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1. Kama culture
3. Starčevo–Körös–Criș culture
6. Eastern Linear Pottery culture
7. Western Linear Pottery culture
Pre-Pottery Neolithic (10000 – 6500 BCE) and Pottery Neolithic (7000–5000 BCE)
Ancient DNA Reveals Prehistoric Gene-Flow from Siberia in the Complex Human Population History of North-East Europe
“North East Europe harbors a high diversity of cultures and languages, suggesting a complex genetic history. Archaeological, anthropological, and genetic research has revealed a series of influences from Western and Eastern Eurasia in the past. While genetic data from modern-day populations is commonly used to make inferences about their origins and past migrations, ancient DNA provides a powerful test of such hypotheses by giving a snapshot of the past genetic diversity. In order to better understand the dynamics that have shaped the gene pool of North East Europeans, we generated and analyzed 34 mitochondrial genotypes from the skeletal remains of three archaeological sites in northwest Russia. These sites were dated to the Mesolithic and the Early Metal Age (7,500 and 3,500 uncalibrated years Before Present).” ref
“Comparisons of genetic data from ancient and modern-day populations revealed significant changes in the mitochondrial makeup of North East Europeans through time. Mesolithic foragers showed high frequencies and diversity of haplogroups U (U2e, U4, U5a), a pattern observed previously in European hunter-gatherers from Iberia to Scandinavia. In contrast, the presence of mitochondrial DNA haplogroups C, D, and Z in Early Metal Age individuals suggested discontinuity with Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and genetic influx from central/eastern Siberia. We identified remarkable genetic dissimilarities between prehistoric and modern-day North East Europeans/Saami, which suggests an important role of post-Mesolithic migrations from Western Europe and subsequent population replacement/extinctions.” ref
“The history of human populations can be retraced by studying the archaeological and anthropological record, but also by examining the current distribution of genetic markers, such as the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA. Ancient DNA research allows the retrieval of DNA from ancient skeletal remains and contributes to the reconstruction of the human population history through the comparison of ancient and present-day genetic data. Analyzed the mitochondrial DNA of prehistoric remains from archaeological sites dated to 7,500 and 3,500 years Before Present. These sites are located in North-East Europe, a region that displays a significant cultural and linguistic diversity today but for which no ancient human DNA was available before. We show that prehistoric hunter-gatherers of North East Europe were genetically similar to other European foragers. We also detected a prehistoric genetic input from Siberia, followed by migrations from Western Europe into North-East Europe.” ref
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“Rare unclassified haplogroup N* has been found among fossils belonging to the Cardial and Epicardial culture (Cardium pottery) and the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B. Haplogroup N1a – Arabian Peninsula and Northeast Africa. Found also in Central Asia and Southern Siberia. This branch is well attested in ancient people from various cultures of Neolithic Europe, from Hungary to Spain, and among the earliest farmers of Anatolia.” ref
Cardium pottery
“Cardium pottery or Cardial ware is a Neolithic decorative style that gets its name from the imprinting of the clay with the heart-shaped shell of the Corculum cardissa , a member of the cockle family Cardiidae. These forms of pottery are in turn used to define the Neolithic culture which produced and spread them, commonly called the “Cardial culture”. The alternative name, impressed ware, is given by some archaeologists to define this culture, because impressions can be made with sharp objects other than cockle shells, such as a nail or comb.” ref
“Impressed pottery is much more widespread than the Cardial. Impressed ware is found in the zone “covering Italy to the Ligurian coast” as distinct from the more western Cardial extending from Provence to western Portugal. The sequence in prehistoric Europe has traditionally been supposed to start with widespread Cardial ware, and then to develop other methods of impression locally, termed “epi-Cardial”. However the widespread Cardial and Impressed pattern types overlap and are now considered more likely to be contemporary.” ref
“This pottery style gives its name to the main culture of the Mediterranean Neolithic: Cardium pottery culture or Cardial culture, or impressed ware culture, which eventually extended from the Adriatic sea to the Atlantic coasts of Portugal and south to Morocco. The earliest impressed ware sites, dating to 6400–6200 BCE, are in Epirus and Corfu. Settlements then appear in Albania and Dalmatia on the eastern Adriatic coast dating to between 6100 and 5900 BCE. The earliest date in Italy comes from Coppa Nevigata on the Adriatic coast of southern Italy, perhaps as early as 6000 cal BCE.” ref
“Also during Su Carroppu culture in Sardinia, already in its early stages (low strata into Su Coloru cave, c. 6000 BCE) early examples of cardial pottery appear. Northward and westward all secure radiocarbon dates are identical to those for Iberia c. 5500 cal BCE, which indicates a rapid spread of Cardial and related cultures: 2,000 km from the gulf of Genoa to the estuary of the Mondego in probably no more than 100–200 years. This suggests a seafaring expansion by planting colonies along the coast. Older Neolithic cultures existed already at this time in eastern Greece and Crete, apparently having arrived from the Levant, but they appear distinct from the Cardial or impressed ware culture.” ref
“The ceramic tradition in the central Balkans also remained distinct from that along the Adriatic coastline in both style and manufacturing techniques for almost 1,000 years from the 6th millennium BCE. Early Neolithic impressed pottery is found in the Levant, and certain parts of Anatolia, including Mezraa-Teleilat, and in North Africa at Tunus-Redeyef, Tunisia. So the first Cardial settlers in the Adriatic may have come directly from the Levant.” ref
“Of course, it might equally well have come directly from North Africa, and impressed pottery also appears in Egypt. Along the East Mediterranean coast impressed ware has been found in North Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon. Cardial and Epicardial fossils that were analyzed for ancient DNA were found to carry the rare mtDNA (maternal) basal haplogroup N*, supporting an early Neolithic maritime colonization of Mainland Europe through Cyprus and the Aegean Islands by Near-Eastern farmers.” ref
“Fernández et al. 2014 found traces of maternal genetic affinity between people of the Linear Pottery Culture and Cardium pottery with earlier peoples of the Near Eastern Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, and suggested that Neolithic period was initiated by seafaring colonists from the Near East. Olalde et al. 2015 examined the remains of 6 Cardials buried in Spain c. 5470-5220 BCE. The 6 samples of mtDNA extracted belonged to the maternal haplogroups K1a2a, X2c, H4a1a (2 samples), H3, and K1a4a1.” ref
“The authors of the study suggested that the Cardials and peoples of the Linear Pottery Culture were descended from a common farming population in the Balkans, which had subsequently migrated further westwards into Europe along the Mediterranean coast and Danube river respectively. Among modern populations, the Cardials were found to be most closely related to Sardinians and Basque people. The Iberian Cardials carried a noticeable amount of hunter-gatherer ancestry. This hunter-gatherer ancestry was more similar to that of Eastern Hunter-Gatherers (EHGs) than Iberian hunter-gatherers, and appeared to have been acquired before the Cardial expansion into Iberia.” ref
“Mathieson et al. 2018 examined three Cardials buried at the Zemunica Cave in modern-day Croatia c. 5800 BCE. The two samples of Y-DNA extracted belonged to the paternal haplogroups C1a2 and E1b1b1a1b1, while the three samples of mtDNA extracted belonged to the maternal haplogroups H1, K1b1a, and N1a1. The team further examined two Cardials buried at Kargadur in modern-day Croatia c. 5600 BCE. The one male carried the paternal haplogroup G2a2a1, and the maternal haplogroup H7c, and the female carried H5a.” ref
“All three belonged to the Early European Farmer (EEF) cluster, thus being closely related to earlier Neolithic populations of north-west Anatolia, of the Balkan Neolithic, contemporary peoples of the Central European Linear Pottery culture, and later peoples of the Cardial Ware culture in Iberia. This would suggest that the Cardial Ware people and the Linear Pottery people were derived from a single migration from Anatolia into the Balkans, which then split into two and expanded northward and westward further into Europe.” ref
Haplogroup N1c (Y-DNA)
“Haplogroup N1c is found chiefly in north-eastern Europe, particularly in Finland (61%), Lapland (53%), Estonia (34%), Latvia (38%), Lithuania (42%), and northern Russia (30%), and to a lower extent also in central Russia (15%), Belarus (10%), eastern Ukraine (9%), Sweden (7%), Poland (4%) and Turkey (4%). N1c is also prominent among the Uralic-speaking ethnicities of the Volga-Ural region, including the Udmurts (67%), Komi (51%), Mari (50%), and Mordvins (20%), but also among their Turkic neighbors like the Chuvashs (28%), Volga Tatars (21%) and Bashkirs (17%), as well as the Nogais (9%) of southern Russia.” ref
“N1c represents the western extent of haplogroup N, which is found all over the Far East (China, Korea, Japan), Mongolia, and Siberia, especially among Uralic speakers of northern Siberia. Haplogroup N1 reaches a maximum frequency of approximately 95% in the Nenets (40% N1c and 57% N1b) and Nganassans (all N1b), two Uralic tribes of central-northern Siberia, and 90% among the Yakuts (all N1c), a Turkic people who live mainly in the Sakha (Yakutia) Republic in central-eastern Siberia.” ref
“Haplogroup N is a descendant of East Asian macro-haplogroup NO. It is believed to have originated in Indochina or southern China approximately 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. Haplogroup N1* and N1c were both found at high frequency (26 out of 70 samples, or 37%) in Neolithic and Bronze Age remains (4500-700 BCE) from the West Liao River valley in Northeast China (Manchuria) by Yinqiu Cui et al. (2013). Among the Neolithic samples, haplogroup N1 made up two thirds of the samples from the Hongshan culture (4700-2900 BCE) and all the samples from the Xiaoheyan culture (3000-2200 BCE), hinting that N1 people played a major role in the diffusion of the Neolithic lifestyle around Northeast China, and probably also to Mongolia and Siberia.” ref
“Ye Zhang et al. 2016 found 100% of Y-DNA N out of 17 samples from the Xueshan culture (Jiangjialiang site) dating from 3600–2900 BCE, and among those 41% belonged to N1c1-Tat. It is therefore extremely likely that the N1c1 subclade found in Europe today has its roots in the Chinese Neolithic. It would have progressively spread across Siberia until north-eastern Europe, possibly reaching the Volga-Ural region around 5500 to 4500 BCE with the Kama culture (5300-3300 BCE), and the eastern Baltic with the Comb Ceramic culture (4200-2000 BCE), the presumed ancestral culture of Proto-Finnic and pre-Baltic people. There is little evidence of agriculture or domesticated animals in Siberia during the Neolithic, but pottery was widely used. In that regard it was the opposite development from the Near East, which first developed agriculture then only pottery from circa 5500 BCE, perhaps through contact with East Asians via Siberia or Central Asia.” ref
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Kama culture
“The Kama culture (also known as Volga-Kama or Khutorskoye from finds near the Khutorskoye settlement) is an Eastern European Subneolithic archaeological culture from the 6th-4th millennium BCE. The area covers the Kama, Vyatka, and the Ik–Belaya watershed (Perm and Kirov regions, Udmurtia, Tatarstan, and Bashkortostan).” ref
“The definition of the Kama culture remains a subject of debate. Initially, it was determined by O.H. Bader on the territory of the Middle Kama, where he distinguished two phases: Borovoye (Borovoy Lake I) and Khutorskoye. A.Kh. Khalikov united the finds with Pitted and Combed Ware of the Lower and Middle Kama into one Volga-Kama culture. I.V. Kalinina, based on the study of ceramics came to the conclusion that there are two distinct cultures: Volga-Kama pitted pottery and Kama combed pottery. A.A.” ref
“Vibornov identified three stages of development in the Kama culture, and V.P. Denisov and L.A. Nagovitchin joined the Kama Neolithic finds with combed ceramics into a single Khutorskoye culture, synchronous with the Poluden culture in the Ural Mountains. Its comb-decorated pottery is similar to that of the Upper Volga culture. The Kama culture is also culturally close and genetically related to the Volosovo culture. There are scholars who also believe that the culture is related to the Dnieper-Donetsk. There are no signs of agriculture. The economy was based on hunting and fishing. Burials are unknown.” ref
“Settlements involve, rectangular partially sunken dwellings, ranging in size from 6×8 to 16×5m, are grouped in unfortified permanent and temporary settlements, located on the banks of lakes, floodplains, and on river terraces. The pottery is thick-walled, egg-shaped, both round- and pointed-bottomed. The stone and bone inventory of the pottery culture demonstrated a Mesolithic character. It is heavily ornamented with comb stamp designs, vertical and horizontal zigzags, sloping rows, braids, triangles, and banded comb meshes. Kama culture is noted for its metal work and handicrafts. The instruments for work include scrapers, sharpeners, knives, leaf-shaped, and semi-rhombic arrowheads, chisels, adzes, and weights.” ref
“In its development, the Kama culture passed through three stages: early (sites: Mokino, Ust-Bukorok, Ziarat, Ust-Shizhma), middle (sites: Khutorskaya Kryazhskaya, Lebedynska), and late (sites: Lyovshino, Chernashka). The culture was formed in the early Neolithic on a local Mesolithic substrate under the influence of southern steppe populations. The prehistoric phase according to archaeologists emerged around 2,000 BCE. During this stage, the culture existed in the area that began in the Ufa River (in modern Bashkortostan) through the entire Kama drainage area to the upper Pechora River (Komimu).” ref
“In the southern regions, the influence of the nearby forest-steppe cultures of the Middle Volga can be observed during the whole period of existence. In the developed Neolithic a population of Trans-Ural origin penetrates in the upper and middle Kama. In this period there are formed local variants: Verkhnekamsk, Ikska-Belsky and Nizhnekamsk. At the end of the Neolithic the lower Kama falls under the influence of the Early Eneolithic Samara culture.” ref
Narva culture
“Narva culture or eastern Baltic was a European Neolithic archaeological culture found in present-day Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kaliningrad Oblast (former East Prussia), and adjacent portions of Poland, Belarus, and Russia. A successor of the Mesolithic Kunda culture, Narva culture continued up to the start of the Bronze Age. The culture spanned from c. 5300 to 1750 BCE. The technology was that of hunter-gatherers. The culture was named after the Narva River in Estonia.” ref
“The people of the Narva culture had little access to flint; therefore, they were forced to trade and conserve their flint resources. For example, there were very few flint arrowheads and flint was often reused. The Narva culture relied on local materials (bone, horn, schist). As evidence of trade, researchers found pieces of pink flint from Valdai Hills and plenty of typical Narva pottery in the territory of the Neman culture while no objects from the Neman culture were found in Narva. Heavy use of bones and horns is one of the main characteristics of the Narva culture.” ref
“The bone tools, continued from the predecessor Kunda culture, provide the best evidence of continuity of the Narva culture throughout the Neolithic period. The people were buried on their backs with few grave goods. The Narva culture also used and traded amber; a few hundred items were found in Juodkrantė. One of the most famous artifacts is a ceremonial cane carved of horn as a head of female elk found in Šventoji. The people were primarily fishers, hunters, and gatherers. They slowly began adopting husbandry in the middle Neolithic. They were not nomadic and lived in the same settlements for long periods as evidenced by abundant pottery, middens, and structures built in lakes and rivers to help fishing.” ref
“The pottery shared similarities with the Comb Ceramic culture, but had specific characteristics. One of the most persistent features was mixing clay with other organic matter, most often crushed snail shells. The pottery was made of 6-to-9 cm (2.4-to-3.5 in) wide clay strips with minimal decorations around the rim. The vessels were wide and large; the height and the width were often the same. The bottoms were pointed or rounded, and only the latest examples have narrow flat bottoms. From mid-Neolithic, Narva pottery was influenced and eventually disappeared into the Corded Ware culture.” ref
“For a long time, archaeologists believed that the first inhabitants of the region were Finnic, who were pushed north by people of the Corded Ware culture. At first, it was believed that Narva culture ended with the appearance of the Corded Ware culture. However, newer research extended it up to the Bronze Age. As Narva culture spanned several millennia and encompassed a large territory, archaeologists attempted to subdivide the culture into regions or periods. For example, in Lithuania two regions are distinguished: southern (under influence of the Neman culture) and western (with major settlements found in Šventoji). There is an academic debate what ethnicity the Narva culture represented: speakers of Finno-Ugric languages or other Europids, preceding the arrival of the Indo-Europeans.” ref
“It is also unclear how the Narva culture fits with the arrival of the Indo-Europeans (Corded Ware and Globular Amphora cultures) and the formation of the Baltic tribes. Mathieson (2015) analyzed a large number of individuals buried at the Zvejnieki burial ground, most of whom were affiliated with the Kunda culture and the succeeding Narva culture. The mtDNA extracted belonged exclusively to haplotypes of U5, U4, and U2. With regards to Y-DNA, the vast majority of samples belonged to R1b1a1a haplotypes and I2a1 haplotypes. The results affirmed that the Kunda and Narva cultures were about 70% WHG and 30% EHG. The nearby contemporary Pit–Comb Ware culture was on the contrary found to be about 65% EHG.” ref
“An individual from the Corded Ware culture, which would eventually succeed the Narva culture, was found to have genetic relations with the Yamnaya culture. Jones et al. (2017) examined the remains of a male of the Narva culture buried c. 5780-5690 BCE. He was found to be a carrier of the paternal haplogroup R1b1b and the maternal haplogroup U2e1. People of the Narva culture and preceding Kunda culture were determined to have closer genetic affinity with Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHGs) than Eastern Hunter-Gatherers (EHGs).” ref
“Saag et al. (2017) determined haplogroup U5a2d in a Narva male. Mittnik et al. (2018) analyzed 24 Narva individuals. Of the four samples of Y-DNA extracted, one belonged to I2a1a2a1a, one belonged to I2a1b, one belonged to I, and one belonged to R1. Of the ten samples of mtDNA extracted, eight belonged to U5 haplotypes, one belonged to U4a1, and one belonged to H11. U5 haplotypes were common among Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHGs) and Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherers (SHGs). Genetic influence from Eastern Hunter-Gatherers (EHGs) was also detected.” ref
Starčevo–Körös–Criș culture
“The Starčevo–Karanovo I-II–Körös culture or Starčevo–Körös–Criș culture is a grouping of two related Neolithic archaeological cultures in Southeastern Europe: the Starčevo culture and the Körös or Criș culture. Some of the earliest settlements of the Starčevo–Körös–Criș culture were discovered in the Banat Plain and southwest “Transylvania,” a historical region in central Romania. To the east and south its natural border is the Carpathian Mountains, and to the west the Apuseni Mountains. Cultural sites were also discovered in the north-west Balkans, which yielded painted pottery noted for its “barbotine” vessel surfaces. Specifically, the Starčevo settlements were located in Serbia, Körös in Hungary, and Criș in Romania.” ref
“The Starčevo culture is an archaeological culture of Southeastern Europe, in what is now Serbia, dating to the Neolithic period between c. 5500 and 4500 BCE (according to another source, between 6200 and 5200 BCE). The Starčevo culture is sometimes grouped together and sometimes not. The Körös culture is another Neolithic archaeological culture, but in Central Europe. It was named after the river Körös in eastern Hungary and western Romania, where it is named Criș. It survived from about 5800 to 5300 BCE.” ref
“The Starčevo–Kőrös–Criș culture encompasses various Early Neolithic archeological cultures from the Balkans, including those of Anzabegovo, Chavdar, Conevo, Criș, Dudești-Cernica, Karanovo, Kőrös, Kremikovci, Ovtcharovo, Porodin, Starčevo, and Tsonevo. It is commonly known simply under the appellation of Starčevo culture. Represents the advance of Early Neolithic farmers from Anatolia to south-east Europe, including present-day Bulgaria, Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia, northern Croatia, south-west Hungary, and Romania. The Starčevo–Kőrös–Criș culture is the precursor of the Alföld Linear Pottery, the LBK culture, and the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture – in other words all the Early Neolithic cultures from northern France to western Ukraine.” ref
“The Starčevo–Kőrös–Criș culture’s neolithic agricultural economy was based primarily on the cultivation of crops from the Fertile Crescent, such as Emmer wheat, Einkorn wheat, barley, spelt millet, pulses (peas and bitter vetch), and buckwheat. Some fruit trees were also cultivated, including plums and apricots. Starčevo farmers bred livestock, especially goats and sheep, but to a lower extent also cattle and pigs. They also supplemented their diets by fishing in rivers and hunting deer and wild boar in forests. Starčevo farmers lived in dug-out rectangular dwellings with a timber frame, wattle-and-daub walls, and clay-plastered foors. Most houses were small, measuring approximately 7–10 m in length and 4–6 m in width (i.e. 30 to 60 m²). They were built on a single storey, which consisted of a single room, without any internal divisions. Some structures may have contained a loft on the second floor, probably used as a granary.” ref
“Pottery types varied between regional groups, and could be painted in white-on-red and dark-on-red as in the Starčevo culture around Serbia, or be unpainted as in the Körös culture in Hungary. Ceramic vessels were typically decorated with net patterns, spirals, garlands, floral motives, ridges, and finger imprints. Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic representations of goats and deer were common. Like in other Neolithic cultures, most tools were made of stone, bones, or antlers. Flints, obsidian, and quartzes were used to make blades, cutters, scrapers, and drills. Axes, hatchets, and grinding stones were made of sandstone, limestone, granite, quartz, and other rocks.” ref
“Very few graves were found in the Starčevo culture, and those were generally single graves. Most burials identified belonged to women or children, who were placed in the graves in a crouched position, lying on the right or the left side. They were inhumed under the floors of personal residences, a practice that continued until 4000 BCE. Graves rarely contained goods. When they did, it was pottery, grinding stones, flint tools, or jewelry. The sequencing of ancient DNA samples of Early Neolithic cultures conducted since the early 2010’s confirmed that the Neolithic lifestyle was brought to Europe by Anatolian farmers – represented by Y-haplogroup G2a.” ref
