9000 years ago, thousands of people lived in a town in central Turkey with no streets.
At Çatalhöyük, the houses were packed wall to wall, and you entered through a hole in the roof. One of the largest settlements on Earth at the time, home to perhaps 8000 people.
They buried their dead beneath the floors they walked on and painted the walls with hunting scenes and what may be one of the world's earliest paintings of an erupting volcano.
But then, after more than a thousand years of continuous life, they left.
No invasion. No clear catastrophe. Instead, the settlement gradually emptied, and the experiment in living that close together quietly came to an end.
We tend to think the city is the inevitable shape of human life, the direction everything was always heading. Çatalhöyük was a city before cities were supposed to exist, and then it wasn't, and people scattered back into smaller worlds.
To the people who lived there, that crowded warren of rooms was simply how humans lived.
We assume our arrangement is the permanent one too.
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