© Peter Watson 2017 Chapter 4: The Current Orthodoxy Before we come to the new theories, we must first outline what the current view – the current orthodoxy – is. This orthodoxy is itself fairly fresh, being based on recent (1992-2016) excavations at the following archaeological sites in the Middle East, which have been thoroughly explored by leading British, American, French, Israeli and Turkish archaeologists. The sites are all located in the Middle East, an area that was near to – contiguous with – the savannah prairies, the mammoth steppe, where the reindeer had roamed. The sites, with their relevant dates are: Wadi an-Natuf 12,500-9,500 BC Pinabarsi 12,000-6,000 Boncuklu 11,000-4,000 Ain Mallaha 11,000-8,000 Khiamian 10,200-8,800 Muyrebet 10,200-8,000 Göbekli Tepe 9,130-8,800 Nevali Cori 8,400-8,100 Çatalhöyük 7,500-5,700 Ain Ghazal 7,250-5,000 We shall be examining the life-style changes that took place during this overall time frame but concentrating most on Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük, where the most work has been done and the most important changes recorded. Only the most distinctive findings are included here. An explanatory synthesis, such as it is, then follows. Insofar as it affects my argument, the previous orthodoxy (up until, say, 1994) was that the Natufian culture was much the same as hunter-gatherer culture. The art was mainly zoomorphic, containing images of mainly wild animals. Around 9,500 BC, however, during the Khiamian culture, we see the first human forms in art, which are all female – no males are recorded. Instead, the woman is paired with the bull and ‘bucrania’ (antlers, horns, teeth) are found embedded in the walls of buildings, structures which have now come out of the ground. These women, who are sometimes shown giving birth to bulls, are – or were – regarded as ‘mother goddesses’, leading to a form of ‘female monotheism’, which would last until male monotheism emerged in the Bronze Age, associated with the domestication of the horse, the