At its peak Çatalhöyük housed perhaps 8,000 people, making it a kind of 'proto-city'. Its urban grain was extraordinary: houses pressed wall-to-wall, with no streets between them. Residents moved across the rooftops and entered each home through a hole in the ceiling, descending by a ladder.

The interiors are no less remarkable. Walls bore red geometric designs, hunting scenes, vivid panels showing vultures descending on headless human bodies, and plastered bull-horn reliefs. In some houses ancestors were buried beneath the floor, suggesting a tight physical interleaving of home and family.

Çatalhöyük is one of the richest windows we have onto the Neolithic transition: hunter-gatherer customs alongside emerging agriculture, partly domesticated animals, and a community that as yet shows little visible social hierarchy. The relative uniformity of houses and burial goods has fuelled debate about whether the society was genuinely egalitarian — among the site's most contested questions. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012.