"Why Settle Down? The Mystery of Communities" by Michael Balter, and "The Slow Birth of Agriculture" by Heather Pringle, in Science (Nov. 20, 1998), American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, 1200 New York Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005.

Archaeologists have long believed that the rise of farming, which occurred about 10,000 years ago, after the last Ice Age ended, led to the first human settlements. As nomads shifted away from hunting and gathering, it was thought, they needed to be near their crops and animals, and so had to stay put and form stable communities. New evidence from digs in Turkey, as well as new discoveries about ancient agriculture around the world, are casting strong doubt on the idea that agriculture and settlements emerged together in a single "Neolithic Revolution." So report Science contributing correspondent Balter and Pringle, a science writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

In recent years, an Anglo-American army of 90 excavators has descended on Çatalhöyük, a sprawling, 9,000-year-old village near the modern Turkish city of Konya, and has been slowly sifting through its multilayered remains. Discovered in 1958, Çatalhöyük was hailed initially as the world’s oldest known city, with shared institutions, a division of labor (made possible by farm surpluses), and a dependence on agriculture. But today, the archaeologists, led by Ian Hodder of Cambridge University, have tentatively reached a different conclusion: that Çatalhöyük, though it may have harbored as many as 10,000 people, was not a "city" at all but a decentralized community of extended families, with very little division of labor and only limited agriculture. The occupants still heavily relied on hunting and gathering.

Excavations by a University of Istanbul team at another site, a smaller village in Central Anatolia that appears to be about 1,000 years older than Çatalhöyük, have produced even stronger evidence against the idea of a single Neolithic Revolution, Balter notes. This settlement, home to several hundred people at its height, "has a more complex arrangement of buildings than Çatalhöyük. A large collection of mud-brick houses is partly surrounded by a stone wall, and [there is] a large cluster of public buildings that may have been a temple complex, as well as a pebbled street running through the settlement." The houses and the street are arranged exactly the same way in 10 successive layers of occupation, yet most of the vegetative remains and all of the animal remains were wild. In short, the occupants of this fairly large and highly stable settlement subsisted mostly on hunting and gathering. That "goes against every paradigm we have ever had," Guillermo Algaze of the University of California, San Diego, points out.

A further assault on the Neolithic Revolution has come from researchers using new techniques involving tiny plant fossils to study early agriculture, Pringle says. Their work has pushed back the dates of both plant domestication and animal husbandry around the world. While some villages in the Near East came into existence before agriculture, settlements in many other regions came thousands of years after crops. Either way, the strong causal link between farming and settled village life that archaeologists have long imagined seems to have snapped.