“For the first 1,700 years of agriculture in the Balkans, those Near Eastern farmers did not intermingle much with Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers in the Balkans. The few Mesolithic Balkanic lineages that may have been assimilated by farmers would have belonged to Y-haplogroup I2 and mt-haplogroups HV0 and V, and possibly J1c, J2a1, K1c, and T2. Since the Balkans were relatively depopulated in the Mesolithic, it is likely that these assimilations took place in north-west Anatolia, where European hunter-gatherers had migrated. Ancient DNA tests have shown that Starčevo people had fair skin, brown eyes, and dark hair, in contrast to Mesolithic Europeans who had darker skin, and dark hair, but blue eyes. Both groups were lactose intolerant.” ref
Comb Ceramic culture
“The Comb Ceramic culture or Pit-Comb Ware culture, often abbreviated as CCC or PCW, was a northeast European culture characterized by its Pit–Comb Ware. It existed from around 4200 BCE to around 2000 BCE. The bearers of the Comb Ceramic culture are thought to have still mostly followed the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer lifestyle, with traces of early agriculture.” ref
“The distribution of the artifacts found includes Finnmark (Norway) in the north, the Kalix River (Sweden) and the Gulf of Bothnia (Finland) in the west and the Vistula River (Poland) in the south. It would include the Narva culture of Estonia and the Sperrings culture in Finland, among others. They are thought to have been essentially hunter-gatherers, though e.g. the Narva culture in Estonia shows some evidence of agriculture. Some of this region was absorbed by the later Corded Ware horizon. The ceramics consist of large pots that are rounded or pointed below, with a capacity from 40 to 60 litres. The forms of the vessels remained unchanged but the decoration varied.” ref
“The Pit–Comb Ware culture is one of the few exceptions to the rule that pottery and farming coexist in Europe. In the Near East farming appeared before pottery, then when farming spread into Europe from the Near East, pottery-making came with it. However, in Asia, where the oldest pottery has been found, pottery was made long before farming. It appears that the Comb Ceramic Culture reflects influences from Siberia and distant China. By dating according to the elevation of land, the ceramics have traditionally (Äyräpää 1930) been divided into the following periods: early (Ka I, c. 4200 – 3300 BCE), typical (Ka II, c. 3300 – 2700 BCE), and late Comb Ceramic (Ka III, c. 2800 – 2000 BCE).” ref
“However, calibrated radiocarbon dates for the comb-ware fragments found (e.g., in the Karelian isthmus), give a total interval of 5600 – 2300 BCE (Geochronometria Vol. 23, pp 93–99, 2004). Among the many styles of comb ware, there is one that makes use of the characteristics of asbestos: Asbestos ware. In this tradition, which persisted through different cultures into the Iron Age, asbestos was used to temper the ceramic clay. Other styles are Pyheensilta, Jäkärlä, Kierikki, Pöljä and Säräisniemi pottery with their respective subdivisions. Sperrings ceramics is the original name given for the younger early Comb ware (Ka I:2) found in Finland.” ref
“The settlements were located at sea shores or beside lakes and the economy was based on hunting, fishing, and the gathering of plants. In Finland, it was a maritime culture which became more and more specialized in hunting seals. The dominant dwelling was probably a teepee of about 30 square meters where some 15 people could live. Also, rectangular houses made of timber become popular in Finland from 4000 BCE cal. Graves were dug at the settlements and the dead were covered with red ochre. The typical Comb Ceramic age shows an extensive use of objects made of flint and amber as grave offerings.” ref
“The stone tools changed very little over time. They were made of local materials such as slate and quartz. Finds suggest a fairly extensive exchange network: red slate originating from northern Scandinavia, asbestos from Lake Saimaa, green slate from Lake Onega, amber from the southern shores of the Baltic Sea, and flint from the Valdai area in northwestern Russia. The culture was characterized by small figurines of burnt clay and animal heads made of stone. The animal heads usually depict moose and bears and were derived from the art of the Mesolithic. There were also many rock paintings. There are sources noting that the typical comb ceramic pottery had a sense of luxury and that its makers knew how to wear precious amber pendants.” ref
“In earlier times, it was often suggested that the spread of the Comb Ware people was correlated with the diffusion of the Uralic languages, and thus an early Uralic language would have been spoken throughout this culture. It was also suggested that bearers of this culture likely spoke Finno-Ugric languages. Another view is that the Comb Ware people may have spoken Palaeo-European languages, as some toponyms and hydronyms also indicate a non-Uralic, non-Indo-European language at work in some areas. In addition, modern scholars have located the Proto-Uralic homeland east of the Volga, if not even beyond the Urals. The great westward dispersal of the Uralic languages is suggested to have happened long after the demise of the Comb Ceramic culture, perhaps in the 1st millennium BCE.” ref
“Saag et al. (2017) analyzed three CCC individuals buried at Kudruküla as belonging to Y-hg R1a5-YP1272 (R1a1b~ after ISOGG 2020), along with three mtDNA samples of mt-hg U5b1d1, U4a, and U2e1. Mittnik (2018) analyzed two CCC individuals. The male carried R1 (2021: R1b-M343) and U4d2, while the female carried U5a1d2b. Generally, the CCC individuals were mostly of Eastern Hunter-Gatherer (EHG) descent, with even more EHG than people of the Narva culture. Lamnidis et al. (2018) confirmed and specified this to 65% Eastern Hunter-Gatherer (EHG), 20% Western Steppe Herder (WSH), and 15% Western Hunter-Gatherer (WHG) ancestry. This amount of EHG ancestry was higher than among earlier cultures of the eastern Baltic, while WSH ancestry had previously not even been attested among such an early culture in the region.” ref
Ertebølle culture
“The Ertebølle culture (ca 5300 – 3950 BCE) is the name of a hunter-gatherer and fisher, pottery-making culture dating to the end of the Mesolithic period. The culture was concentrated in Southern Scandinavia. It is named after the type site, a location in the small village of Ertebølle on Limfjorden in Danish Jutland. In the 1890s, the National Museum of Denmark excavated heaps of oyster shells there, mixed with mussels, snails, bones and bone, antler, and flint artifacts, which were evaluated as kitchen middens, or refuse dumps. Accordingly, the culture is less commonly named the Kitchen Midden. As it is approximately identical to the Ellerbek culture of Schleswig-Holstein, the combined name, Ertebølle-Ellerbek is often used. The Ellerbek culture (German Ellerbek Kultur) is named after a type site in Ellerbek, a community on the edge of Kiel, Germany.” ref
“In the 1960s and 1970s another closely related culture was found in the (now dry) Noordoostpolder in the Netherlands, near the village Swifterbant and the former island of Urk. Named the Swifterbant culture (5300 – 3400 BCE) they show a transition from hunter-gatherer to both animal husbandry, primarily cows and pigs, and cultivation of barley and emmer wheat. During the formative stages contact with nearby Linear Pottery culture settlements in Limburg has been detected. Like the Ertebølle culture, they lived near open water, in this case, creeks, river dunes, and bogs along post-glacial banks of the Overijsselse Vecht. Recent excavations show a local continuity going back to (at least) 5600 BCE, when burial practices resembled the contemporary gravefields in Denmark and South Sweden “in all details”, suggesting only part of a diverse ancestral “Ertebølle”-like heritage was locally continued into the later (Middle Neolithic) Swifterbant tradition (4200 – 3400 BCE).” ref
“The Ertebølle culture was roughly contemporaneous with the Linear Pottery culture, food-producers whose northernmost border was located just to the south. The Ertebølle did not practice agriculture but it did utilize domestic grain in some capacity, which it must have obtained from the south. The Ertebølle culture replaced the earlier Kongemose culture of Denmark. It was limited to the north by the Scandinavian Nøstvet and Lihult cultures. It is divided into an early phase ca 5300-4500 BCE, and a later phase ca 4500-3950 BCE. Shortly after 4100 BCE the Ertebølle began to expand along the Baltic coast at least as far as Rügen. Shortly thereafter it was replaced by the Funnelbeaker culture. Ertebølle peoples lived primarily on seafood. The mainstay of Ertebølle economy was fish. Three main methods of fishing are supported by the evidence, such as the boats and other equipment found in fragmentary form at Tybrind Vig and elsewhere: trapping, angling, and spearing.” ref
“In recent years archaeologists have found the acronym EBK most convenient, parallel to LBK for German Linearbandkeramik (Linear Pottery culture) and TRB for German Trichterbecher, Danish Tragtbæger (Funnelbeaker culture) and Dutch trechterbekercultuur. Ostensibly for Ertebølle Kultur, EBK could be either German or Danish and has the added advantage that Ellerbek also begins with E. The Ertebølle population derived its living from a variety of means, but chiefly from the sea. They prospered, grew healthy, and multiplied on a diet of fish. They were masters of the inland waters, which they traversed in paddled dugouts. Like many peoples known in history, they were able to hunt whales and seals from their dugouts. Their materials were mainly wood, with bone, antler, and flint for functions requiring harder surfaces. Homes were constructed of brush or light wood. The materials encourage us to view them as transitory. They were, nevertheless, able to place the dead in longer-used cemeteries. Perhaps the dwelling-places were transitory, but the territories were not.” ref
“Evidence of conflict: There is some evidence of conflict between Ertebølle settlements: an arrowhead in a pelvis at Skateholm, Sweden; a bone point in a throat at Vedbæk, Zealand; a bone point in the chest at Stora Biers, Sweden. More significant is evidence of cannibalism at Dyrholmen, Jutland, and Møllegabet on Ærø. Their human bones were broken open to obtain the marrow. The evidence of marrow exploitation in the Ertebølle remains indicates dietary rather than ritual cannibalism; as marrow is never the subject of ritualistic cannibalism. The Ertebølle culture is of a general type called Late Mesolithic, of which other examples can be found in Swifterbant culture, Zedmar culture, Narva culture, and in Russia. Some would include the Nøstvet culture and Lihult culture to the north as well. The various locations seem fragmented and isolated, but that characteristic may be an accident of discovery. Perhaps if all the submarine sites were known, a continuous coastal culture would appear from the Netherlands to the lakes of Russia, but this has yet to be demonstrated.” ref
“Judging from the remains of animal bones at their sites, the Ertebølle people hunted mainly three types of land animals: large forest browsers, fur animals, and maritime birds. The forest mammals are the red deer and roe deer, which were dietary staples, and the wild boar, european elk, less frequently the aurochs, and a rare horse, believed to have been wild. Only a left foreleg from Østenkær remains. It offers definitive proof that horses lived in the forests of Europe. On the plains to the east they are only found in association with man. The boar were supplemented by swine with mixed European and Near Eastern ancestry, obtained through their Neolithic farming neighbors, as early as 4600 BCE.” ref
“The fur animals are fairly widespread: the beaver, squirrel, polecat, badger, fox, lynx. Furs might have served as a currency and may have been traded to some degree, but this is speculation. Maritime birds must have been easily taken in the marshes and ponds of the region: red-throated diver, black-throated diver, Dalmatian pelican, capercaille, grebe, cormorant, swan, and duck. In addition are a few others: the dog and the wolf, and two snakes, the common grass snake, and the Aesculapian snake. As snakes do not appear in the art, it is impossible to say what cultural impact they had, if any.” ref
“Plant use: The EBK gathered berries for consumption and also prepared a number of wild plants, judging from the seed remains of plants that could not be consumed without preparation. Of the berries that have been found are raspberry (Rubus idaeus), dewberry (Rubus caesius), wild strawberry, and the somewhat less palatable dogwood (Cornus sanguinea), hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna, and C. oxyacantha), rowanberry (Sorbus aucuparia), crab apple and rose hips. Some seeds usually made into gruel in historical times are acorn and manna grass (Glyceria fluitans). Roots of the sea beet, Beta maritima, were prepared as well. That species is ancestral to modern domestic beets. Greens could have been boiled from nettle (Urtica dioica), orache (Atriplex), and goosefoot (Chenopodium album).” ref
“Some of the pottery evidences grain impressions, which some interpret as the use of food imported from the south. Certainly, they did not need to import food and were probably better nourished than the southerners. Analysis of charred remains in one pot indicates that it at least was used for fermenting a mixture of blood and nuts. Some have therefore guessed that fermentation of grain was used to produce beer. Finally, fragments of textiles from Tybrind Vig were woven in the needle-netting technique from spun plant fibers.” ref
“Pottery was manufactured from native clays tempered with sand, crushed stone, and organic material. The EBK pot was made by coil technique, being fired on the open bed of hot coals. It was not like the neighboring Neolithic Linearbandkeramik and appears related instead to a pottery type that first appears in Europe in the Samara region of Russia c. 7000 cal BC, and spread up the Volga to the Eastern Baltic and then westward along the shore. Two main types are found, a beaker and a lamp. The beaker is a pot-bellied pot narrowing at the neck, with a flanged, outward turning rim. The bottom was typically formed into a point or bulb (the “funnel”) of some sort that supported the pot when it was placed in clay or sand. One can imagine a sort of mobile pantry consisting of rows of jars set now in the hut, now by the fire, now in the clay layer at the bottom of a dugout.” ref
“The beaker came in various sizes from 8 to 50 cm high and from 5 to 20 cm in diameter. Decoration filled the entire surface with horizontal bands of fingertip or fingernail impressions. It must have been in the decoration phase that grains of wheat and barley left their impression in the clay. Late in the period technique and decoration became slightly more varied and sophisticated: the walls were thinner and different motifs were used in the impressions: chevrons, cord marks, and punctures made with animal bones. Handles are sometimes added and the rims may turn in instead of out. The blubber lamp was molded from a single piece of clay. The use of such lamps suggests some household activity in the huts after dark.” ref
“Paddles from Tybrind Vig show traces of highly developed and artistic woodcarving. This is an example of the embellishment of functional pieces. The population also polished and engraved non-functional or not obviously functional pieces of bone or antler. Motifs were predominantly geometric with some anthropomorphic or zoomorphic forms. Also in evidence (for example, at Fanø) are polished amber representations of animals, such as birds, boars, and bears. Jewelry was made of animal teeth or decorative shells. To what extent any of these pieces were symbolic of wealth and status is not clear. Cemeteries, such as the ones at Vedbæk and Skateholm, give a “sedentary” character to the settlements. Red ochre and deer antlers were placed in some graves, but not others. Some social distinctions may therefore have been made.” ref
“There was some appreciation of sexual dimorphism: the women wore necklaces and belts of animal teeth and shells. No special body position was used. Both burial and cremation were practiced. At Møllegabet, an individual was buried in a dugout, which some see as the beginning of Scandinavian boat burials. Skateholm contained also a dog cemetery. Dog graves were prepared and gifted the same as human, with ochre, antler, and grave goods. In either history or prehistory, the dog is an invaluable animal and is often treated as a person.” ref
7,522-6,522 years ago Linear Pottery culture which I think relates to Arcane Capitalism’s origins
Eastern Linear Pottery Culture
“In contrast to the western Linear Pottery Culture, there is also an eastern or Alföld Linear Pottery Culture. The name is misleading since the western LPC can be found east of the eastern LPC. Since the term “Alföld LPC”, however, also covers only part of the distribution, we will use the name “eastern LPC” in this context. By means of vessel shapes and decoration and cultic remains, the eastern LPC can be well distinguished from the western LPC. House-building techniques of the eastern LPC which seemed to be characterized by so-called pit-houses for a long time include, however, also long-houses which are frequent in the western LPC.” ref
“The Eastern Linear Pottery culture developed in eastern Hungary and Transylvania roughly contemporaneously with, perhaps a few hundred years after, the Transdanubian. The great plain there (Hungarian Alföld) had been occupied by the Starčevo-Körös-Criş culture of “gracile Mediterraneans” from the Balkans as early as 6100 BCE. Hertelendi and others give a reevaluated date range of 5860–5330 BCE for the Early Neolithic, 5950–5400 BCE for the Körös. The Körös Culture went as far north as the edge of the upper Tisza and stopped. North of it the Alföld plain and the Bükk Mountains were intensively occupied by Mesolithics thriving on the flint tool trade.” ref
Western Linear Pottery Culture
“The early or earliest Western Linear Pottery culture began conventionally at 5500 BCE, possibly as early as 5700 BCE, in western Hungary, southern Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic. It is sometimes called the Central European Linear Pottery (CELP) to distinguish it from the ALP phase of the Eastern Linear Pottery culture. In Hungarian it tends to be called DVK, Dunántúl Vonaldiszes Kerámia, translated as “Transdanubian Linear Pottery”. A number of local styles and phases of ware are defined.” ref
“The end of the early phase can be dated to its arrival in the Netherlands at about 5200 BCE. The population there was already food-producing to some extent. The early phase went on there, but meanwhile, the Music Note Pottery (Notenkopfkeramik) phase of the Middle Linear Band Pottery culture appeared in Austria at about 5200 BCE and moved eastward into Romania and Ukraine. The late phase, or Stroked Pottery culture (Stichbandkeramik or SBK, 5000–4500 BCE) evolved in central Europe and went eastward.” ref
Linear Pottery culture
“The Linear Pottery culture is a major archaeological horizon of the European Neolithic, flourishing c. 5500–4500 BCE. It is abbreviated as LBK (from German: Linearbandkeramik), and is also known as the Linear Band Ware, Linear Ware, Linear Ceramics, or Incised Ware culture, and falls within the Danubian I culture of V. Gordon Childe. The densest evidence for the culture is on the middle Danube, the upper and middle Elbe, and the upper and middle Rhine. It represents a major event in the initial spread of agriculture in Europe. The pottery after which it was named consists of simple cups, bowls, vases, and jugs, without handles, but in a later phase with lugs or pierced lugs, bases, and necks.” ref
“Important sites include Nitra in Slovakia; Bylany in the Czech Republic; Langweiler and Zwenkau in Germany; Brunn am Gebirge in Austria; Elsloo, Sittard, Köln-Lindenthal, Aldenhoven, Flomborn, and Rixheim on the Rhine; Lautereck and Hienheim on the upper Danube; and Rössen and Sonderhausen on the middle Elbe. In 2019, two large Rondel complexes were discovered east of the Vistula River near Toruń in Poland. Two variants of the early Linear Pottery culture are recognized: 1. The Early or Western Linear Pottery Culture developed on the middle Danube, including western Hungary, and was carried down the Rhine, Elbe, Oder, and Vistula. 2. The Eastern Linear Pottery Culture flourished in eastern Hungary.” ref
“Middle and late phases are also defined. In the middle phase, the Early Linear Pottery culture intruded upon the Bug-Dniester culture and began to manufacture musical note pottery. In the late phase, the Stroked Pottery culture moved down the Vistula and Elbe. A number of cultures ultimately replaced the Linear Pottery culture over its range, but without a one-to-one correspondence between its variants and the replacing cultures. The culture map, instead, is complex. Some of the successor cultures are the Hinkelstein, Großgartach, Rössen, Lengyel, Cucuteni-Trypillian, and Boian-Maritza cultures.” ref
“Since Starčevo-Körös pottery was earlier than the LBK and was located in a contiguous food-producing region, the early investigators looked for precedents there. Much of the Starčevo-Körös pottery features decorative patterns composed of convolute bands of paint: spirals, converging bands, vertical bands, and so on. The LBK appears to imitate and often improve these convolutions with incised lines; hence the term, linear, to distinguish incised band ware from painted band ware. The name depends on specialized meanings of “linear” and “band”, whether in English or in German. Unfortunately, these words without the qualifiers do not describe the decoration. There are few bands going around the pottery and the lines are mainly not straight.” ref
“The LBK did not begin with this range and only reached it toward the end of its time. It began in regions of densest occupation on the middle Danube (Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary) and spread over about 1,500 km (930 mi) along the rivers in 360 years. The rate of expansion was therefore about 4 km (2.5 mi) per year, which can hardly be called an invasion or a wave by the standard of current events, but over archaeological time seems especially rapid. The LBK was concentrated somewhat inland from the coastal areas; i.e., it is not evidenced in Denmark or the northern coastal strips of Germany and Poland, or the coast of the Black Sea in Romania. The northern coastal regions remained occupied by Mesolithic cultures exploiting the then rich Atlantic salmon runs. There are lighter concentrations of LBK in the Netherlands, such as at Elsloo, Netherlands, with the sites of Darion, Remicourt, Fexhe, or Waremme-Longchamps, and at the mouths of the Oder and Vistula. Evidently, the Neolithics and Mesolithics were not excluding each other.” ref
“The LBK at maximum extent ranged from about the line of the Seine–Oise (Paris Basin) eastward to the line of the Dnieper, and southward to the line of the upper Danube down to the big bend. An extension ran through the Southern Bug valley, leaped to the valley of the Dniester, and swerved southward from the middle Dniester to the lower Danube in eastern Romania, east of the Carpathians. A good many C-14 dates have been acquired on the LBK, making possible statistical analyses, which have been performed on different sample groups. One such analysis by Stadler and Lennais sets 68.2% confidence limits at about 5430–5040 BCE; that is, 68.2% of possible dates allowed by variation of the major factors that influence measurement, calculation, and calibration fall within that range. The 95.4% confidence interval is 5600–4750 BCE.” ref
Data continue to be acquired and therefore any one analysis should be taken as a rough guideline only. Overall, it is probably safe to say that the Linear Pottery culture spanned several hundred years of continental European prehistory in the late sixth and early fifth millennia BC, with local variations. Data from Belgium indicate a late survival of LBK there, as late as 4100 BCE. The Linear Pottery culture is not the only food-producing player on the stage of prehistoric Europe. It has been necessary, therefore, to distinguish between it and the Neolithic, which was most easily done by dividing the Neolithic of Europe into chronological phases. These have varied a great deal.” ref
“An approximation is:
- Early Neolithic, 6000–5500. The first appearance of food-producing cultures in the south of the future Linear Pottery culture range: the Körös of southern Hungary and the Dniester culture in Ukraine.
