the city

is the engine of invention.

We didn't always live this way.

For 99% of our time on earth,

humans stayed among friends and relatives

in small, mobile bands.

But then...

We settled down, grew food,

worshiped gods...

Fought battles,

wrote stories,

sold goods, and built cities.

This is the story of that transition,

stepping-stones on the road to civilization.

It's a story set across the globe

in the middle east,

central America,

Southern Asia...

All of them seedbeds of civilization.

Here, our ancestors wrote the blueprint

by which we still live our lives.

This is where the modern world began.

The world's earliest civilization

emerged in the middle east.

It was here, 12,000 years ago,

we started on a journey that would lead

to the cities of today.

There have been no civilizations without cities,

no cities

without civilization.

And the spark was lit here,

in Southern Turkey,

at a place called Gobekli Tepe.

Over the last 20 years,

archaeologists have discovered

more than a hundred t-shaped stone pillars,

erected in up to 20 circles.

The site is currently closed

while Turkish authorities build a roof to protect it.

But nearby,

researchers can examine a full-size replica,

a duplicate of the ancient structure.

Archaeologist Jens Notroff

believes he knows why Gobekli Tepe was built.

There are strong hints that it was used as a gathering place,

where several groups of hunters and gatherers

from the surrounding landscapes were meeting there

for occasional feasts and rituals.

We've found a lot of bones, actually,

oryx and gazelle bones, in particular.

And you could imagine that alcohol played a role,

so there are certain hints that even beer was consumed

and, personally, I don't see why dancing and music

shouldn't play a role here as well.

Hundreds of people would meet here,

usually in late summer or early fall,

and stay for a few weeks.

For mobile groups, it's very important

to regularly meet

just to exchange information, maybe goods,

and most importantly, marriage partners

to keep the gene pool of the group fresh.

What's different at Gobekli Tepe is that they somehow started

to decide to Mark these meeting places with monuments,

leaving an impression in the landscape,

basically saying, "we are here."

As well as building these giant pillars,

the people at Gobekli Tepe decorated them

with elaborate carvings.

If you think of the cave art of the oldest stone age...

The famous cave paintings from France and Spain, for example...

You immediately have pictures in your mind of animals, a lot of animals.

Human beings are rarely depicted,

and if so, they are rather small.

Here at Gobekli Tepe, there are still animals present,

like this fox here,

and while it looks rather big, it dwarfs

compared to the background it is projected onto,

and that is the t-shaped pillars which are so characteristic for Gobekli Tepe.

And actually, we can recognize these t-shaped pillars

as anthropomorphic, as humanlike beings.

You can see that we have arms

and hands depicted in relief,

and even pieces of clothing, like a loincloth

hanging down from a belt.

What is impressing here is their sheer monumentality,

the size of 5.5 meters of these central pillars.

I could imagine that they maybe represent important ancestors,

so they are meant to depict something bigger, something more special, I think.

The first stones were put in place at Gobekli Tepe

almost 12,000 years ago.

The site is more than twice as old as Stonehenge

or the Egyptian pyramids.

But why go to the effort of building a monument?

The attracting factor was the social aspect,

so people were gathering for a feast, and while they were there,

they were starting to cooperatively construct these monuments,

which were also part of the social aspect of the feast.

So it's connected; You can't separate it, actually.

It's all part of the same event.

Feasting and construction activity goes hand-in-hand.

I think it's very important to stress

that the community aspect

of this cooperative work

is like the glue putting... Holding together

the whole society of these hunter-gatherers.

Here, before the emergence of civilization,

people were expressing a basic urge...

To be together, to be social.

That same urge leads to the mega-cities of today.

Tokyo is the world's most populous city.

38 million people

living next to each other,

on top of each other,

side by side.

Just as at Gobekli Tepe,

we crave company.

We want to be social.

Evolutionary psychologist Michael Muthukrishna

believes sociability is at the heart of civilization.

Being social is fun.

We get to hang out together, we tell jokes,

we swap gossip, but being social is much more than that.

It's the primary way that we transmit knowledge and information.

The more people that you have access to, the better the selection

of ideas at your disposal, and the more you can recombine into something brand-new.

This is the key to cultural evolution:

Someone thinks of something,

someone else adapts it to a brand-new environment,

someone incrementally improves on it.

Copying, recombining, and learning from each other...

This is what humans are good at,

and this is the key to our intelligence.

The most important requirement of any civilization

is to feed its people.

It's impossible to create cities

without a reliable supply of food.

Back in the period we're talking about here,

people were mostly still mobile hunter-gatherers...

So where they're occasionally staying seasonally in the same place,

but usually where they're roaming the landscape

and living from what nature actually delivered to them,

following game, gathering foods and plants and nuts and so on.

To stay longer at one place,

you certainly have to go a step further,

to not only take from nature,

but control the environment, create your own food.

20 miles from Gobekli Tepe

grows a type of wild grass

found only in this region,

a strain of wheat.

10,000 years ago,

hunter-gatherers here took a giant leap.

They started cultivating the wheat,

selecting the best seeds,

planting...

Nurturing...

Harvesting.

This is known as domestication.

What happens to wheat once you started domesticating it

is you actually changed the plant.

So you are encouraging specific characteristics you see an advantage in,

like less brittleness or bigger seeds.

So you're creating a new form of the plant, which is not anymore wild, but domesticated.

We are discussing gene-manipulated food these days

as if it was something new, but actually we're doing this

since the very beginning of domestication.

The feasting activity here and the need to supply these feasts with food,

in my opinion, triggered a new development

which subsequently led to the domestication of wheat,

and finally to farming.

Farming was the greatest invention of the ancient world,

a catalyst for civilization,

essential for city life,

and farming spread around the globe.

Wheat is now eaten

by 2 1/2 billion people across the world...

A staple food of civilization.

For cities to emerge,

people had to settle down.

Farming a patch of land,

you need to tend to it on a year-round basis.

It becomes home.

375 miles east of Gobekli Tepe

lies one of the oldest farming villages in the world,