Çayönü


Çayönü Tepesi is a Pre-Pottery [Neolithic B] settlement in southeastern Turkey which prospered from circa 8,630 to 6,800 BC. It is located in Diyarbakır Province forty kilometres north-west of Diyarbakır, one hundred and forty kilometres north-east of Şanlıurfa, at the foot of the Taurus mountains. It lies near the Boğazçay, a tributary of the upper Tigris River and the Bestakot, an intermittent stream. It is an early example of agriculture.
Çayönü Tepesi belongs to the "Taş Tepeler" monumental tradition of Göbekli Tepe, a style found in all the Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites of the Urfa region. There are some variations though, such as using decorated stelae, but without the characteristic T-shape of Göbekli Tepe.

Settlement

At first, Cayonu represented single room structures that were round or had rounded corners. On top were built wattle and daub constructions. The next phase consisted of grill-plan buildings. This refers to a type of the building foundation.

Archaeology

The site was excavated for 16 seasons between 1964 and 1991, initially by Robert John Braidwood and Halet Çambel and later by Mehmet Özdoğan and Aslı Erim Özdoğan. The settlement covers the periods of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, and the Pottery Neolithic.
The stratigraphy is divided into the following subphases according to the dominant architecture:
  • round, PPNA
  • grill, PPNA
  • channeled, Early PPNB
  • cobble paved, Middle PPNB
  • cell, Late PPNB
  • large room, final PPNB
An analysis of blood found at the site suggested that human sacrifice occurred there.
Two stelae similar to the T-shapes stelae of Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe were discovered in the "terrazzo floor" at Çayönü Tepe. They are thought to have been symbolic images of men of gods. One of the two stelae had a human face in flat relief carved on it. These findings suggest stela worship, a form of cult which was prevalent in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period, and remained widespread in the Near-East until the 1st millennium BC.

Origin of domestication

Çayönü Tepe developed from the cultural tradition of Gobekli Tepe, and started to implement agriculture from the 9th millennium BCE, as other sites such as Neva Çori or Cafer Höyük.

Animal life – domestication of pigs and cattle

The settlement attests to the period of transition from hunting and gathering to plant and animal domestication. Domestic animals appear in the final aspects of Phase I ; prior to that, the bones of wild game are relatively abundant. Mainly sheep was domesticated at first.
In regard to cattle domestication, recently scholars make a distinction between "cattle management" and "domestic cattle". Çayönü Tepesi provides a time sequence clarifying changes in the human management of Bos populations from the earliest times.
Arbuckle and Kassebaum outline several stages of cattle management at Cayonu, and they present a rather complicated picture. Bos remains are abundant already in the earliest levels representing c. 20% of the mammalian remains. Much later, around 7500 BC, cattle reach their maximum abundance at the site, but they are still phenotypically unchanged. Decrease in cattle size is evident only around 7000 BC, and continues thereafter at this and related sites in the area.
Çayönü is possibly the place where the pig was first domesticated.

Farming – cultivation of cereals

Genetic studies of emmer wheat, the precursor of most current wheat species, show that the slopes of Mount Karaca, which is located in close vicinity to Çayönü, was the location of first domestication. A different DNA approach pointed to Kartal Daği.
Robert Braidwood wrote that "insofar as unit HA can be considered as representing all of the major pre-historic occupation at Cayonu, cultivated emmer along with cultivated einkorn was present from the earliest sub-phase."

Genetics

Origins

In a 2022 genetic study, the population of Çayönü was analyzed as a representative of the earliest known hunter-gatherer sedentary populations who built the monumental structure of Gobekli Tepe and domesticated various plants and animals, such as the einkorn, emmer, sheep, goats, pigs and cattles in Upper Mesopotamian. The Çayönü population was shown to be genetically diverse, carrying both western and eastern Fertile Crescent ancestry, and best modelled by an ancestry combining about 48% Anatolian Epipaleolithic, 33% Central Zagros Neolithic and 19% South Levant Neolithic components.

Diffusion

Human samples from Çayönü dated to circa 8300-7500 BC were also part of a recent 2025 genetic study, as members of a Mesopotamia_Neolithic cluster. In this study, the Mesopotamia Neolithic cluster appeared as a major ancestry of several Levantine and Egyptian Bronze Age individuals, particularly from Ebla, Ashkalon, Baq'ah and Nuwayrat.
The Nuwayrat individual in particular, an Old Kingdom adult male Egyptian of relatively high-status radiocarbon-dated to 2855–2570 BCE and dubbed "Old Kingdom individual (NUE001)", was found to be associated with North African Neolithic ancestry, but about 24% of his genetic ancestry could be sourced to the eastern Fertile Crescent, including Mesopotamia, corresponding to the Mesopotamia_Neolithic cluster. The genetic profile was most closely represented by a two-source model, in which 77.6% ± 3.8% of the ancestry corresponded to genomes from the Middle Neolithic Moroccan site of Skhirat-Rouazi, which itself consists of predominantly Levant Neolithic ancestry and minor Iberomaurusian ancestry, while the remainder was most closely related to known genomes from Neolithic Mesopotamia. No other two-source model met the significance criteria. A total of two Three-source models also emerged, but had similar ancestry proportions, with the addition of a much smaller third-place component from the Neolithic/Chalcolithic Levant. According to Lazardis, "What this sample does tell us is that at such an early date there were people in Egypt that were mostly North African in ancestry, but with some contribution of ancestry from Mesopotamia". According to Girdland-Flink, the fact that 20% of the man's ancestry best matches older genomes from Mesopotamia, suggests that the movement of Mesopotamian people into Egypt may have been fairly substantial at some point.
The timing of the admixture event cannot be calculated directly from the 2025 genetic study. The 2025 study showed that the Nuwayrat sample had the greatest affinity with samples from Neolithic Mesopotamia dating to 9000-8000 BCE. Concurrently, other studies have shown that during the Neolithic, in the 10,000-5,000 BCE period, populations from Mesopotamia and the Zagros expanded into the Near-East, particularly Anatolia, bringing with them the Neolithic package of technological innovation. Egypt may also have been affected by such migratory movements. Further changes in odontometrics and dental tissues have been observed in the Nile Valley around 6000 BCE. Subsequent cultural influxes from Mesopotamia are documented into the 4th millennium with the appearance of Late Uruk features during the Late Pre-dynastic period of Egypt.