- Middle Neolithic, 5500–5000. Early and Middle Linear Pottery culture.
- Late Neolithic, 5000–4500. Late Linear Pottery and legacy cultures.” ref
“The last phase is no longer the end of the Neolithic. A “Final Neolithic” has been added to the transition between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. All numbers depend to some extent on the geographic region. The pottery styles of the LBK allow some division of its window in time. Conceptual schemes have varied somewhat. One is:
- Early: The Eastern and Western LBK cultures, originating on the middle Danube
- Middle: Musical Note pottery – the incised lines of the decoration are broken or terminated by punctures, or “strokes”, giving the appearance of musical notes. The culture expanded to its maximum extent, and regional variants appeared. One variant is the late Bug-Dniester culture.
- Late: Stroked pottery – lines of punctures are substituted for the incised lines.” ref
“The earliest theory of Linear Pottery culture origin is that it came from the Starčevo-Körös culture of Serbia and Hungary. Supporting this view is the fact that the LBK appeared earliest about 5600–5400 BCE on the middle Danube in the Starčevo range. Presumably, the expansion northwards of early Starčevo-Körös produced a local variant reaching the upper Tisza that may have well been created by contact with native epi-Paleolithic people. This small group began a new tradition of pottery, substituting engravings for the paintings of the Balkanic cultures.” ref
“A site at Brunn am Gebirge just south of Vienna seems to document the transition to LBK. The site was densely settled in a long house pattern around 5550–5200 BCE. The lower layers feature Starčevo-type plain pottery, with large number of stone tools made of material from near Lake Balaton, Hungary. Over the time frame, LBK pottery and animal husbandry increased, while the use of stone tools decreased.” ref
“A second theory proposes an autochthonous development out of the local Mesolithic cultures. Although the Starčevo-Körös entered southern Hungary about 6000 BCE and the LBK spread very rapidly, there appears to be a hiatus of up to 500 years in which a barrier seems to have been in effect. Moreover, the cultivated species of the near and middle eastern Neolithic do not do well over the Linear Pottery culture range. And finally, the Mesolithics in the region prior to the LBK used some domestic species, such as wheat and flax. The La Hoguette culture on the northwest of the LBK range developed their own food production from native plants and animals.” ref
“A third theory attributes the start of Linear Pottery to an influence from the Mesolithic cultures of the east European plain. The pottery was used in intensive food gathering. The rate at which it spread was no faster than the spread of the Neolithic in general. Accordingly, Dolukhanov and others postulate that an impulse from the steppe to the southeast of the barrier stimulated the Mesolithics north of it to innovate their own pottery. This view only accounts for the pottery; presumably, the Mesolithics combined it de novo with local food production, which began to spread very rapidly throughout a range that was already producing some food.” ref
“The initial LBK population theory hypothesized that the culture was spread by farmers moving up the Danube practicing slash-and-burn methods. The presence of the Mediterranean sea shell, Spondylus gaederopus, and the similarity of the pottery to gourds, which did not grow in the north, seemed to be evidence of the immigration, as does the genetic evidence cited below. The lands into which they moved were believed untenanted or too sparsely populated by hunter-gatherers to be a significant factor. The barrier causing the hiatus mentioned above does not have an immediate geographical cause. The Körös culture ended in the middle of the Hungarian plain, and although the climate to the north is colder, the gradient is not so sharp as to form a barrier there.” ref
“In 2005, scientists successfully sequenced mtDNA coding region 15997–16409 derived from twenty-four 7,500- to 7,000-year-old human remains associated with the LBK culture. Of those remains, 22 were from locations in Germany near the Harz Mountains and the upper Rhine Valley, while one was from Austria and one from Hungary. The scientists did not reveal the detailed hypervariable segment I (HVSI) sequences for all the samples, but identified that seven of the samples belonged to H or V branch of the mtDNA phylogenetic tree, six belonged to the N1a branch, five belonged to the T branch, four belonged to the K(U8) branch, one belonged to the J branch, and one belonged to the U3 branch. All branches are extant in the current European population, although the K branch was present in roughly twice the percentages as would be found in Europe today (15% vs. 8% now).” ref
“A comparison of the N1a HVSI sequences with sequences of living individuals found three of them to correspond with those of individuals currently living in Europe. Two of the sequences corresponded to ancestral nodes predicted to exist or to have existed on the European branch of the phylogenetic tree. One of the sequences is related to European populations, but with no apparent descendants amongst the modern population. The N1a evidence supports the notion that the descendants of LBK culture have lived in Europe for more than 7,000 years and have become an integral part of the current European population. The lack of mtDNA haplogroup U5 supports the notion that U5 at this time is uniquely associated with mesolithic European cultures.” ref
“A 2010 study of ancient DNA suggested the LBK population had affinities to modern-day populations from the Near East and Anatolia, such as an overall prevalence of G2. The study also found some unique features, such as the prevalence of the now-rare Y-haplogroup H2 and mitochondrial haplogroup frequencies. Subsequent studies based on full-genome analysis have found that the LBK population was similar genetically to modern southern Europeans, and did not resemble modern Near Eastern or Anatolian populations. Neolithic Anatolian farmers have also been found to be more similar to modern southern Europeans that to modern Near Easterners or Anatolians.” ref
“Lipson et al. (2017) and Narasimhan et al. (2019) analyzed a large number of skeletons ascribed to the Linear Pottery Culture. Most of the Y-DNA belonged to G2a and subclades of it, some to I2 and subclades of it, beside few samples of T1a, CT, and C1a2. The samples of mtDNA extracted were various subclades of T, H, N, U, K, J, X, HV, and V. The LBK people settled on fluvial terraces and in the proximities of rivers. They were quick to identify regions of fertile loess. On it they raised a distinctive assemblage of crops and associated weeds in small plots, an economy that Gimbutas called a “garden type of civilization”. The difference between a crop and a weed in LBK contexts is the frequency.” ref
“The unit of residence was the long house, a rectangular structure, 5.5 to 7.0 m (18.0 to 23.0 ft) wide, of variable length; for example, a house at Bylany was 45 m (148 ft). Outer walls were wattle-and-daub, sometimes alternating with split logs, with slanted, thatched roofs, supported by rows of poles, three across. The exterior wall of the home was solid and massive, oak posts being preferred. Clay for the daub was dug from pits near the house, which were then used for storage. Extra posts at one end may indicate a partial second story. Some LBK houses were occupied for as long as 30 years.” ref
“It is thought that these houses had no windows and only one doorway. The door was located at one end of the house. Internally, the house had one or two partitions creating up to three areas. Interpretations of the use of these areas vary. Working activities might be carried out in the better lit door end, the middle used for sleeping and eating, and the end farthest from the door could have been used for grain storage. According to another view, the interior was divided in areas for sleeping, common life, and a fenced enclosure at the back end for keeping animals.” ref
When the First Farmers Arrived in Europe, Inequality Evolved
“Forests gave way to fields, pushing hunter-gatherers to the margins—geographically and socially. There is no clear genetic evidence of interbreeding along the central European route until the (Linear Pottery culture 5500–4500 BCE or 7,522-6,522 years ago) LBK farmers reached the Rhine. And yet the groups mixed in other ways—potentially right from the beginning. A tantalizing hint of such interactions came from Gamba’s discovery of a hunter-gatherer bone in a farming settlement at a place called Tiszaszőlős-Domaháza in Hungary. But there was nothing more to be said about that individual. Was he a member of that community? A hostage? Someone passing through?” ref
“With later evidence, the picture became clearer. At Bruchenbrücken, a site north of Frankfurt in Germany, farmers, and hunter-gatherers lived together roughly 7,300 years ago in what Gronenborn calls a “multicultural” settlement. It looks as if the hunters may have come there originally from farther west to trade with the farmers, who valued their predecessors’ toolmaking techniques—especially their finely chiseled stone arrowheads. Perhaps some hunter-gatherers settled, taking up the farming way of life. So fruitful were the exchanges at Bruchenbrücken and other sites, Gronenborn says, that they held up the westward advance of farming for a couple of centuries.” ref
“There may even have been rare exceptions to the rule that the two groups did not interbreed early on. The Austrian site of Brunn 2, in a wooded river valley not far from Vienna, dates from the earliest arrival of the LBK farmers in central Europe, around 7,600 years ago. Three burials at the site were roughly contemporaneous. Two were of individuals of pure farming ancestry, and the other was the first-generation offspring of a hunter and a farmer. All three lay curled up on their sides in the LBK way, but the “hunter” was buried with six arrowheads.” ref
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Hamangia culture
“The Hamangia culture is a Late Neolithic archaeological culture of Dobruja (Romania and Bulgaria) between the Danube and the Black Sea and Muntenia in the south. It is named after the site of Baia-Hamangia, discovered along Golovița Lake. The Hamangia culture began around 5250/5200 BCE and lasted until around 4550/4500 BCE. It was absorbed by the expanding Boian culture in its transition towards the Gumelniţa. Its cultural links with Anatolia suggest that it was the result of a recent settlement by people from Anatolia, unlike the neighboring cultures, which appear descended from earlier Neolithic settlements.” ref
“The Hamangia culture attracted and attracts the attention of many art historians because of its exceptional clay figures. Pottery figurines are normally extremely stylized and show standing naked faceless women with emphasized breasts and buttocks. Two figurines known as “The Thinker” and “The Sitting woman” are considered masterpieces of Neolithic art. Painted vessels with complex geometrical patterns based on spiral-motifs are typical. The shapes include: bowls and cylindric glasses (most of them with arched walls). They are decorated with dots, straight parallel lines, and zig-zags, which make Hamangia pottery very original.” ref
“Settlements consist of rectangular houses with one or two rooms, built of wattle and daub, sometimes with stone foundations (in Durankulak). They are normally arranged on a rectangular grid and may form small tells. Settlements are located along the coast, on the coast of lakes, on lower or middle river terraces, and sometimes in caves. Crouched or extended inhumation in cemeteries. Grave-goods tend to be without pottery in Hamangia I. Grave-goods include flint, worked shells, bone tools, and shell-ornaments.” ref
“Important sites: The Durankulak lake settlement, now Archaeological Complex Durankulak, commenced on a small island, approximately 7000 BCE, and around 4700/4600 BCE the stone architecture was already in general use and became a characteristic phenomenon that was unique in Europe. Another site is Cernavodă, the necropolis where the famous statues “The Thinker” and “The Sitting Woman” were discovered. As well as the eponymous site of Baia-Hamangia, discovered along Lake Golovița, close to the Black Sea coast, in the Romanian province of Dobrogea.” ref
Neolithic Czech Republic farmers
“Insights into the cultural and biological lives of early farmers who lived in the Czech Republic around 7,500 years ago. The researchers conducted biochemical and DNA tests on the bones of a sample of 85 early Neolithic farmers found at the Linear Pottery culture cemetery in Vedrovice, Czech Republic. Their findings suggest that these early farmers were indigenous to Central Europe and not migrants from Anatolia and Levant in the Near East, as was previously thought. The Linear Pottery Ware culture was the major early Neolithic culture in continental Europe, stretching from northern France and Belgium across Germany all the way to southern Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary. This type of pottery has been seen as a signature of immigrant farming groups who came up from the south-east and colonized all these regions of Europe, pushing the local hunter-gatherers aside in the process. However, the new research indicates that it was the local hunter-gatherer communities, whose ancestry can be traced back to the local late Palaeolithic, who adopted farming for themselves – through contacts, trade, and partner exchange (e.g. marriage), with the first farmers of south-east Europe.” ref
Interactions between earliest Linearbandkeramik farmers and central European hunter-gatherers at the dawn of European Neolithization
“Archaeogenetic research over the last decade has demonstrated that European Neolithic farmers (ENFs) were descended primarily from Anatolian Neolithic farmers (ANFs). ENFs, including early Neolithic central European Linearbandkeramik (LBK) farming communities, also harbored ancestry from European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers (WHGs) to varying extents, reflecting admixture between ENFs and WHGs. The Linearbandkeramik or Linear Pottery culture (LBK) played a key role in the Neolithization of central Europe. Culturally, economically, and genetically, the LBK had its ultimate roots in western Anatolia, but it also displayed distinct features of autochthonous European Mesolithic hunter-gatherer societies. Several models for the origins of the LBK culture have been proposed over the years.” ref
“However, the timing and other details of this process are still imperfectly understood. In this report, we provide a bioarchaeological analysis of three individuals interred at the Brunn 2 site of the Brunn am Gebirge-Wolfholz archeological complex, one of the oldest LBK sites in central Europe. Two of the individuals had a mixture of WHG-related and ANF-related ancestry, one of them with approximately 50% of each, while the third individual had approximately all ANF-related ancestry. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios for all three individuals were within the range of variation reflecting the diets of other Neolithic agrarian populations. Strontium isotope analysis revealed that the ~50% WHG-ANF individual was non-local to the Brunn 2 area. Overall, our data indicate interbreeding between incoming farmers, whose ancestors ultimately came from western Anatolia, and local HGs, starting within the first few generations of the arrival of the former in central Europe, as well as highlighting the integrative nature and composition of the early LBK communities.” ref
“The Indigenist model suggests the LBK was founded through the adaptation of elements of the West Asian Neolithic Package by indigenous Mesolithic populations exclusively through frontier contact and cultural diffusion. The Integrationist model views the formation of LBK as the integration of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers into an agro-pastoral lifeway through mechanisms such as leapfrog colonization, frontier mobility, and contact. According to this model, small groups associated with the Starčevo-Körös-Criş (SKC) culture, the likely LBK predecessors in Europe, left their homelands in the Balkans (where most of their own ancestors had arrived earlier from Anatolia), and settled new areas to the northwest. Contacts with local Mesolithic groups and exchange of products would have resulted in the co-optation of hunter-gatherers into farming communities, where they would have adopted farming practices1. Evidence of such interactions exists at the Tiszaszőlős-Domaháza site in northeastern Hungary, containing interments of individuals of mostly hunter-gatherer genetic ancestry buried in a clearly SKC context.” ref
“The Migrationist model suggests that a sparsely populated territory of Mesolithic central Europe was taken over by pioneering agro-pastoral groups associated with the SKC culture, which gradually displaced indigenous hunting-gathering populations, who did not significantly influence the arriving Starčevo colonizers. According to this model, newcomers would have replicated their ancestral material culture in the newly settled territory without incorporating the material culture features of the local indigenous populations. Some variation, due to innovation and adaptation to the new environment and sources, would have involved changes in technology such as pottery and building material as well as lithic tool sources. At the same time, symbolic systems, such as decorative designs and cultural objects, would have remained unchanged. This model appeared at the end of the 1950s and gained wide support in the second half of the 20th century.” ref
“To date, ancient DNA (aDNA) studies have convincingly shown that Neolithic European farming populations were primarily genetic descendants of central and western Anatolian Neolithic farmers (ANFs). Their genetic signature is clearly distinct from autochthonous Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers (HGs) of central Europe (WHGs) at the level of uniparental markers such as mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y chromosome as well as genome-wide. Nevertheless, the extent to which the newcomers interacted both culturally and genetically with local hunter-gatherers remains unclear; that is, it remains unclear to what extent an Integrationist or Migrationist model is accurate. Genetically, Neolithic central European farmers carried a minor proportion of genetic ancestry characteristic to WHG populations, but the extent and the timing of the WHG admixture in the gene pool of the European Neolithic descendants of Anatolian farmers varies across central Europe. While the amount of WHG ancestry in European Neolithic farmers had been observed to increase throughout the Neolithic in the present-day territories of Hungary, Germany, and other regions of Europe, the initial degree of exchange remains unresolved, in part due to a scarcity of human remains contemporaneous with the earliest stages of the Neolithic farming migration.” ref
“The Brunn 2 archaeological site, part of the Brunn am Gebirge, Wolfholz archaeological complex south of Vienna, Austria (Fig. 1), is the oldest Neolithic site known in Austria and one of the oldest in all of central Europe. It belongs to the earliest stage of the development of LBK, called the Formative phase. Radiocarbon dates obtained for Brunn 2 time the site to about 5670–5350 cal BCE. The main characteristic of the settlements of the Formative phase is the absence of fine pottery and the use of coarse pottery with clear Starčevo features. The leading role of Anatolian migrants in the formation of cultural attributes of the earliest farmers of Europe is evident through the comparative typological analysis of material culture artifacts from the Brunn 2 site. In addition to a rich trove of cultural artifacts, Brunn 2 yielded four human burials. The initial radiocarbon dating of the remains confirmed these to be contemporaneous with the earliest phase of the Brunn am Gebirge complex and, thus, to represent some of the earliest central European Neolithic farmers. We set out to perform a bioarchaeological analysis of these individuals to examine genetic ancestry as well as diet and mobility at the dawn of the European Neolithization, in an effort to refine the model of the establishment of farming in Neolithic central Europe.” ref
When the First Farmers Arrived in Europe, Inequality Evolved
“Forests gave way to fields, pushing hunter-gatherers to the margins—geographically and socially. Roughly 9,000 years ago farmers from the Middle East headed toward Europe, seeking new land to cultivate. The farmers traveled either along the Mediterranean coast or the Danube River, encountering hunter-gatherers who lived in dense forests. At first, the farmers and hunter-gatherers traded or mated. By 5,000 years ago, however, agriculture dominated the continent and hierarchical societies had evolved. Genetic studies suggest that individuals with high hunter-gatherer ancestry may have been treated as inferiors.” ref
“Eight thousand years ago small bands of seminomadic hunter-gatherers were the only human beings roaming Europe’s lush, green forests. Archaeological digs in caves and elsewhere have turned up evidence of their Mesolithic technology: flint-tipped tools with which they fished, hunted deer and aurochs (a now-extinct species of ox), and gathered wild plants. Many had dark hair and blue eyes, recent genetic studies suggest, and the few skeletons unearthed so far indicate that they were quite tall and muscular. Their languages remain mysterious to this day.” ref
“Three millennia later the forests they inhabited had given way to fields of wheat and lentils. Farmers ruled the continent. The transition was evident early on when excavations revealed bones of domesticated animals, pottery containing remnants of grain, and most intriguing of all, graveyards whose riddles are still being solved. Agriculture not only ushered in a new economic model but also brought about metal tools, new diets, and new patterns of land use, as well as novel human relationships with nature and with one another.” ref
“For 150 years scholars debated whether the farmers brought their Neolithic culture from the Middle East to Europe or whether it was only their ideas that traveled. Research on patterns of variation in modern genes provides irrefutable proof that the farmers came—streaming across the Aegean Sea and the Bosporus to reach Greece and the Balkan Peninsula, respectively. From there they spread north and west. This technological revolution enabled an unprecedented collaboration between archaeologists and geneticists, who rushed to characterize the DNA of individuals who had died in prehistoric hunter-gatherer or farmer settlements.” ref
“Researchers found a hunter-gatherer bone in an early farming community in Hungary, and a bewilderingly complex and multifaceted picture of the encounters between the residents and the immigrants has emerged. In some places, the two groups mingled from the time they met; in others, they kept their distance for centuries, if not millennia. Sometimes the farmers venerated their predecessors; at other times they dehumanized and subjugated them. Nevertheless, a clear trend is evident. As the decades passed and farmers increased in number, they assimilated and replaced the hunter-gatherers, pushing those who held out to the margins—both geographically and socially. Disturbingly, the progression toward greater inequality culminated, in at least a few places, in societies in which individuals with greater hunter-gatherer ancestry may have been enslaved—possibly even being sacrificed to accompany their masters to the afterlife.” ref
“Roughly 11,500 years ago Europe and the Middle East were emerging from an ice age. As the weather grew warmer and the land more bountiful, hunter-gatherers in the so-called Fertile Crescent—an envelope of land around the Euphrates, Tigris, and Nile Rivers and the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea—gradually became more sedentary. They spent less of their time hunting wild ibex and boar and gathering wild grasses, and they spent more of it tending their own domesticated animals and plants: sheep, goats, wheat, peas, and lentils. Archaeobotany—in particular the study of ancient pollen—and archaeozoology, the study of ancient animal bones, revealed this transition. These were the first farmers, people who spoke unknown languages (of which Basque could be a relic), used stone tools, and about 9,000 years ago, headed for Europe in search of new land to cultivate.” ref
“The farmers reached the new continent by two routes: in boats via the Mediterranean and on foot along the Danube River from the Balkans into central Europe. Radiocarbon dating of archaeological sites revealed that by about 7,500 years ago, Danubian farmers were building villages in the Carpathian Basin—modern-day Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania—and there they began creating a pottery culture. Archaeologists call it the Linear Pottery culture (LBK, by its German acronym, for Linearbandkeramik) because of the distinctive spiral motifs with which they decorated their ceramics.
