Reading about Çatalhöyük blew my mind

I was reading about the Neolithic site in Turkey and found out that at its peak around 7000 BCE, somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 people lived there in mudbrick houses stacked like a honeycomb. They climbed in through holes in the roofs and buried their dead under the floors. Has anyone else been surprised by how advanced some early settlements really were?

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lunawilson3mo ago

Yeah it's wild how we think of ancient people as simple but they figured out stuff we still do today. Like my neighbor built a tiny house last year and it's basically the same concept as those mudbrick houses stacked together. They were sharing walls and living close to each other just like people in apartments do now. It makes you realize we haven't really changed that much, we just swapped mud for drywall.

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dylan_stone333mo ago

Yeah I actually just watched a documentary about the Romans and they had apartment buildings too, like five stories high. They called them insulae and they were basically the same idea, packed together with shops on the bottom floor. People even had to worry about landlords being sketchy and fires spreading between units. Makes you wonder what they'd think of us complaining about rent prices now.

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