Çatalhöyük’s Urban Mystery
This 9,000-year-old Turkish settlement, first excavated in the 1960s, revealed a strange city without streets where residents entered homes through rooftops. The tightly packed mud-brick houses featured wall paintings of leopards and plastered bull skulls as decoration. People buried their dead beneath floors, often with jewelry, suggesting some form of ancestor worship. Climate shifts or social changes might explain why this proto-city of 8,000 people declined around 6000 BC.