Traveling rapidly westward across the fertile plains of what is now Germany, the LBK farmers reached the Rhine within just a few centuries, around 7,300 years ago. Fine-grained analysis of the evolution of pottery styles, along with radiocarbon dating, suggests that they practiced a form of leapfrog colonization. They took “stepwise movements with sometimes hundreds of kilometers covered, and then the landscape in between filled up,” says archaeologist Detlef Gronenborn of the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum (Romano-Germanic Central Museum) in Mainz, Germany. At some point, they learned how to smelt copper, and a trade in precious copper objects sprang up between farming communities.” ref
“On the southern route, the farmers leapfrogged along the Mediterranean coast from Italy to France and on to the Iberian Peninsula. After reaching French shores, 7,800 or so years ago, they migrated northward toward the Paris Basin, the plain between the Rhine and the Atlantic Ocean that forms a kind of continental cul-de-sac. It was there that the two great streams of farmers met, around seven millennia ago. By then their cultures had diverged to some extent—they had been separated for more than 500 years—but they would still have recognized their own kind. They mingled both biologically and culturally.” ref
“A cemetery near Gurgy, in the southern part of the Paris Basin, dating from 7,000 years ago provides a snapshot of that mingling. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is typically inherited via the maternal line, and the mtDNA of about 50 individuals buried there has roughly equal contributions from LBK and southern farmers. From the Paris Basin, this mixed population spread out again—carrying its farming culture to every corner of the continent.” ref
“The first farmers to enter Europe probably came with their families, with those male and female farmers in roughly equal proportions. Other researchers have concluded that these societies were patrilocal, meaning wealth was passed down the male line and women married in from outside. Clues to the mobility of women come from the ratio of strontium isotopes in their teeth, which reflect their dietary history, and from the constant influx of outside artistic influences into farming communities, as evinced by their pottery. Women are thought to have decorated the pottery, as in agricultural societies of later eras.” ref
“As with all immigrants, the farmers might have taken a while to adapt to their new environment, but gradually they learned which plants and animals thrived in Europe’s temperate climes. They cleared the forest parcel by parcel and shaped its composition using ancient forest-management techniques such as coppicing and pollarding. (Coppicing involves cutting a tree back to its base and then allowing it to produce multiple new stems; pollarding is pruning of just the upper branches.) The farmers’ numbers began to increase. When there was no more room at a farm, the younger generation moved on, settling in what may have seemed to them a virgin forest. The newcomers might not have had the impression of encroaching on anybody else’s territory. But they were. Sooner or later the immigrant farmers must have met the resident hunter-gatherers—and when it happened, it must have been a shock.” ref
“Comparisons of their genes with those of modern Europeans indicate that the farmers were shorter than the Western hunter-gatherers who occupied most of the continent. They also had dark hair, dark eyes, and probably, lighter skin. There is no evidence of violence between the two groups in the earliest encounters—although the archaeological record is incomplete enough that violence cannot be ruled out. Yet in large parts of Europe, the hunter-gatherers and their Mesolithic culture simply vanished from both genetic and archaeological records the moment the farmers arrived.” ref
“For decades archaeologists have wondered whether, in the face of this massive influx, the hunter-gatherers retreated—into the hills, perhaps, where the soil was less fertile and hence less suitable for farming, or deep into the forest, where the farmers were unlikely to interfere with them. “Maybe there were massive pockets of hunter-gatherers surviving there, not for a generation but for 1,000 or 2,000 years after the farmers arrived,” suggests Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist and anthropologist at the University of Vienna in Austria.” ref
“The hunter-gatherers must still have been there somewhere because modern Europeans carry their genes, and Europe-wide surveys of ancient DNA have highlighted a so-called Mesolithic resurgence that started 6,500 years ago. Hunter-gatherer genetic elements accounted for more and more of the farmers’ genomes as time went on—but the resurgence was not just genetic. “Around the same time, we see the reemergence in the archaeological record of Mesolithic ways of doing things,” says archaeologist Thomas Perrin of the Jean Jaurès University of Toulouse in France. The hunter-gatherers themselves were no longer there, except for possible pockets of them hiding deep in the forest—but their genes, and their technology, were.” ref
“By the time the farmers started moving out again from that hub of the Paris Basin, they were no longer the same people who had set out from Hungary or beached on Europe’s prehistoric Riviera. They carried a little bit of the old Europe within them. And that raises the question: How did the encounter between such disparate peoples unfold? The answer is: in a kaleidoscope of different ways. There is no clear genetic evidence of interbreeding along the central European route until the LBK farmers reached the Rhine. And yet the groups mixed in other ways—potentially right from the beginning. A tantalizing hint of such interactions came from Gamba’s discovery of a hunter-gatherer bone in a farming settlement at a place called Tiszaszőlős-Domaháza in Hungary. But there was nothing more to be said about that individual. Was he a member of that community? A hostage? Someone passing through?” ref
“With later evidence, the picture became clearer. At Bruchenbrücken, a site north of Frankfurt in Germany, farmers, and hunter-gatherers lived together roughly 7,300 years ago in what Gronenborn calls a “multicultural” settlement. It looks as if the hunters may have come there originally from farther west to trade with the farmers, who valued their predecessors’ toolmaking techniques—especially their finely chiseled stone arrowheads. Perhaps some hunter-gatherers settled, taking up the farming way of life. So fruitful were the exchanges at Bruchenbrücken and other sites, Gronenborn says, that they held up the westward advance of farming for a couple of centuries.” ref
“There may even have been rare exceptions to the rule that the two groups did not interbreed early on. The Austrian site of Brunn 2, in a wooded river valley not far from Vienna, dates from the earliest arrival of the LBK farmers in central Europe, around 7,600 years ago. Three burials at the site were roughly contemporaneous. Two were of individuals of pure farming ancestry, and the other was the first-generation offspring of a hunter and a farmer. All three lay curled up on their sides in the LBK way, but the “hunter” was buried with six arrowheads.” ref
“By excavating Brunn 2, they found it littered with thousands of stone fragments, along with ceramic amphorae and clay flutes and figurines. They concluded that it served as a place of ritual or as a Stone Age workshop and trading post, or both. If it was a sacred place, says Alexey Nikitin, a paleogeneticist at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Mich., who has worked at Brunn 2, the individuals buried there must all have enjoyed high status. For him, the site attests to mutually profitable interactions between the two cultures. “The incomers brought in something the locals didn’t have, but the locals had something that the incomers didn’t—knowledge of the landscape,” he says.” ref
“On the southern route, however, those interactions seem to have included interbreeding right from the start. “Within the first two centuries of the first farmers’ arrival, we have individuals whose genetic makeup is 55 percent hunter-gatherer,” says paleogeneticist Maïté Rivollat of the University of Bordeaux, co-author of a genetic analysis of human remains found at Neolithic burial sites in southern France that was published in May in Science Advances. Moreover, by looking at the way the hunter-gatherer component was distributed through farmer genomes, Rivollat and her colleagues could tell the interbreeding had gone on for five or six generations already—perhaps starting as soon as the pioneers landed.” ref
“Curiously, French sites where the two groups might have come into contact are absent, although Perrin has searched for them. The closest he and others have come to putting the farmers and the hunter-gatherers in the same place at the same time is the Grotte du Gardon, a cave in the Jura Mountains east of Lyon, which was occupied in quick succession by Neolithic farmers from the south and by Mesolithic hunters, with the latter moving in after the former. “Given the small separation between these occupations in time, we can conclude that they coexisted in the region, at least,” Perrin says.” ref
“How to make sense of these disparate findings? Polly Wiessner, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, who has long studied hunter-gatherers, says that such regional variation is unsurprising. In more recent history, when immigrant farmers encountered an established group of hunter-gatherers, relations between the two depended on their respective economic goals. “If newcomers [want] to colonize land or resources, they dehumanize the residents,” she says. “If there is a possibility for cooperation, then the response is to categorize relations to facilitate interaction”—to label the other a friend or a trading partner, that is.” ref
“Did a lowering of social barriers allow Europe’s early farmers and its hunter-gatherers to mix? It is hard to know, but a possible clue is provided by the Cerny culture of the Paris Basin. Archaeologists have long regarded Cerny as a last vestige of LBK, developing just as LBK was embracing other elements. If that premise is correct, the inhabitants had farming in their blood—their ancestors were the early farmers of the Carpathian Basin. Yet in cemeteries dating from 6,700 years ago, men of high status were buried lying on their backs, not curled up on their sides, and arranged around them were hunting weapons and ornaments made from red deer antlers, the tusks of wild boars, and the claws of birds of prey.” ref
“Their funerary rites speak to another world from their day-to-day,” says archaeologist Aline Thomas of the Museum of Mankind. “They make reference to the sphere of the wild, things that are more often associated with Mesolithic populations. Those rites have prompted Thomas and Bon to ask: Who were the Cerny people really? Were they farmers who had adopted Mesolithic ways and come to venerate them, or were they recently converted hunter-gatherers who had never let them go? Bon and Thomas have been analyzing DNA extracted from the Cerny cemeteries to try to answer that question. So far they have analyzed the (maternally inherited) mtDNA and found that it contains Mesolithic elements. At Cerny, therefore, hunter-gatherer women came into the community from outside to marry local men.” ref
“This influx may reflect what was happening in other farming communities of the period, because by 6,700 years ago the Mesolithic resurgence—the emergence of hunter-gatherer genes in farming genomes—was well underway. So the outstanding question is: Who were the Cerny men? The researchers are analyzing Y chromosomes and whole genomes from Cerny now, in the hope of pinpointing their genetic origins. Whoever the Cerny people were, their cemeteries seem to provide a freeze-frame of that Mesolithic resurgence in Europe. Within a few hundred years almost everybody in Europe had adopted the farming culture—even if their genes, and occasionally their rituals, told a more complex story.” ref
“AN EMERGING HIERARCHY: Around 6,500 years ago a new phase began in Europe. Previously, as at Brunn 2, even important people were buried individually and in the ground. Now, in some regions, huge burial mounds were raised over small chambers in which one or two individuals were interred. Archaeologists think these changes reflect some seismic social shift, perhaps the birth of inequality as farming societies began to generate surplus and distribute it unevenly. If so, those societies now contained people with high levels of hunter-gatherer ancestry who may still have looked different from their “pure” farmer neighbors and whose existence was not necessarily happy.” ref
“An example is the Michelsberg culture. Dating from 6,400 years ago, it likely originated in the Paris Basin before farmers moved east toward Alsace and Germany. The people of Michelsberg organized their territory defensively. At the core, typically, was a large fortified settlement inhabited by up to several thousand people. This center was surrounded by a belt of land containing smaller, more dispersed settlements, and beyond that was what Gronenborn calls a “frontier zone” inhabited by even sparser “colonies.” This defensive pattern probably reflected tensions between neighboring communities, which clashed as their populations grew.” ref
“Michelsberg burials reveal a stratified society. In some of the sites—for example, at Bruchsal-Aue near Karlsruhe—a high-status individual lies curled up on his side in traditional LBK fashion, with other individuals thrown in apparently willy-nilly around him. The ratio of strontium isotopes in their teeth indicates that all those buried in a single grave were raised on the same diet—a farmer’s diet—but their DNA reveals that those surrounding the central figure generally had much higher hunter-gatherer ancestry than him. Additionally, the remains of those with hunter-gatherer ancestry were often discarded in rubbish pits or ditches. According to Gronenborn, these findings point to a society that discriminated on both social and biological grounds and one in which little value was attached to the lives of those at the bottom. Individuals thrown haphazardly into a high-status grave were probably slaves or war captives who were forced to accompany their master in death, Gronenborn says: “I think these people were killed to be deposited in those graves.” ref
“In a 2017 paper, the Bordeaux group reported, “probable practices of human sacrifice” at another Michelsberg site, Gougenheim, in Alsace. Several of those whose bodies appeared to have been dumped had severed limbs, and one had traces of burns, suggesting that they had been subjected to rituals. Significantly, the researchers sequenced mtDNA from the teeth of 22 individuals and found differences between those laid deliberately into graves and those thrown in alongside them in “unconventional” positions. “The individuals in the unconventional position had mitochondrial profiles inherited from hunter-gatherers, while those in the conventional position had not,” Rivollat says. Because of the small sample size and because mtDNA provides information only about the maternal line, she warns against linking their treatment in death to their ancestry. But the evidence does point to a stratified society that forbade interbreeding between certain strata, she says.” ref
“The population of Michelsberg peaked close to 5,700 years ago—when the violence intensified, Gronenborn notes. Neighboring settlements attacked and massacred one another continuously, as reflected in their increasingly elaborate defenses and abandoned settlements, along with spot finds of unceremonious burials of disarticulated human remains. “I picture painted faces, bodies strewn in trees, something not unlike the last scenes of Apocalypse Now,” he says. At Kapellenberg, a Michelsberg site near Frankfurt, the fortifications—still partially visible today—were raised and reinforced. A stockade was added and later a moat. Then, 5,500 or so years ago, the village these defenses were designed to protect seems to have been abandoned.” ref
Long-distance Trade in Prehistoric Europe; the Aegean origins of the Neolithic European cultures
“Spondylus gaederopus is a species of marine bivalve mollusk, a thorny oyster in the family Spondylidae. This species is regularly occurring in the Mediterranean Sea, such as from Sicily and this mollusk is edible. Spondylus gaederopus attaches itself to the substrate with its lower valve, which is usually white, while the upper valve is usually purple. Specimens that are all white, or all purple do, however, exist. Archaeological evidence indicates that people in Neolithic Europe were trading the shells of S. gaederopus to make bangles and other ornaments throughout much of the Neolithic period. The main use period appears to have been from around 5350 to 4200 BCE. The shells were harvested from the Aegean Sea, but were transported far into the center of the continent. In the LBK and Lengyel cultures, Spondylus shells from the Aegean Sea were worked into bracelets and belt buckles. Over time styles changed with the middle neolithic favoring generally larger barrel-shaped beads and the late neolithic smaller flatter and disk-shaped beads. Significant finds of jewelry made from Spondylus shells were made at the Varna Necropolis. During the late Neolithic, the use of Spondylus in grave goods appears to have been limited to women and children.” ref
“From the excellent paper titled “Spondylus and Long-Distance Trade in Prehistoric Europe“, by Michel Louis Séfériadès, included in the collective work titled “The Lost World of Old Europe – The Danube Valley, 5000–3500 BCE” we read, among many other interesting things, the following: “Analyses of the oxygen and strontium isotopes in ancient Spondylus shells found in Neolithic archaeological sites in Europe have shown that they came from the Mediterranean, and not from old fossil deposits on land or from the Black Sea. “In Europe the appearance of Spondylus as a valuable item in long-distance trade coincided with the creation of new regional exchange networks that accompanied the introduction of farming economies, precipitating the new economic order that began the Neolithic era. The earliest farming economies in Europe evolved, I believe, as the result of a largely independent process, which took place first in the modern territory of Greece about 7500–6500 BCE.” ref
“Researchers can follow the Spondylus trade archaeologically over nearly three thousand kilometers—mirroring the trajectory of the spread of domesticated wheat, barley, legumes, cattle, and sheep northward out of Greece extending from the Aegean and the Adriatic Seas, where the shells were harvested, to France, Germany, and Poland, where they are found in the archaeological remains of settlements and cemeteries, in graves, and as isolated finds. In the Mediterranean, the southernmost Spondylus beads are found in the Neolithic of Sicily and the archipelago of Malta. In the Aegean region during the Neolithic, as during the Copper Age, worked Spondylus ornaments are commonly found in Greece and Thessaly and in Greek Macedonia and Thrace. They also occur south to the Peloponnese in Greece.” ref
“Researchers are also informed that Spondylus’ made objects were also found in a number of sites in Bulgaria, Romania, former Yugoslavia, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, Germany, and France. We also read that: “Curiously, the farther one moves away from the Adriatic-Aegean, the native habitat of the Spondylus, the more frequently Spondylus artifacts appear to abound! Most of the Spondylus artifacts found in Europe were initially processed and then finished on the Aegean and Adriatic coasts or in farming communities not far from the sea, principally in modern Greece, Albania, Montenegro, and Croatia. The trade among these places presupposes a network of access routes and a social framework of elaborate exchange systems—including bartering, gift exchange, and reciprocity—such that these shells even reached somewhat isolated places, including high mountain valleys in the Carpathians.” ref
“Researchers also learn that Spondylus shells are often found in graves together with marble, malachite, jadeite, rock crystal, carnelian, polished stone axes, adzes, mace heads, copper, and gold. Most likely a sign of prestige or wealth. There is also a possibility that this type of material was somehow needed for cultic purposes. Objects made from Spondylus were found everywhere across Europe and most importantly, already from the Early Neolithic (7th-6th mil. BCE). Interest in them seems to have disappeared rather suddenly at the beginning of the Bronze Age. There is a strong possibility that new cultures from the Eurasian Steppes were induced in Europe at that point causing general social and cultural, as well as commercial, disturbance. Quoting the words of the great archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, we also learn that “The Danubians seem to have brought with them from the south a superstitious attachment to the shells of a Mediterranean mussel, Spondylus gaederopus, which they imported even into central Germany and the Rhineland for ornaments and amulets.” ref
“From the very informative paper titled “Spondylus gaederopus/Glycymeris exchange networks in the European Neolithic and Chalcolithic“, by John Chapman and Bisserka Gaydarska we read, among many other interesting facts, the following: “The two marine shells, Spondylus gaederopus Linne (spiny oyster) and Glycymeris glycymeris Linne (dog-cockle), have become famous in global prehistory as prestige exchange items which look very attractive as ornaments and, very occasionally, tools. In the middle Holocene (6500–3000 BCE), the Black Sea was too cool and insufficiently saline to support either species, but both occurred throughout the Aegean, the Adriatic, and the central and western Mediterranean. The paucity of Spondylus ornaments from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic in the two latter regions indicates that the only sources of living shell were the Adriatic and the Aegean (but note finds on coastal sites in Sicily and Malta, peninsular Italy and Iberia). Fossil Spondylus shells, which were brittle and pallid, were only occasionally used in prehistory. Despite limited sources, Spondylus and Glycymeris shells and products in archaeological contexts indicate an extensive long-distance exchange network covering much of Danubian Europe and beyond, over distances of up to 3000km.” ref
