Fat Hill

A recent article in The New Yorker got me thinking about the Neolithic Revolution.  The article was about an archeological dig in southeastern Turkey known as Gobekli Tepe (“Fat Hill” in Turkish).  The site contains more than 60 multi-ton limestone pillars.  It’s estimated it would require at least 500 men working in a directed, organized way to quarry, move, and erect these pillars.  The pillars are engraved with high and low reliefs of predatory animals.  Because, unlike the cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic, the reliefs offer no portrayal of daily life, they are thought to be symbolic, or perhaps guardians.  The pillars themselves are T-shaped and give evidence of representing stylized human beings.  Gobekli Tepe was designed and built by hunter-gatherers as a centralized meeting place, a sanctuary if you like, for people from a 100-mile radius.  You could think of it as party-central, a Stone Age Studio 54, a place where unknown ceremonies were performed along with great feasts, perhaps including fermented beverages and/or psychotropic plants.  The oldest sections of Gobekli Tepe were built around 12,000 years ago (as compared to 4500 years ago for Stonehenge), and thus predate by millennia the conditions which were thought to be prerequisite for monumental architecture to occur.  Gobekli Tepe turns previous thinking about the Neolithic Revolution on its head. 

Hominids have been on earth for approximately 2.6 million years.  Our particular species has been around for about 200,000.  95% of that time we made our living as foragers.  Women scoured the countryside for nuts, berries, roots, fruits, wild grains, anything edible.  Men hunted for meat.  And they were pretty successful.  Studies have shown that in most cases our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors were able to support themselves on an investment of only about 20 hours a week.  Nevertheless, over a 3-thousand-year period, independently in several different locations, they transformed themselves into sedentary farmers.  This event, the domestication of plants and animals (i.e., sheep, goats, cattle—dogs were domesticated much earlier, at least 33,000 years ago), marks the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic era and is known as the Neolithic Revolution.  Gobekli Tepe, it now appears, is where this transformation began.  DNA analysis of modern wheat shows that it is genetically most closely related to the wild wheat found near this site.

Contrary to what you might assume, this change did not result in an improved standard of living.  The physical record shows that subsequently people were more anemic, had worse teeth, more spinal deformities, more infectious diseases, worked harder and died younger.  They actually shrank in size, from an average 5’10” for men and 5’6” for women during the Paleolithic to an average 5’6” for men and 5’1” for women.  Socially, they went from egalitarianism to a hierarchical structure with a ruling class.  Some say that the legends of a past Golden Age, a Garden of Eden, represent racial memories of the old hunter-gatherer days.  Our ancestors had it pretty good as hunter-gatherers and could have gone on indefinitely that way.  Instead, they took the path that led to where we are now.  So why did they make the fateful change?

There have been a number of theories.  To me, the one that makes the most sense is that they were victims of their own success.  Population growth led to increasing conflicts between competing groups, forcing the groups into more confined territories, which then had to be more thoroughly exploited.  One can imagine some wild wheat being accidentally left behind, and when the group returned the next season it found a new crop, so it got the notion to enlarge on the practice.  Then, agriculture produced a surplus, and the surplus needed to be stored for future use.  A surplus allows for further growth in population.  Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, says that the hunter-gatherers were seduced by the temporary abundance produced by agriculture, but then population caught up and they found themselves trapped in a vicious cycle of increasing production and increasing population, the cycle we are still caught in today.

It has long been the assumption that agriculture came first.  The agricultural surplus required storage and that plus the presence of domesticated animals led people to stay in one place and build permanent structures.  In particular, monumental architecture required the organization and division of labor and thus it is only after the Neolithic Revolution that monumental architecture appears. 

Gobekli Tepe tells a different story.  It shows that the temple preceded the city.  It suggests that, instead of agriculture creating the need to stay in one place, the need for division of labor, social hierarchies, and complex symbol systems, rather it was the desire to come together in one place to celebrate their existence that required all these things.  Perhaps the need to protect wild grain from marauding herds of gazelles and donkeys fired cooperation among the local human groups, and this required social organization and a means of cementing and celebrating that cooperation.  It may be that the Neolithic Revolution was not so much a choice as something bumbled into.  Our ancestors were trying to make their lives even easier and in the process made them a lot more complicated. 

Only 5% of Gobekli Tepe has been excavated, so it’s possible that more discoveries there will enhance our insight into this crucial transition in the developmental history of our species. 

