<P> Çatalhöyük was excavated in the 1960s in a methodical way, but not using the full range of natural science techniques that are available to us today . Sir James Mellaart who excavated the site in the 1960s came up with all sorts of ideas about the way the site was organized and how it was lived in and so on...We've now started working there since the mid 1990s and come up with very different ideas about the site . One of the most obvious examples of that is that Çatalhöyük is perhaps best known for the idea of the mother goddess . But our work more recently has tended to show that in fact there is very little evidence of a mother goddess and very little evidence of some sort of female - based matriarchy . That's just one of the many myths that the modern scientific work is undermining . </P> <P> Professor Lynn Meskell explained that while the original excavations had found only 200 figures, the new excavations had uncovered 2,000 figurines of which most were animals, with less than 5% of the figurines women . </P> <P> Estonian folklorist Uku Masing has suggested as early as in 1976, that Çatalhöyük was probably a hunting and gathering religion and the Mother Goddess figurine did not represent a female deity . He implied that perhaps a longer period of time was needed in order to develop symbols for agricultural rites . His theory was developed in the paper "Some remarks on the mythology of the people of Catal Hüyük". </P> <P> Çatalhöyük has strong evidence of an egalitarian society, as no houses with distinctive features (belonging to royalty or religious hierarchy, for example) have been found so far . The most recent investigations also reveal little social distinction based on gender, with men and women receiving equivalent nutrition and seeming to have equal social status, as typically found in Paleolithic cultures . Children observed domestic areas . They learned how to perform rituals and how to build or repair houses by watching the adults make statues, beads and other objects . Çatalhöyük's spatial layout may be due to the close kin relations exhibited amongst the people . It can be seen, in the layout, that the people were "divided into two groups who lived on opposite sides of the town, separated by a gully ." Furthermore, because no nearby towns were found from which marriage partners could be drawn, "this spatial separation must have marked two intermarrying kinship groups ." This would help explain how a settlement so early on would become so large . </P>

Were çatalhüyük and jericho located near the red sea