“The Spondylus exchange network has three distinct phases. In phase 1 (6500–5400 BCE), Spondylus use is sporadic. The earliest known ornaments are disc beads and fragmented rings from Greece. After 6000 BC, fragmentary rings appear in the Balkans, Hungary, and the Adriatic coast, later to become the most common Spondylus find alongside the disc bead. In phase 2 (5400–4900 BCE), Spondylus is widely distributed in Hungary and the east Adriatic. In Serbia, Romania, and the LBK*, consumption peaks in this phase. The LBK peak has been explained by the elaboration of ancestral origin myths symbolized by the exotic, south-eastern origins of Spondylus. Similarities between ornaments from the LBK, Serbia, and Romania do support this link, while the importance of the Vršac settlements (north-east Serbia) in channeling Spondylus into the middle Danube basin supports an Aegean source. Phase 3 (4900–3500 BCE) marks a U-turn from the ‘pan-Danubian’ model of distribution, and a reversion to interregional exchange. Post-LBK, there is little Spondylus in western-central Europe. Deposition equally declines in Romania and Serbia, with use continuing into the fourth millennium BCE. So far, there are only two areas where Spondylus ornaments are entirely related to the living—Greece and the east Adriatic coast—significantly, both areas of the shell’s origin. By contrast, in areas furthest from these coasts, such as the western LBK, shell ornaments are almost exclusively related to burials. The few exceptions cannot overturn this striking difference in consumption.” ref
“During the LBK Spondylus peak, farming settlements in north Greece and the Balkans were more numerous and sedentary, occupying a wider range of regions (e.g., the west Pontic zone), including uplands (e.g., the northern Hungarian mountains). The increasing regional differentiation of material culture and settlement trajectories contrasted with the more homogeneous pattern of LBK expansion. In many Balkan cases, such as the Vinča networks, a wider range of materials was exchanged over longer distances, with ‘intercultural’ exchange of pottery, more extensive prospecting, and the consequent utilization of lithics, ax materials, and copper from uplands in every major lowland basin. Typically, Balkan exchange expanded, as seen in the peak of obsidian exchange, now distributed from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, and Poland to northern Greece. However, the distribution of high-quality north-east Bulgarian honey flint and Melian obsidian in Greece contracts. Exotics are firmly established within local cultural value scales.” ref
Technical traditions and individual variability in the Early Neolithic: Linear pottery culture flint knappers in the Aisne Valley (France)
“For the Early Neolithic lithic industry in Western Europe (5500–4800 BCE), the study of technical behaviors, recognition of technical traditions, and even more so, idiosyncratic manifestations are not widespread. In this study, we propose an original approach to lithic industries based on the identification of “communities of practice” and individuals within housing units. The comparison of lithic series from the Meuse, Rhine, and Seine basins allowed us to identify different technical traditions in the Early Neolithic. The study of three dwelling units at two sites in the Aisne Valley in France shows that it is possible to distinguish different flint blade debitages, which we interpreted as the work of different knappers. This novel study of hand-finding in the villages of the first agro-pastoralists populations proves stimulating for the renewal of perspectives on the interpretation of the organization of activities within villages.” ref
“The Neolithic developed in temperate Europe with the Rubané, or Linear Pottery Culture (LPC). This large cultural entity diffused to the west from Transdanubia (Hungary) to the Paris Basin (France). In approximately six centuries, from 5600 to 5000 BCE, Neolithic lifeways reached most regions in northwestern Europe. In western Europe, the LPC was largely homogeneous (architecture, pottery styles, mortuary practices, etc.) except at the transition from the 6th to 5th millennium BCE when it fragmented into a mosaic of cultural entities (Fig 1). Between 4950 and 4650 BCE, much of northern France and Belgium was occupied by Neolithic villages of the Blicquy/Villeneuve-Saint-Germain (BQY/VSG) culture. In western Germany, the Hinkelstein and Grossgartach cultures, followed by the Planig-Friedberg, succeeded the LPC and are contemporary with the BQY/VSG. These various cultures are generally grouped under the term “Danubian Early Neolithic.” The structure of the villages and hamlets was similar, with remarkable stability in the general architecture of the houses, which were bordered by lateral pits containing domestic activity waste. Therefore, none of the archaeological assemblages originate from a level or remnant of one that can be considered as an occupation layer of this period.” ref
“In this article, we propose a new approach to Danubian lithic industries based on identifying “communities of practice” and individuals within the LPC households. Many studies of the lithic industries of the first agro-pastoral communities in temperate Europe rely on analyses of raw materials and their circulation networks to understand the economic organization, contacts, and exchanges between communities. Studies that report technical or stylistic variability in flint blade production are less frequent. At the scale of our study region (the Rhine/Meuse/Seine basins), it appears that a chronological evolution of blade manufacturing methods is thus perceptible. In the earliest LPC (älteste Bandkeramik) lithic industry, D. Gronenborn reports the coexistence of what he calls two technical “traditions” for blade extraction.” ref
“The first produced narrow regular blades with a large facetted platform and seems to correspond to the debitage in the Early LPC zone. The second concerns products with a small plain platform, tending toward punctiform, which seems to be associated with the local Mesolithic. In the same zone, from the next stage (LPC II) to the final one, we see longer and less regular products with wide, slightly prepared platforms. These pieces, identified in northern Rhineland and the Netherlands, correspond to the modalities described for the Hesbaye. The two “traditions” mentioned in the early stage thus appear to disappear rapidly in the zone concerned. Gronenborn, to the notion of styles or variants. In contrast to pottery studies, the interpretative framework from which to investigate the informative potential of these observations remains to be established.” ref
“In studies of prehistoric artifact manufacturing, the technological and chaîne opératoire (CO) approaches can be used together to analyze the technological procedures and knowledge obtained via cultural transmission, thus reflecting the society in which they existed. Most researchers define the CO as a series of operations that transform a raw material into a finished product. The constraints associated with the raw materials and cultural factors are responsible for the variability observed in its implementation, thus resulting in different “ways of doing” and the ensuing “traditions” of distinct social groups, whatever their nature. Because COs are a product of the skills acquired by individuals via apprenticeship within social groups governed by cultural rules, they rapidly appear as expressions of cultural traditions.” ref
“However, apprenticeship is structured by cultural rules in the sense that the individuals belong to social groups. Due to the constraints that influence the learning processes, varying technical practices are associated with distinct “communities of practice,” a concept defined by Lave and Wenger to describe social groups that share the “same way of doing things”. In this way, technical traditions represent social groups more than morphological or stylistic features. In ceramic studies, actualistic studies have revealed regularities that associate the variability of COs with social entities, whose meaning is understood via several theoretical frameworks. The technological approach to lithic artifacts, in France, for example, where a distinction is made between technique and method, reveals the importance attributed to the project and the abilities of the actor. The intention is perceived as highly constrained by the technical traditions of the group, which are transmitted via apprenticeship. Therefore, the CO concept is explicitly enriched by the concept of “technological practice,” defined as the COs and competencies implicated in manufacturing objects that fulfill socio-economic needs.” ref
“In summary, to understand the variability of material culture, it is necessary to comprehend the factors that influence technological practices. The nature of a prehistoric artifact is determined by the technical, economic, and social choices dictated by cultural traditions. At the individual level, technological analysis, faced with behavioral variability, enables one to identify recurring responses to certain situations at the individual level. For example, regular knapping practice enables an artisan to overcome circumstantial events, which then no longer hinder the completion of the project. When confronted with similar situations, the individual tends to repeat the operational and/or conceptual responses they know. The conjugation of knowledge, motor skills, and psychological mastery can thus indicate individual variability within a general scheme shared by the community. In this study, the method and other criteria enabled us to identify different technical traditions in the Early Danubian Neolithic in the Rhine/Meuse/Seine basins.” ref
“Our study of three habitation units in two sites in the Aisne Valley shows that it is possible to distinguish different assemblages, which we interpreted the work of different knappers. This study documents the organization of flint knapping in the LPC houses of Bucy-le-Long “La Héronnière” and Cuiry-lès-Chaudardes “Les Fontinettes.” Such idiosyncratic manifestations have already been observed in other contexts, mainly Upper Paleolithic ones, such as the Magdalenian at the sites of Etiolles and Pincevent. These studies also included the notion of varying skill levels in executing actions. We demonstrated that this notion could be fundamental to distinguishing individuals belonging to a single community of practice.” ref
“At the scale of our study region and for the period considered, we are not aware of any similar studies. Other studies have focused, however, on demonstrating the existence of flint knapping specialists in some villages of the Blicquy/Villeneuve-Saint-Germain group. These studies are based on a technological approach that broadly distinguishes, in some villages, two types of laminar productions, one considered as domestic and the other as the work of a specialist and dedicated to exchanges between villages. The systematic approach that we applied here should support this distinction of productions per house. For the LPC, the autonomy of the relationships between houses has been addressed, especially in research on the Rhine/Meuse region. There are probably several scenarios in western Europe, with the house displaying the most evidence for different productions (except for exogenous products, of course). However, the statistical approach applied to the site of Elsloo in the Netherlands suggests that during some occupation phases of this site, certain houses took charge of the flintknapping activities and redistributed the blades. We do not know, however, if these activities involved several knappers or not. Our approach can significantly contribute to these research questions.” ref
“Finally, the models of the socio-economic organization of activities developed for the village of Cuiry-lès-Chaudardes have demonstrated an opposition between large and small domestic units. Researchers believe that detailed technological analysis seeking to identify individuals can open new avenues to discuss socio-economic organization of the first farmers. Indeed, it would be possible to formulate a hypothesis about (i) the composition of the household based on the number of producers; (ii) the social origin of the household producers (same or different learning network). Integrated studies on Western LBK sites have already suggested socio-economic models proposing the opposition between long and small houses. House size reflects varying degrees of economic maturity and particular functional status. Lithic production was not included in this modeling. But our work seems to support this opposition between long and small houses. The mastering of blade production seems to involve more individuals in longhouses. Furthermore, we highlighted two models of coexistence within the longhouses where knappers can be originated from the same learning networks or not.” ref
Çatalhöyük/Çatal Höyük
“Çatalhöyük (also Çatal Höyük and Çatal Hüyük; from Turkish çatal “fork” + höyük “tumulus“) was a very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic proto-city settlement in southern Anatolia, which existed from approximately 7500 5700 BCE, and flourished around 7000 BCE. Çatalhöyük was composed entirely of domestic buildings, with no obvious public buildings. While some of the larger ones have rather ornate murals, the purpose of some rooms remains unclear.” ref
“The population of the eastern mound has been estimated to be around 10,000 people, but the population likely varied over the community’s history. An average population of between 5,000 and 7,000 is a reasonable estimate. The sites were set up as large numbers of buildings clustered together. Households looked to their neighbors for help, trade, and possible marriage for their children. The inhabitants lived in mudbrick houses that were crammed together in an aggregate structure.” ref
“No footpaths or streets were used between the dwellings, which were clustered in a honeycomb-like maze. Most were accessed by holes in the ceiling and doors on the side of the houses, with doors reached by ladders and stairs. The rooftops were effectively streets. The ceiling openings also served as the only source of ventilation, allowing smoke from the houses’ open hearths and ovens to escape. Houses had plaster interiors characterized by squared-off timber ladders or steep stairs.” ref
“These were usually on the south wall of the room, as were cooking hearths and ovens. The main rooms contained raised platforms that may have been used for a range of domestic activities. Typical houses contained two rooms for everyday activity, such as cooking and crafting. All interior walls and platforms were plastered to a smooth finish. Ancillary rooms were used as storage, and were accessed through low openings from main rooms. All rooms were kept scrupulously clean. Archaeologists identified very little rubbish in the buildings, finding middens outside the ruins, with sewage and food waste, as well as significant amounts of ash from burning wood, reeds, and animal dung.” ref
“As a part of ritual life, the people of Çatalhöyük buried their dead within the village. Human remains have been found in pits beneath the floors and, especially, beneath hearths, the platforms within the main rooms, and under beds. Bodies were tightly flexed before burial and were often placed in baskets or wound and wrapped in reed mats. Disarticulated bones in some graves suggest that bodies may have been exposed in the open air for a time before the bones were gathered and buried.” ref
“In some cases, graves were disturbed, and the individual’s head removed from the skeleton. These heads may have been used in rituals, as some were found in other areas of the community. In a woman’s grave spinning whorls were recovered and in a man’s grave, stone axes. Some skulls were plastered and painted with ochre to recreate faces, a custom more characteristic of Neolithic sites in Syria and at Neolithic Jericho than at sites closer by.” ref
“Vivid murals and figurines are found throughout the settlement, on interior and exterior walls. Distinctive clay figurines of women, notably the Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük, have been found in the upper levels of the site. Although no identifiable temples have been found, the graves, murals, and figurines suggest that the people of Çatalhöyük had a religion rich in symbols. Rooms with concentrations of these items may have been shrines or public meeting areas. Predominant images include men with erect phalluses, hunting scenes, red images of the now extinct aurochs (wild cattle) and stags, and vultures swooping down on headless figures. Relief figures are carved on walls, such as of lionesses facing one another. Heads of animals, especially of cattle, were mounted on walls.” ref
“A striking feature of Çatalhöyük are its female figurines. Mellaart, the original excavator, argued that these well-formed, carefully made figurines, carved and molded from marble, blue and brown limestone, schist, calcite, basalt, alabaster, and clay, represented a female deity. Although a male deity existed as well, “statues of a female deity far outnumber those of the male deity, who moreover, does not appear to be represented at all after Level VI”. To date, eighteen levels have been identified. These artfully-hewn figurines were found primarily in areas Mellaart believed to be shrines. The stately goddess seated on a throne flanked by two lionesses was found in a grain bin, which Mellaart suggests might have been a means of ensuring the harvest or protecting the food supply.” ref
New Rituals and Violence with the appearance of Pottery and People?
Abstract “The world’s earliest pottery comes from Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherer sites in East Asia. This material is typically seen as disconnected from later pottery traditions in Europe, which are generally associated with sedentary farmers. However, new evidence suggests that Asian and European pottery traditions may be linked to a Hyperborean stream of hunter-gatherer pottery dispersals that spanned eastern and western Asia, and introduced pottery into the prehistoric societies of northern Europe.” ref
Carbon Dating Çatalhöyük Pottery 8,722-7,672 years ago
“It relates to the early Neolithic (ca. 6700–5650 BCE or 8,722-7,672 years ago) site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, dates from four pottery sherds also matched the site’s known chronology. Evershed hopes the technique will allow researchers to learn more about the origins of animal domestication. It could also reveal when changes in prehistoric diets, such as the adoption of dairy products, took place. The researchers analyzed microscopic traces of plant residues trapped in pits and crevices on stone tools. In addition to wheat, oats, peas, and vegetables grown by the early farmers, the researchers found traces of wild tubers and wild millet seeds. This is the first time the presence of wild millet has been detected at the site. These foraged plants would have supplemented the diet, and indicated that the residents of Çatalhöyük possessed knowledge of the tubers’ seasonal cycles. The study also suggests that the tools were used for other domestic activities in addition to processing plants.” ref, ref
“The arrival of haplogroup R1a-M417 in Eastern Europe, and the east-west diffusion of pottery through North Eurasia.” https://indo-european.eu/2018/02/the-arrival-of-haplogroup-r1a-m417-in-eastern-europe-and-the-east-west-diffusion-of-pottery-through-north-eurasia/
Ancient North Eurasian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_North_Eurasian
Ancient North Eurasian/Mal’ta–Buret’ culture haplogroup R* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mal%27ta%E2%80%93Buret%27_culture
“The arrival of haplogroup R1a-M417 in Eastern Europe, and the east-west diffusion of pottery through North Eurasia.” ref
R-M417 (R1a1a1)
“R1a1a1 (R-M417) is the most widely found subclade, in two variations which are found respectively in Europe (R1a1a1b1 (R-Z282) ([R1a1a1a*] (R-Z282) and Central and South Asia (R1a1a1b2 (R-Z93) ([R1a1a2*] (R-Z93).” ref
R-Z282 (R1a1a1b1a) (Eastern Europe)
“This large subclade appears to encompass most of the R1a1a found in Europe.
- R1a1a1b1a [R1a1a1a*] (R-Z282*) occurs in northern Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia at a frequency of c. 20%.
- R1a1a1b1a3 [R1a1a1a1] (R-Z284) occurs in Northwest Europe and peaks at c. 20% in Norway.
- R1a1a1c (M64.2, M87, M204) is apparently rare: it was found in 1 of 117 males typed in southern Iran.” ref
R1a1a1b2 (R-Z93) (Asia)
“This large subclade appears to encompass most of the R1a1a found in Asia, being related to Indo-European migrations (including Scythians, Indo-Aryan migrations, and so on).
- R-Z93* or R1a1a1b2* (R1a1a2* in Underhill (2014)) is most common (>30%) in the South Siberian Altai region of Russia, cropping up in Kyrgyzstan (6%) and in all Iranian populations (1-8%).
- R-Z2125 occurs at highest frequencies in Kyrgyzstan and in Afghan Pashtuns (>40%). At a frequency of >10%, it is also observed in other Afghan ethnic groups and in some populations in the Caucasus and Iran.
- R-M434 is a subclade of Z2125. It was detected in 14 people (out of 3667 people tested), all in a restricted geographical range from Pakistan to Oman. This likely reflects a recent mutation event in Pakistan.
- R-M560 is very rare and was only observed in four samples: two Burushaski speakers (north Pakistan), one Hazara (Afghanistan), and one Iranian Azerbaijani.
