© Peter Watson 2017 Remember this, as we go along. That there is at the moment no overall theory as to why life took the form that it did: only a description of the main developments, the main changes, that took place at that time.  In more detail, the current orthodoxy has it that there were settled villages as early as the 11th - millennium BC but that full domestication didn’t occur until the 9th . Even as late as Göbekli Tepe, wild and dangerous animals were the order of the day, recorded in their art, and the economy was based on wild resources. But it was at this location and around this time that there was a change in symbolism, one that indicated a new centrality of the human form, ‘dominating and dwarfing the world of wild animals.’ Suddenly, in the 9th millennium, we see monumental monoliths within ceremonial structures and/or communal houses. On the large stones are carvings of wild animals with human arms, the important point being that the symbolic world of animal spirits is more and more dominated by human figures. In Çatalhöyük we also see more concern with ancestors. Excavators found adult men and women with their heads removed after burial and the special placing of skulls in the foundation of buildings. They even found a plastered male skull in the arms of an adult female. ‘It seems possible that the process of removing and circulating human heads created ancestors that could communicate with the world of animal spirits as well as be communicated with by humans (in the caring for and replastering of skulls).’ The art from Göbekli also shows a headless body with an erect penis associated with birds. At Çatalhöyük animals with an erect penis are found at levels V and III. In the art too there is an increasing fascination with body parts – buttocks, breasts and navels, very often protruding navels. Navels are also associated with spiral meander motifs. ‘Seen from this perspective the human form is everywhere at the site. It has reached a new centrality that does indeed suggest a new conception of human agency, less reciprocal and more dominant in the world of symbols.’ Alongside this in Çatalhöyük we see the development of a ‘house society’. By now the large round houses of earlier cultures have come out of the ground and been reshaped as rectangular dwellings, a most intriguing change. (This is seen most clearly at Muyrebet where the houses come completely out of the ground.) Many of these rectangular houses endured for