Çayönü

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Çayönü is a Neolithic settlement in southern Turkey, forty kilometres north-west of Diyarbakır, at the foot of the Taurus mountains. It lies near the Bogazcay, a tributary of the upper Tigris and the Bestakot, an intermittent stream. Excavations, first under the direction of Robert John Braidwood, took place between 1964and 1978 and between 1985and 1991. The settlement was inhabited around 7200 til 6600 BC.

The settlement covers the periods of PPNA, PPNB, 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

Çayönü is probably the place where the pig (Sus scrofa) was first domesticated. The wild fauna include wild boar, wild sheep, wild goat and cervids. The neolithic environment included marshes and swamps near the Bogazcay, open wood, patches of steppe and almond-pistachio forest-steppe to the south.

According to Der Spiegel ([1]) of 6/3/2006, the Max Planck Institute for Breeding Research in Cologne [2] has discovered that the genetically common ancestor of 68 contemporary types of cereal still grows as a wild plant on the slopes of Mount Karaca (Karacadag), which is located in close vicinity to Çayönü. (Compare to information on cereal use in PPNA).