- R-M780 occurs at high frequency in South Asia: India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Himalayas. The group also occurs at >3% in some Iranian populations and is present at >30% in Roma from Croatia and Hungary.” ref
R-M458 (R1a1a1b1a1)
“R-M458 is a mainly Slavic SNP, characterized by its own mutation, and was first called cluster N. Underhill et al. (2009) found it to be present in modern European populations roughly between the Rhine catchment and the Ural Mountains and traced it to “a founder effect that … falls into the early Holocene period, 7.9±2.6 KYA.” M458 was found in one skeleton from a 14th-century grave field in Usedom, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. The paper by Underhill et al. (2009) also reports a surprisingly high frequency of M458 in some Northern Caucasian populations (for example 27.5% among Karachays and 23.5% among Balkars, 7.8% among Karanogays and 3.4% among Abazas).” ref
Pic ref
Ancient Human Genomes…Present-Day Europeans – Johannes Krause (Video)
Ancient North Eurasian (ANE)
Eastern Hunter-Gatherer (EHG)
Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG)
Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherer (SHG)
Early European Farmers (EEF)
A quick look at the Genetic history of Europe
“The most significant recent dispersal of modern humans from Africa gave rise to an undifferentiated “non-African” lineage by some 70,000-50,000 years ago. By about 50–40 ka a basal West Eurasian lineage had emerged, as had a separate East Asian lineage. Both basal East and West Eurasians acquired Neanderthal admixture in Europe and Asia. European early modern humans (EEMH) lineages between 40,000-26,000 years ago (Aurignacian) were still part of a large Western Eurasian “meta-population”, related to Central and Western Asian populations. Divergence into genetically distinct sub-populations within Western Eurasia is a result of increased selection pressure and founder effects during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, Gravettian). By the end of the LGM, after 20,000 years ago, A Western European lineage, dubbed West European Hunter-Gatherer (WHG) emerges from the Solutrean refugium during the European Mesolithic. These Mesolithic hunter-gatherer cultures are substantially replaced in the Neolithic Revolution by the arrival of Early European Farmers (EEF) lineages derived from Mesolithic populations of West Asia (Anatolia and the Caucasus). In the European Bronze Age, there were again substantial population replacements in parts of Europe by the intrusion of Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) lineages from the Pontic–Caspian steppes. These Bronze Age population replacements are associated with the Beaker culture archaeologically and with the Indo-European expansion linguistically.” ref
“As a result of the population movements during the Mesolithic to Bronze Age, modern European populations are distinguished by differences in WHG, EEF, and ANE ancestry. Admixture rates varied geographically; in the late Neolithic, WHG ancestry in farmers in Hungary was at around 10%, in Germany around 25%, and in Iberia as high as 50%. The contribution of EEF is more significant in Mediterranean Europe, and declines towards northern and northeastern Europe, where WHG ancestry is stronger; the Sardinians are considered to be the closest European group to the population of the EEF. ANE ancestry is found throughout Europe, with a maximum of about 20% found in Baltic people and Finns. Ethnogenesis of the modern ethnic groups of Europe in the historical period is associated with numerous admixture events, primarily those associated with the Roman, Germanic, Norse, Slavic, Berber, Arab and Turkish expansions. Research into the genetic history of Europe became possible in the second half of the 20th century, but did not yield results with a high resolution before the 1990s. In the 1990s, preliminary results became possible, but they remained mostly limited to studies of mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal lineages. Autosomal DNA became more easily accessible in the 2000s, and since the mid-2010s, results of previously unattainable resolution, many of them based on full-genome analysis of ancient DNA, have been published at an accelerated pace.” ref
Pic ref
Ancient Women Found in a Russian Cave Turn Out to Be Closely Related to The Modern Population https://www.sciencealert.com/ancient-women-found-in-a-russian-cave-turn-out-to-be-closely-related-to-the-modern-population
Abstract
“Ancient genomes have revolutionized our understanding of Holocene prehistory and, particularly, the Neolithic transition in western Eurasia. In contrast, East Asia has so far received little attention, despite representing a core region at which the Neolithic transition took place independently ~3 millennia after its onset in the Near East. We report genome-wide data from two hunter-gatherers from Devil’s Gate, an early Neolithic cave site (dated to ~7.7 thousand years ago) located in East Asia, on the border between Russia and Korea. Both of these individuals are genetically most similar to geographically close modern populations from the Amur Basin, all speaking Tungusic languages, and, in particular, to the Ulchi. The similarity to nearby modern populations and the low levels of additional genetic material in the Ulchi imply a high level of genetic continuity in this region during the Holocene, a pattern that markedly contrasts with that reported for Europe.” ref
Millet
“Proso millet (Panicum miliaceum) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica) were important crops beginning in the Early Neolithic of China. Some of the earliest evidence of millet cultivation in China was found at Cishan (north), where proso millet husk phytoliths and biomolecular components have been identified around 10,300–8,700 years ago in storage pits along with remains of pit-houses, pottery, and stone tools related to millet cultivation. Evidence at Cishan for foxtail millet dates back to around 8,700 years ago. The oldest evidence of noodles in China were made from these two varieties of millet in a 4,000-year-old earthenware bowl containing well-preserved noodles found at the Lajia archaeological site in north China. The cultivation of common millet as the earliest dry crop in East Asia has been attributed to its resistance to drought, and this has been suggested to have aided its spread. Asian varieties of millet made their way from China to the Black Sea region of Europe by 5000 BCE. And millet was growing wild in Greece as early as 3000 BCE, and bulk storage containers for millet have been found from the Late Bronze Age in Macedonia and northern Greece.” ref
“According to the findings, Transeurasian (or ‘Altaic’) family of languages, that hundreds of millions of people who speak one such language today can trace their shared legacy back to a single group of millet farmers that lived 9,000 years ago in what today is northeast China. Integration of linguistic, agricultural, and genetic expansions in Northeast Asia. This family of languages includes peoples and countries all across Eurasia, with notable members including Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic.” ref
Neolithic Millet farming from China
Haplogroup N and its related Uralic Languages and Cultures
The place of millet in food globalization during Late Prehistory as evidenced by new bioarchaeological data from the Caucasus
“Two millets, Panicum miliaceum, and Setaria italica, were domesticated in northern China, around 6000 BCE. Results assert that millet was not present in the Caucasus in the Neolithic period. Its arrival in the region, based on existing data in Eurasia, was from the south, without excluding a possible local domestication of Setaria italica. The appearance of millet in the Caucasus redefines the modalities of its diffusion from East Asia. Archaeobotany, radiocarbon dates, and isotopic data also reveal that one of the species, Setaria italica, could have been domesticated locally in the Western Caucasus. In the following, “millet” designates two species, Panicum miliaceum (common millet) and Setaria italica (foxtail millet). The terms millets, small millets, Panicum, or Setaria only refer to these two cultivated species.” ref
“Despite the current minor importance of the crops, small millets are nutritionally superior to large-grained cereals like wheat or barley, in terms of proteins, minerals, and vitamins. The grains can be stored for a long time; they have good productive returns and need little management. Millets require about half the water compared to wheat, and their cultivation does not require plowing due to their shallow roots. Thus, millets are very suitable for cultivation by semi-nomadic societies both in the past and still today, as they are low-investment agricultural crops. Numerous studies have been carried out on the chronology and routes of the spread of millet from China to Europe, especially across the central Eurasian steppe regions and mountain corridors. Several publications report the presence of millet grains in the Caucasus since the Neolithic, before 5000 BCE. Millet is listed as present at Aruchlo-1, an important Neolithic site in Georgia, dated to 6050–5200 cal BCE or 8,072-7,222 years ago, however, according to the archaeobotanists working on this site, the grains are actually wild Setaria.” ref
“In the end, were millets domesticated in the Caucasus? Concerning Panicum, genetic evidence, coupled with archaeobotany and paleodietary analysis “are now consistent with a single origin of cultivated P. miliaceum somewhere in northern China, at least by the 6th millennium BCE. Our results converge to support the hypothesis of a single primary domestication center in East Asia and not scattered in different points of the globe, since we have no evidence of broomcorn millet dated before the 3rd millennium in the Caucasus. For Setaria, we have a different pattern: the wild progenitor of foxtail millet—Setaria viridis—is widespread across Eurasia. If genetic analyses indicate a single domestication center for foxtail millet in China then more research is needed to understand its early presence in the Caucasus.” ref
Animism: Respecting the Living World by Graham Harvey
“How have human cultures engaged with and thought about animals, plants, rocks, clouds, and other elements in their natural surroundings? Do animals and other natural objects have a spirit or soul? What is their relationship to humans? In this new study, Graham Harvey explores current and past animistic beliefs and practices of Native Americans, Maori, Aboriginal Australians, and eco-pagans. He considers the varieties of animism found in these cultures as well as their shared desire to live respectfully within larger natural communities. Drawing on his extensive casework, Harvey also considers the linguistic, performative, ecological, and activist implications of these different animisms.” ref
My thoughts on Religion Evolution with external links for more info:
- (Pre-Animism Africa mainly, but also Europe, and Asia at least 300,000 years ago), (Pre-Animism – Oxford Dictionaries)
- (Animism Africa around 100,000 years ago), (Animism – Britannica.com)
- (Totemism Europe around 50,000 years ago), (Totemism – Anthropology)
- (Shamanism Siberia around 30,000 years ago), (Shamanism – Britannica.com)
- (Paganism Turkey around 12,000 years ago), (Paganism – BBC Religion)
- (Progressed Organized Religion “Institutional Religion” Egypt around 5,000 years ago), (Ancient Egyptian Religion – Britannica.com)
- (CURRENT “World” RELIGIONS after 4,000 years ago) (Origin of Major Religions – Sacred Texts)
- (Early Atheistic Doubting at least by 2,600 years ago) (History of Atheism – Wikipedia)
“Religion is an Evolved Product” and Yes, Religion is Like Fear Given Wings…
Atheists talk about gods and religions for the same reason doctors talk about cancer, they are looking for a cure, or a firefighter talks about fires because they burn people and they care to stop them. We atheists too often feel a need to help the victims of mental slavery, held in the bondage that is the false beliefs of gods and the conspiracy theories of reality found in religions.
Understanding Religion Evolution:
- Pre-Animism (at least 300,000 years ago)
- Animism (Africa: 100,000 years ago)
- Totemism (Europe: 50,000 years ago)
- Shamanism (Siberia: 30,000 years ago)
- Paganism (Turkey: 12,000 years ago)
- Progressed organized religion (Egypt: 5,000 years ago), (Egypt, the First Dynasty 5,150 years ago)
- CURRENT “World” RELIGIONS (after 4,000 years ago)
- Early Atheistic Doubting (at least by 2,600 years ago)
“An Archaeological/Anthropological Understanding of Religion Evolution”
It seems ancient peoples had to survived amazing threats in a “dangerous universe (by superstition perceived as good and evil),” and human “immorality or imperfection of the soul” which was thought to affect the still living, leading to ancestor worship. This ancestor worship presumably led to the belief in supernatural beings, and then some of these were turned into the belief in gods. This feeble myth called gods were just a human conceived “made from nothing into something over and over, changing, again and again, taking on more as they evolve, all the while they are thought to be special,” but it is just supernatural animistic spirit-belief perceived as sacred.
Quick Evolution of Religion?
Pre-Animism (at least 300,000 years ago) pre-religion is a beginning that evolves into later Animism. So, Religion as we think of it, to me, all starts in a general way with Animism (Africa: 100,000 years ago) (theoretical belief in supernatural powers/spirits), then this is physically expressed in or with Totemism (Europe: 50,000 years ago) (theoretical belief in mythical relationship with powers/spirits through a totem item), which then enlists a full-time specific person to do this worship and believed interacting Shamanism (Siberia/Russia: 30,000 years ago) (theoretical belief in access and influence with spirits through ritual), and then there is the further employment of myths and gods added to all the above giving you Paganism (Turkey: 12,000 years ago) (often a lot more nature-based than most current top world religions, thus hinting to their close link to more ancient religious thinking it stems from). My hypothesis is expressed with an explanation of the building of a theatrical house (modern religions development). Progressed organized religion (Egypt: 5,000 years ago) with CURRENT “World” RELIGIONS (after 4,000 years ago).
Historically, in large city-state societies (such as Egypt or Iraq) starting around 5,000 years ago culminated to make religion something kind of new, a sociocultural-governmental-religious monarchy, where all or at least many of the people of such large city-state societies seem familiar with and committed to the existence of “religion” as the integrated life identity package of control dynamics with a fixed closed magical doctrine, but this juggernaut integrated religion identity package of Dogmatic-Propaganda certainly did not exist or if developed to an extent it was highly limited in most smaller prehistoric societies as they seem to lack most of the strong control dynamics with a fixed closed magical doctrine (magical beliefs could be at times be added or removed). Many people just want to see developed religious dynamics everywhere even if it is not. Instead, all that is found is largely fragments until the domestication of religion.
Religions, as we think of them today, are a new fad, even if they go back to around 6,000 years in the timeline of human existence, this amounts to almost nothing when seen in the long slow evolution of religion at least around 70,000 years ago with one of the oldest ritual worship. Stone Snake of South Africa: “first human worship” 70,000 years ago. This message of how religion and gods among them are clearly a man-made thing that was developed slowly as it was invented and then implemented peace by peace discrediting them all. Which seems to be a simple point some are just not grasping how devastating to any claims of truth when we can see the lie clearly in the archeological sites.
I wish people fought as hard for the actual values as they fight for the group/clan names political or otherwise they think support values. Every amount spent on war is theft to children in need of food or the homeless kept from shelter.
Here are several of my blog posts on history:
- To Find Truth You Must First Look
- (Magdalenian/Iberomaurusian) Connections to the First Paganists of the early Neolithic Near East Dating from around 17,000 to 12,000 Years Ago
- Natufians: an Ancient People at the Origins of Agriculture and Sedentary Life
- Possible Clan Leader/Special “MALE” Ancestor Totem Poles At Least 13,500 years ago?
- Jewish People with DNA at least 13,200 years old, Judaism, and the Origins of Some of its Ideas
- Baltic Reindeer Hunters: Swiderian, Lyngby, Ahrensburgian, and Krasnosillya cultures 12,020 to 11,020 years ago are evidence of powerful migratory waves during the last 13,000 years and a genetic link to Saami and the Finno-Ugric peoples.
- The Rise of Inequality: patriarchy and state hierarchy inequality
- Fertile Crescent 12,500 – 9,500 Years Ago: fertility and death cult belief system?
- 12,400 – 11,700 Years Ago – Kortik Tepe (Turkey) Pre/early-Agriculture Cultic Ritualism
- Ritualistic Bird Symbolism at Gobekli Tepe and its “Ancestor Cult”
- Male-Homosexual (female-like) / Trans-woman (female) Seated Figurine from Gobekli Tepe
- Could a 12,000-year-old Bull Geoglyph at Göbekli Tepe relate to older Bull and Female Art 25,000 years ago and Later Goddess and the Bull cults like Catal Huyuk?
- Sedentism and the Creation of goddesses around 12,000 years ago as well as male gods after 7,000 years ago.
- Alcohol, where Agriculture and Religion Become one? Such as Gobekli Tepe’s Ritualistic use of Grain as Food and Ritual Drink
- Neolithic Ritual Sites with T-Pillars and other Cultic Pillars
- Paganism: Goddesses around 12,000 years ago then Male Gods after 7,000 years ago
- First Patriarchy: Split of Women’s Status around 12,000 years ago & First Hierarchy: fall of Women’s Status around 5,000 years ago.
- Natufians: an Ancient People at the Origins of Agriculture and Sedentary Life
- J DNA and the Spread of Agricultural Religion (paganism)
- Paganism: an approximately 12,000-year-old belief system
- Paganism 12,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Pre-Capitalism)
- Shaman burial in Israel 12,000 years ago and the Shamanism Phenomena
- Need to Mythicized: gods and goddesses
- 12,000 – 7,000 Years Ago – Paleo-Indian Culture (The Americas)
- 12,000 – 2,000 Years Ago – Indigenous-Scandinavians (Nordic)
- Norse did not wear helmets with horns?
- Pre-Pottery Neolithic Skull Cult around 11,500 to 8,400 Years Ago?
- 10,400 – 10,100 Years Ago, in Turkey the Nevail Cori Religious Settlement
- 9,000-6,500 Years Old Submerged Pre-Pottery/Pottery Neolithic Ritual Settlements off Israel’s Coast
- Catal Huyuk “first religious designed city” around 9,500 to 7,700 years ago (Turkey)
- Cultic Hunting at Catal Huyuk “first religious designed city”
- Special Items and Art as well as Special Elite Burials at Catal Huyuk
- New Rituals and Violence with the appearance of Pottery and People?
- Haplogroup N and its related Uralic Languages and Cultures
- Ainu people, Sámi people, Native Americans, the Ancient North Eurasians, and Paganistic-Shamanism with Totemism
- Ideas, Technology and People from Turkey, Europe, to China and Back again 9,000 to 5,000 years ago?
- First Pottery of Europe and the Related Cultures
- 9,000 years old Neolithic Artifacts Judean Desert and Hills Israel
- 9,000-7,000 years-old Sex and Death Rituals: Cult Sites in Israel, Jordan, and the Sinai
- 9,000-8500 year old Horned Female shaman Bad Dürrenberg Germany
- Neolithic Jewelry and the Spread of Farming in Europe Emerging out of West Turkey
- 8,600-year-old Tortoise Shells in Neolithic graves in central China have Early Writing and Shamanism
- Swing of the Mace: the rise of Elite, Forced Authority, and Inequality begin to Emerge 8,500 years ago?
- Migrations and Changing Europeans Beginning around 8,000 Years Ago
- My “Steppe-Anatolian-Kurgan hypothesis” 8,000/7,000 years ago
- Around 8,000-year-old Shared Idea of the Mistress of Animals, “Ritual” Motif
- Pre-Columbian Red-Paint (red ochre) Maritime Archaic Culture 8,000-3,000 years ago
- 7,522-6,522 years ago Linear Pottery culture which I think relates to Arcane Capitalism’s origins
- Arcane Capitalism: Primitive socialism, Primitive capital, Private ownership, Means of production, Market capitalism, Class discrimination, and Petite bourgeoisie (smaller capitalists)
- 7,500-4,750 years old Ritualistic Cucuteni-Trypillian culture of Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine
- Roots of a changing early society 7,200-6,700 years ago Jordan and Israel
- Agriculture religion (Paganism) with farming reached Britain between about 7,000 to 6,500 or so years ago and seemingly expressed in things like Western Europe’s Long Barrows
- My Thoughts on Possible Migrations of “R” DNA and Proto-Indo-European?
- “Millet” Spreading from China 7,022 years ago to Europe and related Language may have Spread with it leading to Proto-Indo-European
- Proto-Indo-European (PIE), ancestor of Indo-European languages: DNA, Society, Language, and Mythology
- The Dnieper–Donets culture and Asian varieties of Millet from China to the Black Sea region of Europe by 7,022 years ago
- Kurgan 6,000 years ago/dolmens 7,000 years ago: funeral, ritual, and other?
- 7,020 to 6,020-year-old Proto-Indo-European Homeland of Urheimat or proposed home of their Language and Religion
- Ancient Megaliths: Kurgan, Ziggurat, Pyramid, Menhir, Trilithon, Dolman, Kromlech, and Kromlech of Trilithons
- The Mytheme of Ancient North Eurasian Sacred-Dog belief and similar motifs are found in Indo-European, Native American, and Siberian comparative mythology
- Elite Power Accumulation: Ancient Trade, Tokens, Writing, Wealth, Merchants, and Priest-Kings
- Sacred Mounds, Mountains, Kurgans, and Pyramids may hold deep connections?
- Between 7,000-5,000 Years ago, rise of unequal hierarchy elite, leading to a “birth of the State” or worship of power, strong new sexism, oppression of non-elites, and the fall of Women’s equal status
- Paganism 7,000-5,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Capitalism) (World War 0) Elite & their slaves
- Hell and Underworld mythologies starting maybe as far back as 7,000 to 5,000 years ago with the Proto-Indo-Europeans?
- The First Expression of the Male God around 7,000 years ago?
- White (light complexion skin) Bigotry and Sexism started 7,000 years ago?
- Around 7,000-year-old Shared Idea of the Divine Bird (Tutelary and/or Trickster spirit/deity), “Ritual” Motif
- Nekhbet an Ancient Egyptian Vulture Goddess and Tutelary Deity
- 6,720 to 4,920 years old Ritualistic Hongshan Culture of Inner Mongolia with 5,000-year-old Pyramid Mounds and Temples
- First proto-king in the Balkans, Varna culture around 6,500 years ago?
- 6,500–5,800 years ago in Israel Late Chalcolithic (Copper Age) Period in the Southern Levant Seems to Express Northern Levant Migrations, Cultural and Religious Transfer
- KING OF BEASTS: Master of Animals “Ritual” Motif, around 6,000 years old or older…
- Around 6000-year-old Shared Idea of the Solid Wheel & the Spoked Wheel-Shaped Ritual Motif
- “The Ghassulian Star,” a mysterious 6,000-year-old mural from Jordan; a Proto-Star of Ishtar, Star of Inanna or Star of Venus?
- Religious/Ritual Ideas, including goddesses and gods as well as ritual mounds or pyramids from Northeastern Asia at least 6,000 years old, seemingly filtering to Iran, Iraq, the Mediterranean, Europe, Egypt, and the Americas?
