A figurine from one the world’s oldest known human settlements reveals much about the history and potential of female power
As a writer, my focus has been on one of the biggest mysteries in all of history: what are the origins of patriarchy in human society? I should have known that the journey to answer that question would for ever change the way I thought about myself.
What I did know was that researching it would mean going back in time. The historical timescales involved here aren’t centuries but millennia. That was how I landed in southern Anatolia, Turkey, at the site of one of the oldest known human settlements in the world. Çatalhöyük is beautifully preserved, its box-like homes a window into how people lived in this region thousands of years before Stonehenge was built or the first pyramids went up in Egypt.
Angela Saini is a science journalist and the author of Superior: The Return of Race Science
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