Wednesday, January 3, 2024

The Okayest Kung Pao Chicken in Town


           I would be perfectly content to eat this dish every day for the rest of my life. In fact, on any given day it’s probably coin-toss odds that I’m going to have this for dinner.

Ingredients:

Cooking Oil:
As needed, no more than a couple tbsp.

Various Cocaine-Like Powders:
1+ tbsp flour
1 tsp sugar

Liquids:
4 tbsp soy sauce
3 tbsp dark rice vinegar
3 tbsp huangjiu (sake works in a pinch)

Spices and Nuts:
1+ handful peanuts
5-10 dried red chili peppers, broken up. I like to leave one whole.
1 tbsp whole Sichuan peppercorns

Veggies:
½ onion (or: a leek)
1 bunch green onions (optional when a leek is used above)
1 large bell pepper
2-4 cloves garlic
1+ tbsp fresh ginger

Meat:
2 cocktits (i.e., chicken breasts)
1 chicken bouillon cube OR 1 tbsp chicken goop

Preparation:

1. Put powders together in a cup. Set aside.
2. Put liquids together in a cup. Set aside.
3. Put nuts and spices together in a cup. Set aside.
4. Chop up the green onions, put in their own bowl. Set aside.
5. Chop up the other veggies, put together in another bowl. Set aside.
6. CUBE the chicken. Most Western Chinese restaurants don’t do this, but rather slice the chicken. We’re making Palace Exploding Chicken Cubes, not palace exploding chicken slices.
7. If you want, sprinkle some salt on the chicken.

Now is a good time to wash your knife and cutting board, so you have less dishes later. It’s also a good time to put your rice on. I recommend using a rice cooker.

Cooking:

1. Get your stove nice and hot, like HOT hot. Heat should be high throughout. Pour on a little oil and add the chicken. Sizzling should be immediate and loud. Stir the chicken around.
2. Pour off any liquid that forms in the wok/pan. If you’re doing it right, with a big enough wok, there shouldn’t be much. If there is, it’s ok, just pour it off.
3. Once the chicken is white all around, add the chicken cube or goop. Stir it around, let it mix into the chicken.
4. Chicken should be browned and crispy, but tender inside. When it would be safe to eat, take it off, put it in a bowl, and set aside.
5. Put a little more oil in the wok, and put on the peanuts and vegetables. Stir them around for about a minute, get them crisp and toasted but not burned. You should be coughing and sneezing here. When done, put them on top of the chicken.
6. Put the veggies (except for the green onions) on the hot wok. Lately I haven’t been putting any more oil in at this point. Stir them around for a couple minutes until they become slightly charred, but haven’t lost their crisp texture.
7. Put the chicken, with the nuts and spices, back on the wok. Add half of the green onions. Stir it around, mix everything together, pour off any liquid, but again if you’ve done things right there shouldn’t be (much).
8. Add the powders. Lately I’ve been quickly stirring everything around with the powder to get an even distribution.
9. Pour on the liquids. Stir around quickly, get a caramelized, sticky texture, not too thin or liquidy but at the same time having mixed in all of the powder.
10. Take it off before things start burning. Serve and garnish with the remaining green onions. Rice should be ready at about the same time you finish the chicken.


Tuesday, August 1, 2023

The Age of Barbarians, Part II: Doggerstyle


           What’s new everybody, welcome back to Office Hours with the Brofessor, the Show that’s Proudly Irrelevant. In this video I’m going to talk about the European Mesolithic, a transitional period of several thousand years between the last glacial period and the introduction of agriculture. Originally my plan was to briefly touch on the Mesolithic before moving on to Europe’s first farmers, but it’s worth it to spend more time on this period, not only for its own sake but also to establish context.

The story picks up eleven thousand years ago (KYA), 3000 years after my last series, “CAVEMEN ROCK”, concluded. We finished with the world’s oldest known bread crumbs, found in Jordan, and incredibly the most recent known archaic hominins, known as the Red Deer Cave people, whose remains were found in Southwest China. By eleven and a half thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was the last hominin* standing, and the last gasp of the Ice Age**, known as the Younger Dryas, had concluded. By this time also the ancient megafauna, such as cave bears and wooly mammoths, had gone extinct. In geological terms, the Pleistocene epoch had ended, and the Quaternary had begun. In anthropological terms, the Paleolithic was over, and mankind now entered the Mesolithic era.