- Maykop (5,720–5,020 years ago) Caucasus region Bronze Age culture-related to Copper Age farmers from the south, influenced by the Ubaid period and Leyla-Tepe culture, as well as influencing the Kura-Araxes culture
- 5-600-year-old Tomb, Mummy, and First Bearded Male Figurine in a Grave
- Kura-Araxes Cultural 5,520 to 4,470 years old DNA traces to the Canaanites, Arabs, and Jews
- Minoan/Cretan (Keftiu) Civilization and Religion around 5,520 to 3,120 years ago
- Evolution Of Science at least by 5,500 years ago
- 5,500 Years old birth of the State, the rise of Hierarchy, and the fall of Women’s status
- “Jiroft culture” 5,100 – 4,200 years ago and the History of Iran
- Stonehenge: Paganistic Burial and Astrological Ritual Complex, England (5,100-3,600 years ago)
- Around 5,000-year-old Shared Idea of the “Tree of Life” Ritual Motif
- Complex rituals for elite, seen from China to Egypt, at least by 5,000 years ago
- Around 5,000 years ago: “Birth of the State” where Religion gets Military Power and Influence
- The Center of the World “Axis Mundi” and/or “Sacred Mountains” Mythology Could Relate to the Altai Mountains, Heart of the Steppe
- Progressed organized religion starts, an approximately 5,000-year-old belief system
- China’s Civilization between 5,000-3,000 years ago, was a time of war and class struggle, violent transition from free clans to a Slave or Elite society
- Origin of Logics is Naturalistic Observation at least by around 5,000 years ago.
- Paganism 5,000 years old: progressed organized religion and the state: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Kings and the Rise of the State)
- Ziggurats (multi-platform temples: 4,900 years old) to Pyramids (multi-platform tombs: 4,700 years old)
- Did a 4,520–4,420-year-old Volcano In Turkey Inspire the Bible God?
- Finland’s Horned Shaman and Pre-Horned-God at least 4,500 years ago?
- 4,000-year-Old Dolmens in Israel: A Connected Dolmen Religious Phenomenon?
- Creation myths: From chaos, Ex nihilo, Earth-diver, Emergence, World egg, and World parent
- Bronze Age “Ritual” connections of the Bell Beaker culture with the Corded Ware/Single Grave culture, which were related to the Yamnaya culture and Proto-Indo-European Languages/Religions
- Low Gods (Earth/ Tutelary deity), High Gods (Sky/Supreme deity), and Moralistic Gods (Deity enforcement/divine order)
- The exchange of people, ideas, and material-culture including, to me, the new god (Sky Father) and goddess (Earth Mother) religion between the Cucuteni-Trypillians and others which is then spread far and wide
- Koryaks: Indigenous People of the Russian Far East and Big Raven myths also found in Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and other Indigenous People of North America
- 42 Principles Of Maat (Egyptian Goddess of the justice) around 4,400 years ago, 2000 Years Before Ten Commandments
- “Happy Easter” Well Happy Eostre/Ishter
- 4,320-3,820 years old “Shimao” (North China) site with Totemistic-Shamanistic Paganism and a Stepped Pyramid
- 4,250 to 3,400 Year old Stonehenge from Russia: Arkaim?
- 4,100-year-old beaker with medicinal & flowering plants in a grave of a woman in Scotland
- Early European Farmer ancestry, Kelif el Boroud people with the Cardial Ware culture, and the Bell Beaker culture Paganists too, spread into North Africa, then to the Canary Islands off West Africa
- Flood Accounts: Gilgamesh epic (4,100 years ago) Noah in Genesis (2,600 years ago)
- Paganism 4,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (First Moralistic gods, then the Origin time of Monotheism)
- When was the beginning: TIMELINE OF CURRENT RELIGIONS, which start around 4,000 years ago.
- Early Religions Thought to Express Proto-Monotheistic Systems around 4,000 years ago
- Kultepe? An archaeological site with a 4,000 years old women’s rights document.
- Single God Religions (Monotheism) = “Man-o-theism” started around 4,000 years ago with the Great Sky Spirit/God Tiān (天)?
- Confucianism’s Tiān (Shangdi god 4,000 years old): Supernaturalism, Pantheism or Theism?
- Yes, Your Male God is Ridiculous
- Mythology, a Lunar Deity is a Goddess or God of the Moon
- Sacred Land, Hills, and Mountains: Sami Mythology (Paganistic Shamanism)
- Horse Worship/Sacrifice: mythical union of Ruling Elite/Kingship and the Horse
- The Amorite/Amurru people’s God Amurru “Lord of the Steppe”, relates to the Origins of the Bible God?
- Bronze Age Exotic Trade Routes Spread Quite Far as well as Spread Religious Ideas with Them
- Sami and the Northern Indigenous Peoples Landscape, Language, and its Connection to Religion
- Prototype of Ancient Analemmatic Sundials around 3,900-3,150 years ago and a Possible Solar Connection to gods?
- Judaism is around 3,450 or 3,250 years old. (“Paleo-Hebrew” 3,000 years ago and Torah 2,500 years ago)
- The Weakening of Ancient Trade and the Strengthening of Religions around 3000 years ago?
- Are you aware that there are religions that worship women gods, explain now religion tears women down?
- Animistic, Totemistic, and Paganistic Superstition Origins of bible god and the bible’s Religion.
- Myths and Folklore: “Trickster gods and goddesses”
- Jews, Judaism, and the Origins of Some of its Ideas
- An Old Branch of Religion Still Giving Fruit: Sacred Trees
- Dating the BIBLE: naming names and telling times (written less than 3,000 years ago, provable to 2,200 years ago)
- Did a Volcano Inspire the bible god?
- The Amorite/Amurru people’s God Amurru “Lord of the Steppe”, relates to the Origins of the Bible God?
- Dené–Yeniseian language, Old Copper Complex, and Pre-Columbian Mound Builders?
- No “dinosaurs and humans didn’t exist together just because some think they are in the bible itself”
- Sacred Shit and Sacred Animals?
- Everyone Killed in the Bible Flood? “Nephilim” (giants)?
- Hey, Damien dude, I have a question for you regarding “the bible” Exodus.
- Archaeology Disproves the Bible
- Bible Battle, Just More, Bible Babble
- The Jericho Conquest lie?
- Canaanites and Israelites?
- Accurate Account on how did Christianity Began?
- Let’s talk about Christianity.
- So the 10 commandments isn’t anything to go by either right?
- Misinformed christian
- Debunking Jesus?
- Paulism vs Jesus
- Ok, you seem confused so let’s talk about Buddhism.
- Unacknowledged Buddhism: Gods, Savior, Demons, Rebirth, Heavens, Hells, and Terrorism
- His Foolishness The Dalai Lama
- Yin and Yang is sexist with an ORIGIN around 2,300 years ago?
- I Believe Archaeology, not Myths & Why Not, as the Religious Myths Already Violate Reason!
- Archaeological, Scientific, & Philosophic evidence shows the god myth is man-made nonsense.
- Aquatic Ape Theory/Hypothesis? As Always, Just Pseudoscience.
- Ancient Aliens Conspiracy Theorists are Pseudohistorians
- The Pseudohistoric and Pseudoscientific claims about “Bakoni Ruins” of South Africa
- Why do people think Religion is much more than supernaturalism and superstitionism?
- Religion is an Evolved Product
- Was the Value of Ancient Women Different?
- 1000 to 1100 CE, human sacrifice Cahokia Mounds a pre-Columbian Native American site
- Feminist atheists as far back as the 1800s?
- Promoting Religion as Real is Mentally Harmful to a Flourishing Humanity
- Screw All Religions and Their Toxic lies, they are all fraud
- Forget Religions’ Unfounded Myths, I Have Substantiated “Archaeology Facts.”
- Religion Dispersal throughout the World
- I Hate Religion Just as I Hate all Pseudoscience
- Exposing Scientology, Eckankar, Wicca and Other Nonsense?
- Main deity or religious belief systems
- Quit Trying to Invent Your God From the Scraps of Science.
- Archaeological, Scientific, & Philosophic evidence shows the god myth is man-made nonsense.
- Ancient Alien Conspiracy Theorists: Misunderstanding, Rhetoric, Misinformation, Fabrications, and Lies
- Misinformation, Distortion, and Pseudoscience in Talking with a Christian Creationist
- Judging the Lack of Goodness in Gods, Even the Norse God Odin
- Challenging the Belief in God-like Aliens and Gods in General
- A Challenge to Christian use of Torture Devices?
- Yes, Hinduism is a Religion
- Trump is One of the Most Reactionary Forces of Far-right Christian Extremism
- Was the Bull Head a Symbol of God? Yes!
- Primate Death Rituals
- Christian – “God and Christianity are objectively true”
- Australopithecus afarensis Death Ritual?
- You Claim Global Warming is a Hoax?
- Doubter of Science and Defamer of Atheists?
- I think that sounds like the Bible?
- History of the Antifa (“anti-fascist”) Movements
- Indianapolis Anti-Blasphemy Laws #Free Soheil Rally
- Damien, you repeat the golden rule in so many forms then you say religion is dogmatic?
- Science is a Trustable Methodology whereas Faith is not Trustable at all!
- Was I ever a believer, before I was an atheist?
- Atheists rise in reason
- Mistrust of science?
- Open to Talking About the Definition of ‘God’? But first, we address Faith.
- ‘United Monarchy’ full of splendor and power – Saul, David, and Solomon? Most likely not.
- Is there EXODUS ARCHAEOLOGY? The short answer is “no.”
- Lacking Proof of Bigfoots, Unicorns, and Gods is Just a Lack of Research?
- Religion and Politics: Faith Beliefs vs. Rational Thinking
- Hammer of Truth that lying pig RELIGION: challenged by an archaeologist
- “The Hammer of Truth” -ontology question- What do You Mean by That?
- Navigation of a bad argument: Ad Hominem vs. Attack
- Why is it Often Claimed that Gods have a Gender?
- Why are basically all monotheistic religions ones that have a male god?
- Shifting through the Claims in support of Faith
- Dear Mr. AtHope, The 20th Century is an Indictment of Secularism and a Failed Atheist Century
- An Understanding of the Worldwide Statistics and Dynamics of Terrorist Incidents and Suicide Attacks
- Intoxication and Evolution? Addressing and Assessing the “Stoned Ape” or “Drunken Monkey” Theories as Catalysts in Human Evolution
- Sacred Menstrual cloth? Inanna’s knot, Isis knot, and maybe Ma’at’s feather?
- Damien, why don’t the Hebrews accept the bible stories?
- Dealing with a Troll and Arguing Over Word Meaning
- Knowledge without Belief? Justified beliefs or disbeliefs worthy of Knowledge?
- Afrocentrism and African Religions
- Crecganford @crecganford offers history & stories of the people, places, gods, & culture
- Empiricism-Denier?
I am not an academic. I am a revolutionary that teaches in public, in places like social media, and in the streets. I am not a leader by some title given but from my commanding leadership style of simply to start teaching everywhere to everyone, all manner of positive education.
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Low Gods “Earth” or Tutelary deity and High Gods “Sky” or Supreme deity
“An Earth goddess is a deification of the Earth. Earth goddesses are often associated with the “chthonic” deities of the underworld. Ki and Ninhursag are Mesopotamian earth goddesses. In Greek mythology, the Earth is personified as Gaia, corresponding to Roman Terra, Indic Prithvi/Bhūmi, etc. traced to an “Earth Mother” complementary to the “Sky Father” in Proto-Indo-European religion. Egyptian mythology exceptionally has a sky goddess and an Earth god.” ref
“A mother goddess is a goddess who represents or is a personification of nature, motherhood, fertility, creation, destruction or who embodies the bounty of the Earth. When equated with the Earth or the natural world, such goddesses are sometimes referred to as Mother Earth or as the Earth Mother. In some religious traditions or movements, Heavenly Mother (also referred to as Mother in Heaven or Sky Mother) is the wife or feminine counterpart of the Sky father or God the Father.” ref
“Any masculine sky god is often also king of the gods, taking the position of patriarch within a pantheon. Such king gods are collectively categorized as “sky father” deities, with a polarity between sky and earth often being expressed by pairing a “sky father” god with an “earth mother” goddess (pairings of a sky mother with an earth father are less frequent). A main sky goddess is often the queen of the gods and may be an air/sky goddess in her own right, though she usually has other functions as well with “sky” not being her main. In antiquity, several sky goddesses in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Near East were called Queen of Heaven. Neopagans often apply it with impunity to sky goddesses from other regions who were never associated with the term historically. The sky often has important religious significance. Many religions, both polytheistic and monotheistic, have deities associated with the sky.” ref
“In comparative mythology, sky father is a term for a recurring concept in polytheistic religions of a sky god who is addressed as a “father”, often the father of a pantheon and is often either a reigning or former King of the Gods. The concept of “sky father” may also be taken to include Sun gods with similar characteristics, such as Ra. The concept is complementary to an “earth mother“. “Sky Father” is a direct translation of the Vedic Dyaus Pita, etymologically descended from the same Proto-Indo-European deity name as the Greek Zeûs Pater and Roman Jupiter and Germanic Týr, Tir or Tiwaz, all of which are reflexes of the same Proto-Indo-European deity’s name, *Dyēus Ph₂tḗr. While there are numerous parallels adduced from outside of Indo-European mythology, there are exceptions (e.g. In Egyptian mythology, Nut is the sky mother and Geb is the earth father).” ref
Tutelary deity
“A tutelary (also tutelar) is a deity or spirit who is a guardian, patron, or protector of a particular place, geographic feature, person, lineage, nation, culture, or occupation. The etymology of “tutelary” expresses the concept of safety and thus of guardianship. In late Greek and Roman religion, one type of tutelary deity, the genius, functions as the personal deity or daimon of an individual from birth to death. Another form of personal tutelary spirit is the familiar spirit of European folklore.” ref
“A tutelary (also tutelar) in Korean shamanism, jangseung and sotdae were placed at the edge of villages to frighten off demons. They were also worshiped as deities. Seonangshin is the patron deity of the village in Korean tradition and was believed to embody the Seonangdang. In Philippine animism, Diwata or Lambana are deities or spirits that inhabit sacred places like mountains and mounds and serve as guardians. Such as: Maria Makiling is the deity who guards Mt. Makiling and Maria Cacao and Maria Sinukuan. In Shinto, the spirits, or kami, which give life to human bodies come from nature and return to it after death. Ancestors are therefore themselves tutelaries to be worshiped. And similarly, Native American beliefs such as Tonás, tutelary animal spirit among the Zapotec and Totems, familial or clan spirits among the Ojibwe, can be animals.” ref
“A tutelary (also tutelar) in Austronesian beliefs such as: Atua (gods and spirits of the Polynesian peoples such as the Māori or the Hawaiians), Hanitu (Bunun of Taiwan‘s term for spirit), Hyang (Kawi, Sundanese, Javanese, and Balinese Supreme Being, in ancient Java and Bali mythology and this spiritual entity, can be either divine or ancestral), Kaitiaki (New Zealand Māori term used for the concept of guardianship, for the sky, the sea, and the land), Kawas (mythology) (divided into 6 groups: gods, ancestors, souls of the living, spirits of living things, spirits of lifeless objects, and ghosts), Tiki (Māori mythology, Tiki is the first man created by either Tūmatauenga or Tāne and represents deified ancestors found in most Polynesian cultures). ” ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref
Mesopotamian Tutelary Deities can be seen as ones related to City-States
“Historical city-states included Sumerian cities such as Uruk and Ur; Ancient Egyptian city-states, such as Thebes and Memphis; the Phoenician cities (such as Tyre and Sidon); the five Philistine city-states; the Berber city-states of the Garamantes; the city-states of ancient Greece (the poleis such as Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Corinth); the Roman Republic (which grew from a city-state into a vast empire); the Italian city-states from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, such as Florence, Siena, Ferrara, Milan (which as they grew in power began to dominate neighboring cities) and Genoa and Venice, which became powerful thalassocracies; the Mayan and other cultures of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica (including cities such as Chichen Itza, Tikal, Copán and Monte Albán); the central Asian cities along the Silk Road; the city-states of the Swahili coast; Ragusa; states of the medieval Russian lands such as Novgorod and Pskov; and many others.” ref
“The Uruk period (ca. 4000 to 3100 BCE; also known as Protoliterate period) of Mesopotamia, named after the Sumerian city of Uruk, this period saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia and the Sumerian civilization. City-States like Uruk and others had a patron tutelary City Deity along with a Priest-King.” ref
“Chinese folk religion, both past, and present, includes myriad tutelary deities. Exceptional individuals, highly cultivated sages, and prominent ancestors can be deified and honored after death. Lord Guan is the patron of military personnel and police, while Mazu is the patron of fishermen and sailors. Such as Tu Di Gong (Earth Deity) is the tutelary deity of a locality, and each individual locality has its own Earth Deity and Cheng Huang Gong (City God) is the guardian deity of an individual city, worshipped by local officials and locals since imperial times.” ref
“A tutelary (also tutelar) in Hinduism, personal tutelary deities are known as ishta-devata, while family tutelary deities are known as Kuladevata. Gramadevata are guardian deities of villages. Devas can also be seen as tutelary. Shiva is the patron of yogis and renunciants. City goddesses include: Mumbadevi (Mumbai), Sachchika (Osian); Kuladevis include: Ambika (Porwad), and Mahalakshmi. In NorthEast India Meitei mythology and religion (Sanamahism) of Manipur, there are various types of tutelary deities, among which Lam Lais are the most predominant ones. Tibetan Buddhism has Yidam as a tutelary deity. Dakini is the patron of those who seek knowledge.” ref
“A tutelary (also tutelar) The Greeks also thought deities guarded specific places: for instance, Athena was the patron goddess of the city of Athens. Socrates spoke of hearing the voice of his personal spirit or daimonion:
You have often heard me speak of an oracle or sign which comes to me … . This sign I have had ever since I was a child. The sign is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything, and this is what stands in the way of my being a politician.” ref
“Tutelary deities who guard and preserve a place or a person are fundamental to ancient Roman religion. The tutelary deity of a man was his Genius, that of a woman her Juno. In the Imperial era, the Genius of the Emperor was a focus of Imperial cult. An emperor might also adopt a major deity as his personal patron or tutelary, as Augustus did Apollo. Precedents for claiming the personal protection of a deity were established in the Republican era, when for instance the Roman dictator Sulla advertised the goddess Victory as his tutelary by holding public games (ludi) in her honor.” ref
“Each town or city had one or more tutelary deities, whose protection was considered particularly vital in time of war and siege. Rome itself was protected by a goddess whose name was to be kept ritually secret on pain of death (for a supposed case, see Quintus Valerius Soranus). The Capitoline Triad of Juno, Jupiter, and Minerva were also tutelaries of Rome. The Italic towns had their own tutelary deities. Juno often had this function, as at the Latin town of Lanuvium and the Etruscan city of Veii, and was often housed in an especially grand temple on the arx (citadel) or other prominent or central location. The tutelary deity of Praeneste was Fortuna, whose oracle was renowned.” ref
“The Roman ritual of evocatio was premised on the belief that a town could be made vulnerable to military defeat if the power of its tutelary deity were diverted outside the city, perhaps by the offer of superior cult at Rome. The depiction of some goddesses such as the Magna Mater (Great Mother, or Cybele) as “tower-crowned” represents their capacity to preserve the city. A town in the provinces might adopt a deity from within the Roman religious sphere to serve as its guardian, or syncretize its own tutelary with such; for instance, a community within the civitas of the Remi in Gaul adopted Apollo as its tutelary, and at the capital of the Remi (present-day Rheims), the tutelary was Mars Camulus.” ref
Household deity (a kind of or related to a Tutelary deity)
“A household deity is a deity or spirit that protects the home, looking after the entire household or certain key members. It has been a common belief in paganism as well as in folklore across many parts of the world. Household deities fit into two types; firstly, a specific deity – typically a goddess – often referred to as a hearth goddess or domestic goddess who is associated with the home and hearth, such as the ancient Greek Hestia.” ref
“The second type of household deities are those that are not one singular deity, but a type, or species of animistic deity, who usually have lesser powers than major deities. This type was common in the religions of antiquity, such as the Lares of ancient Roman religion, the Gashin of Korean shamanism, and Cofgodas of Anglo-Saxon paganism. These survived Christianisation as fairy-like creatures existing in folklore, such as the Anglo-Scottish Brownie and Slavic Domovoy.” ref
“Household deities were usually worshipped not in temples but in the home, where they would be represented by small idols (such as the teraphim of the Bible, often translated as “household gods” in Genesis 31:19 for example), amulets, paintings, or reliefs. They could also be found on domestic objects, such as cosmetic articles in the case of Tawaret. The more prosperous houses might have a small shrine to the household god(s); the lararium served this purpose in the case of the Romans. The gods would be treated as members of the family and invited to join in meals, or be given offerings of food and drink.” ref
“In many religions, both ancient and modern, a god would preside over the home. Certain species, or types, of household deities, existed. An example of this was the Roman Lares. Many European cultures retained house spirits into the modern period. Some examples of these include:
- Brownie (Scotland and England) or Hob (England) / Kobold (Germany) / Goblin / Hobgoblin
- Domovoy (Slavic)
- Nisse (Norwegian or Danish) / Tomte (Swedish) / Tonttu (Finnish)
- Húsvættir (Norse)” ref