1Q84



Yukio Mishima



My first exposure to Japanese literature was in January, 1973, when I picked up Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask at a bookstore in College Park, Maryland.  Subsequently I read a half-dozen more of his works, plus at least 3 of Yasunari Kawabata, and a handful of others.  In 1976, after landing in California, I decided to audit a course in Japanese lit at UC.  It was taught by a Japanese grad student on a Fulbright.  We became friends and, for a couple of years, housemates.  After post-doctoral work at Cambridge, he returned to Japan and assumed a professorship at Waseda University in Tokyo, his alma mater.  We continued to correspond and in 1989 he asked me if I had read a Japanese novelist who had attended Waseda with him as an undergraduate, and whose book had just been translated into English.  The author’s name was Haruki Murakami and the novel was A Wild Sheep Chase.  The book turned out to have little in common with any of the Japanese literature I’d read before.  A free-wheeling romp, it reminded me more of Tom Robbins than anything from Japan. 

That’s because Murakami is not really a Japanese writer in the sense that Mishima and Kawabata were, which is why the Japanese literary establishment has been less than welcoming to him.  Instead, he is a First World writer, a writer whose works are set not in traditional Japan, but rather on the western frontier of the American Empire, a place where people listen to European classical or American jazz or British pop music, watch American movies, read European and American literature, and have sensibilities more conditioned by those experiences than by the old traditions of Japanese culture.  Contextually, writers like Mishima and Kawabata were backward looking; Murakami accepts the present and looks forward.    



Haruki Murakami



A couple of years later a second novel was released in English, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.  This book was composed of two parallel narratives.  One takes place in a sci-fi version of Tokyo where a narrator (none of the characters have names) works at encrypting data in a laboratory hidden in the sewer system.  The other describes a self-contained world where a narrator reads dreams from the skulls of unicorns.  The two narratives gradually converge.  This book was darker and more dreamlike than the first, and even more bizarre and intriguing. 

When I told my friend how fascinating I’d found it, he mailed me Norwegian Wood, which was available in English in Japan at the time, but not yet in the US.  This was the book that made Murakami’s reputation in Japan, where it sold millions of copies (the film version is due out tomorrow in New York).  It turned out to be a realistic, straightforward, nostalgic story of romantic loss and regret, quite different from what I’d read before.  One could easily imagine it to be a semi-autobiographical novel based on his undergraduate days at Waseda. 

Since then I’ve read each of Murakami’s books as they’ve appeared in English, so it wasn’t surprising when his latest, 1Q84, showed up in my Christmas stocking.  At 925 pages, this is his most massive novel to date.  Like Hard-Boiled Wonderland, it is comprised of dueling narratives and alternate worlds, and like Norwegian Wood, it is a love story.  The lovers met when they were 10 years old.  At the time of the story, they are both 30, and haven’t seen each other in the 20 intervening years.  Nevertheless, they think of each other constantly, and the twin narratives, one of her path, one of his, describe the circuitous routes by which they gradually wend their ways toward one another.  Like Hard-Boiled Wonderland it has elements of a detective story, and like Norwegian Wood it is a nostalgic and sentimental love story.  These are the two sides of Murakami. 

1Q84, in homage to George Orwell, is set in 1984 or, rather, in an alternative to 1984, the “Q” being a phonetic play on the Japanese word for “nine.”  Alienation and loneliness have always been prominent themes in Murakami and 1Q84 is no exception, with both protagonists being, for the most part, socially isolated.  Conversely, social consciousness has never played a big role in Murakami’s fiction, but 1Q84 breaks with that by giving considerable attention to the issue of the abuse of women.  The real charm of 1Q84 though is that it’s an elaborate adult fairy tale.  It even has fairies, called “the Little People.”  By virtue of this it transports us back to our own childhoods, and the stories we heard as children.  In the process it returns to the basics of storytelling: spinning a good yarn.  Looked at in retrospect, there are some problems with the plot and, despite all the surprises along the way (and there are plenty of those), the ending is predictable.  It’s the only possible ending, of course, for a fairy tale.  Nonetheless the book is captivating.  Murakami sets up resonances between the characters, their words and their actions, that keep you both bemused and amused in a world where, as in a child’s world, anything seems possible. In a way, the book is a celebration of the playful creativity of childhood.  And though a couple of them may seem a little too easy, the echoing of actions, characters, and, ultimately, of worlds, feels full of imports that are just out of reach.