THE TAŞ TEPELER, or Stone Mounds, in southeastern Turkey’s şanlıurfa Province arc roughly 125 miles along the foothills of the Taurus Mountains, overlooking the Harran Plain and the Balikh River, a tributary of the Euphrates. The region features plateaus amid modest mountains. Scorching summers and mild winters with little rain barely sustain wild lentils, wheat, barley, and chickpeas, alongside other plant species adapted to the semiarid steppe environment. Farmers cultivate crops of pistachios, which are known locally as “green gold.” The plain’s few native animals, including several species of gazelle, are legally protected, but conservationists struggle to safeguard them from poaching, climate change, and urban expansion. In villages dotted across the plain, residents face challenges, too, their lives intertwined with seasonal agricultural rhythms and subject to the vagaries of swiftly changing weather patterns.
More than 11,000 years ago, during the early Neolithic period, this was a lush expanse of mighty forests teeming with wild animals including cattle, sheep, goats, donkeys, gazelles, boars, leopards, and snakes and other reptiles. Its rivers and lakes were home to numerous species of fish and birds. This fertile environment drew groups of mobile hunter-gatherers who, freed from the need to move seasonally in search of food, built semipermanent and permanent dwellings on the plain and in the hills. “This part of Anatolia had a significantly richer and more productive natural environment than arid regions to the south,” says archaeologist Mehmet Özdoğan of Istanbul University. “This encouraged people to establish permanent