“Although the cosmic status of household deities was not as lofty as that of the Twelve Olympians or the Aesir, they were also jealous of their dignity and also had to be appeased with shrines and offerings, however humble. Because of their immediacy they had arguably more influence on the day-to-day affairs of men than the remote gods did. Vestiges of their worship persisted long after Christianity and other major religions extirpated nearly every trace of the major pagan pantheons. Elements of the practice can be seen even today, with Christian accretions, where statues to various saints (such as St. Francis) protect gardens and grottos. Even the gargoyles found on older churches, could be viewed as guardians partitioning a sacred space.” ref
“For centuries, Christianity fought a mop-up war against these lingering minor pagan deities, but they proved tenacious. For example, Martin Luther‘s Tischreden have numerous – quite serious – references to dealing with kobolds. Eventually, rationalism and the Industrial Revolution threatened to erase most of these minor deities, until the advent of romantic nationalism rehabilitated them and embellished them into objects of literary curiosity in the 19th century. Since the 20th century this literature has been mined for characters for role-playing games, video games, and other fantasy personae, not infrequently invested with invented traits and hierarchies somewhat different from their mythological and folkloric roots.” ref
“In contradistinction to both Herbert Spencer and Edward Burnett Tylor, who defended theories of animistic origins of ancestor worship, Émile Durkheim saw its origin in totemism. In reality, this distinction is somewhat academic, since totemism may be regarded as a particularized manifestation of animism, and something of a synthesis of the two positions was attempted by Sigmund Freud. In Freud’s Totem and Taboo, both totem and taboo are outward expressions or manifestations of the same psychological tendency, a concept which is complementary to, or which rather reconciles, the apparent conflict. Freud preferred to emphasize the psychoanalytic implications of the reification of metaphysical forces, but with particular emphasis on its familial nature. This emphasis underscores, rather than weakens, the ancestral component.” ref
“William Edward Hearn, a noted classicist, and jurist, traced the origin of domestic deities from the earliest stages as an expression of animism, a belief system thought to have existed also in the neolithic, and the forerunner of Indo-European religion. In his analysis of the Indo-European household, in Chapter II “The House Spirit”, Section 1, he states:
The belief which guided the conduct of our forefathers was … the spirit rule of dead ancestors.” ref
“In Section 2 he proceeds to elaborate:
It is thus certain that the worship of deceased ancestors is a vera causa, and not a mere hypothesis. …
In the other European nations, the Slavs, the Teutons, and the Kelts, the House Spirit appears with no less distinctness. … [T]he existence of that worship does not admit of doubt. … The House Spirits had a multitude of other names which it is needless here to enumerate, but all of which are more or less expressive of their friendly relations with man. … In [England] … [h]e is the Brownie. … In Scotland this same Brownie is well known. He is usually described as attached to particular families, with whom he has been known to reside for centuries, threshing the corn, cleaning the house, and performing similar household tasks. His favorite gratification was milk and honey.” ref
Hinduism around 3,700 to 3,500 years old. ref
Judaism around 3,450 or 3,250 years old. (The first writing in the bible was “Paleo-Hebrew” dated to around 3,000 years ago Khirbet Qeiyafa is the site of an ancient fortress city overlooking the Elah Valley. And many believe the religious Jewish texts were completed around 2,500) ref, ref
Judaism is around 3,450 or 3,250 years old. (“Paleo-Hebrew” 3,000 years ago and Torah 2,500 years ago)
“Judaism is an Abrahamic, its roots as an organized religion in the Middle East during the Bronze Age. Some scholars argue that modern Judaism evolved from Yahwism, the religion of ancient Israel and Judah, by the late 6th century BCE, and is thus considered to be one of the oldest monotheistic religions.” ref
“Yahwism is the name given by modern scholars to the religion of ancient Israel, essentially polytheistic, with a plethora of gods and goddesses. Heading the pantheon was Yahweh, the national god of the Israelite kingdoms of Israel and Judah, with his consort, the goddess Asherah; below them were second-tier gods and goddesses such as Baal, Shamash, Yarikh, Mot, and Astarte, all of whom had their own priests and prophets and numbered royalty among their devotees, and a third and fourth tier of minor divine beings, including the mal’ak, the messengers of the higher gods, who in later times became the angels of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Yahweh, however, was not the ‘original’ god of Israel “Isra-El”; it is El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon, whose name forms the basis of the name “Israel”, and none of the Old Testament patriarchs, the tribes of Israel, the Judges, or the earliest monarchs, have a Yahwistic theophoric name (i.e., one incorporating the name of Yahweh).” ref
“El is a Northwest Semitic word meaning “god” or “deity“, or referring (as a proper name) to any one of multiple major ancient Near Eastern deities. A rarer form, ‘ila, represents the predicate form in Old Akkadian and in Amorite. The word is derived from the Proto-Semitic *ʔil-, meaning “god”. Specific deities known as ‘El or ‘Il include the supreme god of the ancient Canaanite religion and the supreme god of East Semitic speakers in Mesopotamia’s Early Dynastic Period. ʼĒl is listed at the head of many pantheons. In some Canaanite and Ugaritic sources, ʼĒl played a role as father of the gods, of creation, or both. For example, in the Ugaritic texts, ʾil mlk is understood to mean “ʼĒl the King” but ʾil hd as “the god Hadad“. The Semitic root ʾlh (Arabic ʾilāh, Aramaic ʾAlāh, ʾElāh, Hebrew ʾelōah) may be ʾl with a parasitic h, and ʾl may be an abbreviated form of ʾlh. In Ugaritic the plural form meaning “gods” is ʾilhm, equivalent to Hebrew ʾelōhîm “powers”. In the Hebrew texts this word is interpreted as being semantically singular for “god” by biblical commentators. However the documentary hypothesis for the Old Testament (corresponds to the Jewish Torah) developed originally in the 1870s, identifies these that different authors – the Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and the Priestly source – were responsible for editing stories from a polytheistic religion into those of a monotheistic religion. Inconsistencies that arise between monotheism and polytheism in the texts are reflective of this hypothesis.” ref
Jainism around 2,599 – 2,527 years old. ref
Confucianism around 2,600 – 2,551 years old. ref
Buddhism around 2,563/2,480 – 2,483/2,400 years old. ref
Christianity around 2,o00 years old. ref
Shinto around 1,305 years old. ref
Islam around 1407–1385 years old. ref
Knowledge to Ponder:
Stars/Astrology:
- Possibly, around 30,000 years ago (in simpler form) to 6,000 years ago, Stars/Astrology are connected to Ancestors, Spirit Animals, and Deities.
- The star also seems to be a possible proto-star for Star of Ishtar, Star of Inanna, or Star of Venus.
- Around 7,000 to 6,000 years ago, Star Constellations/Astrology have connections to the “Kurgan phenomenon” of below-ground “mound” stone/wood burial structures and “Dolmen phenomenon” of above-ground stone burial structures.
- Around 6,500–5,800 years ago, The Northern Levant migrations into Jordon and Israel in the Southern Levant brought new cultural and religious transfer from Turkey and Iran.
- “The Ghassulian Star,” a mysterious 6,000-year-old mural from Jordan may have connections to the European paganstic kurgan/dolmens phenomenon.
“Astrology is a range of divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. Different cultures have employed forms of astrology since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, these practices having originated in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications. Most, if not all, cultures have attached importance to what they observed in the sky, and some—such as the Hindus, Chinese, and the Maya—developed elaborate systems for predicting terrestrial events from celestial observations. Western astrology, one of the oldest astrological systems still in use, can trace its roots to 19th–17th century BCE Mesopotamia, from where it spread to Ancient Greece, Rome, the Islamicate world and eventually Central and Western Europe. Contemporary Western astrology is often associated with systems of horoscopes that purport to explain aspects of a person’s personality and predict significant events in their lives based on the positions of celestial objects; the majority of professional astrologers rely on such systems.” ref
Around 5,500 years ago, Science evolves, The first evidence of science was 5,500 years ago and was demonstrated by a body of empirical, theoretical, and practical knowledge about the natural world. ref
Around 5,000 years ago, Origin of Logics is a Naturalistic Observation (principles of valid reasoning, inference, & demonstration) ref
Around 4,150 to 4,000 years ago: The earliest surviving versions of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, which was originally titled “He who Saw the Deep” (Sha naqba īmuru) or “Surpassing All Other Kings” (Shūtur eli sharrī) were written. ref
Hinduism:
- 3,700 years ago or so, the oldest of the Hindu Vedas (scriptures), the Rig Veda was composed.
- 3,500 years ago or so, the Vedic Age began in India after the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization.
Judaism:
- around 3,000 years ago, the first writing in the bible was “Paleo-Hebrew”
- around 2,500 years ago, many believe the religious Jewish texts were completed
Myths: The bible inspired religion is not just one religion or one myth but a grouping of several religions and myths
- Around 3,450 or 3,250 years ago, according to legend, is the traditionally accepted period in which the Israelite lawgiver, Moses, provided the Ten Commandments.
- Around 2,500 to 2,400 years ago, a collection of ancient religious writings by the Israelites based primarily upon the Hebrew Bible, Tanakh, or Old Testament is the first part of Christianity’s bible.
- Around 2,400 years ago, the most accepted hypothesis is that the canon was formed in stages, first the Pentateuch (Torah).
- Around 2,140 to 2,116 years ago, the Prophets was written during the Hasmonean dynasty, and finally the remaining books.
- Christians traditionally divide the Old Testament into four sections:
- The first five books or Pentateuch (Torah).
- The proposed history books telling the history of the Israelites from their conquest of Canaan to their defeat and exile in Babylon.
- The poetic and proposed “Wisdom books” dealing, in various forms, with questions of good and evil in the world.
- The books of the biblical prophets, warning of the consequences of turning away from God:
- Henotheism:
- Exodus 20:23 “You shall not make other gods besides Me (not saying there are no other gods just not to worship them); gods of silver or gods of gold, you shall not make for yourselves.”
- Polytheism:
- Judges 10:6 “Then the sons of Israel again did evil in the sight of the LORD, served the Baals and the Ashtaroth, the gods of Aram, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the sons of Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines; thus they forsook the LORD and did not serve Him.”
- 1 Corinthians 8:5 “For even if there are so-called gods whether in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords.”
- Monotheism:
- Isaiah 43:10 “You are my witnesses,” declares the LORD, “and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me.
Around 2,570 to 2,270 Years Ago, there is a confirmation of atheistic doubting as well as atheistic thinking, mainly by Greek philosophers. However, doubting gods is likely as old as the invention of gods and should destroy the thinking that belief in god(s) is the “default belief”. The Greek word is apistos (a “not” and pistos “faithful,”), thus not faithful or faithless because one is unpersuaded and unconvinced by a god(s) claim. Short Definition: unbelieving, unbeliever, or unbelief.
Expressions of Atheistic Thinking:
- Around 2,600 years ago, Ajita Kesakambali, ancient Indian philosopher, who is the first known proponent of Indian materialism. ref
- Around 2,535 to 2,475 years ago, Heraclitus, Greek pre-Socratic philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Anatolia, also known as Asia Minor or modern Turkey. ref
- Around 2,500 to 2,400 years ago, according to The Story of Civilization book series certain African pygmy tribes have no identifiable gods, spirits, or religious beliefs or rituals, and even what burials accrue are without ceremony. ref
- Around 2,490 to 2,430 years ago, Empedocles, Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek city in Sicily. ref
- Around 2,460 to 2,370 years ago, Democritus, Greek pre-Socratic philosopher considered to be the “father of modern science” possibly had some disbelief amounting to atheism. ref
- Around 2,399 years ago or so, Socrates, a famous Greek philosopher was tried for sinfulness by teaching doubt of state gods. ref
- Around 2,341 to 2,270 years ago, Epicurus, a Greek philosopher known for composing atheistic critics and famously stated, “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?” ref
This last expression by Epicurus, seems to be an expression of Axiological Atheism. To understand and utilize value or actually possess “Value Conscious/Consciousness” to both give a strong moral “axiological” argument (the problem of evil) as well as use it to fortify humanism and positive ethical persuasion of human helping and care responsibilities. Because value-blindness gives rise to sociopathic/psychopathic evil.
While hallucinogens are associated with shamanism, it is alcohol that is associated with paganism.
The Atheist-Humanist-Leftist Revolutionaries Shows in the prehistory series:
Show two: Pre-animism 300,000 years old and animism 100,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”
Show tree: Totemism 50,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”
Show four: Shamanism 30,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”
Show five: Paganism 12,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”
Show six: Emergence of hierarchy, sexism, slavery, and the new male god dominance: Paganism 7,000-5,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Capitalism) (World War 0) Elite and their slaves!
Prehistory: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” the division of labor, power, rights, and recourses: VIDEO
Pre-animism 300,000 years old and animism 100,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”: VIDEO
Totemism 50,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”: VIDEO
Shamanism 30,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”: VIDEO
Paganism 12,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Pre-Capitalism): VIDEO
Paganism 7,000-5,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Capitalism) (World War 0) Elite and their slaves: VIEDO
Paganism 5,000 years old: progressed organized religion and the state: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Kings and the Rise of the State): VIEDO
Paganism 4,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (First Moralistic gods, then the Origin time of Monotheism): VIEDO
I do not hate simply because I challenge and expose myths or lies any more than others being thought of as loving simply because of the protection and hiding from challenge their favored myths or lies.
The truth is best championed in the sunlight of challenge.
An archaeologist once said to me “Damien religion and culture are very different”
My response, So are you saying that was always that way, such as would you say Native Americans’ cultures are separate from their religions? And do you think it always was the way you believe?
I had said that religion was a cultural product. That is still how I see it and there are other archaeologists that think close to me as well. Gods too are the myths of cultures that did not understand science or the world around them, seeing magic/supernatural everywhere.
I personally think there is a goddess and not enough evidence to support a male god at Çatalhöyük but if there was both a male and female god and goddess then I know the kind of gods they were like Proto-Indo-European mythology.
This series idea was addressed in, Anarchist Teaching as Free Public Education or Free Education in the Public: VIDEO
Our 12 video series: Organized Oppression: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of power (9,000-4,000 years ago), is adapted from: The Complete and Concise History of the Sumerians and Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia (7000-2000 BC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szFjxmY7jQA by “History with Cy“
Show #1: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Samarra, Halaf, Ubaid)
Show #2: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power
Show #3: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Uruk and the First Cities)
Show #4: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (First Kings)
Show #5: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Early Dynastic Period)
Show #6: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power
Show #7: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Sargon and Akkadian Rule)
Show #9: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Gudea of Lagash and Utu-hegal)
Show #12: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Aftermath and Legacy of Sumer)
The “Atheist-Humanist-Leftist Revolutionaries”
Cory Johnston ☭ Ⓐ Atheist Leftist @Skepticallefty & I (Damien Marie AtHope) @AthopeMarie (my YouTube & related blog) are working jointly in atheist, antitheist, antireligionist, antifascist, anarchist, socialist, and humanist endeavors in our videos together, generally, every other Saturday.
Why Does Power Bring Responsibility?
Think, how often is it the powerless that start wars, oppress others, or commit genocide? So, I guess the question is to us all, to ask, how can power not carry responsibility in a humanity concept? I know I see the deep ethical responsibility that if there is power their must be a humanistic responsibility of ethical and empathic stewardship of that power. Will I be brave enough to be kind? Will I possess enough courage to be compassionate? Will my valor reach its height of empathy? I as everyone, earns our justified respect by our actions, that are good, ethical, just, protecting, and kind. Do I have enough self-respect to put my love for humanity’s flushing, over being brought down by some of its bad actors? May we all be the ones doing good actions in the world, to help human flourishing.
I create the world I want to live in, striving for flourishing. Which is not a place but a positive potential involvement and promotion; a life of humanist goal precision. To master oneself, also means mastering positive prosocial behaviors needed for human flourishing. I may have lost a god myth as an atheist, but I am happy to tell you, my friend, it is exactly because of that, leaving the mental terrorizer, god belief, that I truly regained my connected ethical as well as kind humanity.
Cory and I will talk about prehistory and theism, addressing the relevance to atheism, anarchism, and socialism.
At the same time as the rise of the male god, 7,000 years ago, there was also the very time there was the rise of violence, war, and clans to kingdoms, then empires, then states. It is all connected back to 7,000 years ago, and it moved across the world.
Cory Johnston: https://damienmarieathope.com/2021/04/cory-johnston-mind-of-a-skeptical-leftist/?v=32aec8db952d
The Mind of a Skeptical Leftist (YouTube)
Cory Johnston: Mind of a Skeptical Leftist @Skepticallefty
The Mind of a Skeptical Leftist By Cory Johnston: “Promoting critical thinking, social justice, and left-wing politics by covering current events and talking to a variety of people. Cory Johnston has been thoughtfully talking to people and attempting to promote critical thinking, social justice, and left-wing politics.” http://anchor.fm/skepticalleft
Cory needs our support. We rise by helping each other.
Cory Johnston ☭ Ⓐ @Skepticallefty Evidence-based atheist leftist (he/him) Producer, host, and co-host of 4 podcasts @skeptarchy @skpoliticspod and @AthopeMarie
Damien Marie AtHope (“At Hope”) Axiological Atheist, Anti-theist, Anti-religionist, Secular Humanist. Rationalist, Writer, Artist, Poet, Philosopher, Advocate, Activist, Psychology, and Armchair Archaeology/Anthropology/Historian.
Damien is interested in: Freedom, Liberty, Justice, Equality, Ethics, Humanism, Science, Atheism, Antiteism, Antireligionism, Ignosticism, Left-Libertarianism, Anarchism, Socialism, Mutualism, Axiology, Metaphysics, LGBTQI, Philosophy, Advocacy, Activism, Mental Health, Psychology, Archaeology, Social Work, Sexual Rights, Marriage Rights, Woman’s Rights, Gender Rights, Child Rights, Secular Rights, Race Equality, Ageism/Disability Equality, Etc. And a far-leftist, “Anarcho-Humanist.”
I am not a good fit in the atheist movement that is mostly pro-capitalist, I am anti-capitalist. Mostly pro-skeptic, I am a rationalist not valuing skepticism. Mostly pro-agnostic, I am anti-agnostic. Mostly limited to anti-Abrahamic religions, I am an anti-religionist.
To me, the “male god” seems to have either emerged or become prominent around 7,000 years ago, whereas the now favored monotheism “male god” is more like 4,000 years ago or so. To me, the “female goddess” seems to have either emerged or become prominent around 11,000-10,000 years ago or so, losing the majority of its once prominence around 2,000 years ago due largely to the now favored monotheism “male god” that grow in prominence after 4,000 years ago or so.
My Thought on the Evolution of Gods?
Animal protector deities from old totems/spirit animal beliefs come first to me, 13,000/12,000 years ago, then women as deities 11,000/10,000 years ago, then male gods around 7,000/8,000 years ago. Moralistic gods around 5,000/4,000 years ago, and monotheistic gods around 4,000/3,000 years ago.
Damien Marie AtHope (Said as “At” “Hope”)/(Autodidact Polymath but not good at math):
Axiological Atheist, Anti-theist, Anti-religionist, Secular Humanist, Rationalist, Writer, Artist, Jeweler, Poet, “autodidact” Philosopher, schooled in Psychology, and “autodidact” Armchair Archaeology/Anthropology/Pre-Historian (Knowledgeable in the range of: 1 million to 5,000/4,000 years ago). I am an anarchist socialist politically. Reasons for or Types of Atheism
My Website, My Blog, & Short-writing or Quotes, My YouTube, Twitter: @AthopeMarie, and My Email: damien.marie.athope@gmail.com