6000-year-old sites challenge history, suggesting world’s oldest city wasn’t in Mesopotamia

6000-year-old sites challenge history, suggesting world's oldest city wasn't in Mesopotamia Image: Wikimedia/Susane Beyer

VoM News Desk | September 15, 2024 | 08:51 AM IST | Featured by VoM, Featured Edition, History | Follow on Google News

6000-year-old sites challenge history, suggesting world’s oldest city wasn’t in Mesopotamia

6000-year-old sites challenge history, suggesting world’s oldest city wasn’t in Mesopotamia

Maria Mocerino/Intresting Engineering

ecent archaeological discoveries are rewriting the narrative of human history. Contrary to long-held beliefs that the first cities emerged in Mesopotamia or Central Asia, new evidence suggests that these ancient urban centers may have actually originated in Ukraine.

In a recent publication by the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung, researchers describe the astonishing remnants of what may have been “the largest city in the world,” discernible today only through aerial shadows and scattered pottery shards. This site in Ukraine dates back to 4000 BCE, making it the oldest urban settlement ever discovered.

Not only does this archaeological research push the origins of cities further back in time, but also, according to Euromaidan Press, “it sparks heated debates about early social organization, sustainability, and what a city even is.”

The oldest cities on Earth

Joseph Müller, an archeologist from the University of Kiel, began researching these giant settlements in Ukraine in 2011, building upon foundational research from the 1960s.

It was a military topographer who first identified over 250 sites featuring intriguing vegetation patterns, such as concentric formations, hinting strongly at human construction.

However, it wasn’t until the 1970s that Ukrainian scientists, as reported by NZZ, launched a research campaign that required creative strategy as excavating a site of that size proved to be cumbersome and unfeasible. By employing geomagnetic techniques, researchers unveiled structures beneath the earth’s surface, discovering Trypillia megasites that span over 100 hectares.

These findings challenge previous assumptions which placed urbanization later in human history. The Ukrainian settlements suggest that numerous dwellings—and by extension, cities—existed between the end of the Stone Age and the emergence of the Bronze Age. It changes everything archeologists thought they knew. Maybe humans built cities before we even thought it was possible.

The Trypillia megasites, recognized as the earliest planned cities, had nothing in common with modern-day urban centers. According to U-krane, they were circular or oval, with houses organized in concentric rings, interrupted by boulevards or wide corridors.

“These are the first planned cities of humanity,” says NZZ, noting that the most remarkable site surpasses the size of Monaco and is comparable to Central Park.

Evidence leads researchers to believe that the houses were made of wood and clay and might have been burned down in an ancient conflict. Interestingly enough, however, no grave sites have been found.

“Individual graves are something with which the group of burying people represents their role to others. This reflection of social structures does not exist here,” says Müller. “If there are no graves marked in an archaeologist-friendly way, that does not mean that a cult of the dead did not exist,” he adds.

A society seeped in mystery

In the end, these sites leave archeologists with more questions than answers. Most intriguingly, what drove these ancient people to congregate in such substantial urban hubs rather than remaining in smaller communities?

The nature of the society that built and inhabited these megasites is a subject of intense debate among archaeologists, as per Euromaidan Press, but it disappeared around 3,600 BCE for mysterious reasons.

As of right now, a strange gap in time still exists between these megasites’ timeline and the next major city in Ukraine; thus, what happened in the span of 3,000 years?

“Even if they are now just a shadow in a cornfield, the Trypillya megasites and their social order were a successful model for a long time. Now we just need to know which order it was,” U-krane concludes.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by VoM News staff and is published from the syndicated feed)

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