© Peter Watson 2017 invention of the wheel, and then of the chariot, and the hardened bronze sword, leading to the great age of warfare, creating palace states. This narrative is no longer tenable. Before we go on it is worth pointing out that, obviously enough, no one can ever have seen a woman giving birth to a bull. Such an image, therefore, must have referred to a mystery to which Neolithic people gave a symbolic reckoning. In other words, birth was still a mystery. The best explanation for this has come from those who point out that the moon, at certain stages in its monthly cycle, resembles in shape the horns of bulls and this, combined with the disturbing occurrence of menstruation, may have convinced ancient people that some spirit from bulls, say, entered women to make them pregnant. Four phases. More recent discoveries, however, have confirmed that so-called female figurines are nothing of the kind. They are either male, indeterminate sexually, or bears. Instead, four phases are now recognized in this time-frame. The first is still zoomorphism, in the Natufian culture. The second is the woman and the bull in the Khiamian culture; the third is a proliferation of male figures, many with erect penises, and animals with erect penises, in later Göbekli Tepe and early Çatalhöyük culture, and fourth, a similar proliferation of female figures in the later Çatalhöyük levels in the seventh millennium BC. The identification of these four phases has vastly transformed our understanding of the Neolithic, as we shall now see.  I should make it plain what I mean by the current orthodoxy. The current orthodoxy is a description of what life was like in the Neolithic Revolution, a description of the man changes archaeologists think are important. But it is a description rather than an explanation, in the sense that, beyond the fact that people moved into a settled life, there is no overarching or totalizing theory as to how or why life was organized in the way that it was, if indeed it was organized. So, in a sense, what follows immediately below is in some ways no more than a list of the main observations/conclusions drawn from the excavations. Only after this do I offer my version, which does suggest an overarching theory as to why life took the form that it did in the years in question.