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*Yes, I know that technically, “hominin” includes chimpanzees, but in the paleoanthropological context it typically refers to what are properly known as “homininians”—that is, Australopithecines and Homo.

**YES, I KNOW that technically we are still in an ice age. Here I am re ferring to the Last Glacial Period, which ended 11,700 years ago.
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What do I mean by Paleolithic and Mesolithic? The Paleolithic or “Old Stone Age” was characterized by very small band societies, or foraging cultures of no more than 50 people, spread over huge territories. Another important characteristic of the Paleolithic was that during this time we shared the planet with species now extinct: archaic hominins and Pleistocene megafauna. In the Mesolithic or “Middle Stone Age”, modern humans are the planet’s only hominins (that we currently know of), the megafauna have gone extinct, and societies can on occasion be slightly larger and more complex, for example with the very first permanent structures being built. One professor of mine characterized the Mesolithic by “small game hunting”, in the sense that moose are smaller than mammoths. Some Mesolithic people also did cool stuff like clay pottery, controlling wild grains, and controlling which plants grew where, when. They were still however essentially hunter-gatherers, as that is the key quality that sets the Paleolithic and Mesolithic apart from the Neolithic, or “New Stone Age”.

In much of the world, the Mesolithic was a transitional period of several thousand years, although in a few areas it could be argued to have continued into the twentieth century. Due to this “in-between” nature of the Mesolithic I have struggled with where these guys fall on the “caveman-barbarian” dichotomy. In the end I think I’ve decided that they’re closer to cavemen, since they’re hunter-gatherers, and for bonus points are, in fact, occasionally found in caves. Any mesolithic time travelers who think otherwise are free to disagree!

So let’s go ahead and take a look at the Europe of 11 KYA:

The first thing you’ll notice is the extended coastlines, most saliently in the huge plainland that is now covered by the North Sea. This huge area, which many thousands of people must have called home over the millennia, is now known as Doggerland…or as I call it, SNOOPERLAND:

            As the glaciers receded at the end of the Ice Age, people were able to expand into the northern parts of Europe, such as Britain, Scandinavia, and yes, Long Beach. I mean, Snooperland. For thousands of years, prehistoric OG’s called this region home, their cultures now vanished beneath the waves of the North Sea, awaiting a day now not far off, when advances in underwater archaeology will reveal their secrets to us once more.

            Who were the people living in this lost world? Well, let me introduce you to Cheddar Man, who ironically was lactose intolerant:

            His remains were excavated unsurprisingly in Cheddar, Somerset, and more specifically in Gough’s Cave, which appears to have been a busy place during the late Paleolithic and Mesolithic. 14 KYA, a culture known as the Magdalenian was spread across Europe, known best for the spectacular Lascaux cave paintings. Meanwhile, Gough’s cave has a considerably more sinister reputation—a group of Magdalenian people were cannibalized here and had their skulls turned into drinking cups. I know it sounds terrible, but remember, it’s possible that this could have been their way of honoring their passed-on family members, or that it was an isolated incident that would have been viewed with the same horror that we see it. Or it could have been that murder and cannibalism was in some way ritualized or institutionalized to them.

I know it’s disgusting, sorry, but get used to it, there’ll be a lot of that kind of stuff in this series. At any rate I’m struck by the juxtaposition of some of humanity’s most beautiful and enduring art coming out of the same culture that chopped people up, ate them, and drank from their skulls. Before we dismiss people of their time as inherently beneath us, consider the Nazis or Khmer Rouge. Humans are fallen creatures and capable of monstrous evil.

4,000 years after these Magdalenians met their grisly end, Cheddar Man’s body ended up in the cave. We’re not sure if he was placed there, or if that’s where he died—there are no grave goods to indicate funerary ritual. 85% of his genetic makeup is consistent with earlier populations who migrated from the Near East into the Alps, and thence to Northern Europe, while only 15% of his ancestry is Magdalenian (4). This could suggest that the Magdalenians had dwindled in numbers by the time the Alpine group arrived, perhaps because of the millennium-long cold snap of the Younger Dryas, or that they were displaced by the newcomers. The migration could have been spurred by the end of the Younger Dryas allowing expansion into the northern reaches of Europe, such as Britain and, yes, Doggerland. Cheddar Man therefore gives us just a glimpse into the demographic makeup of northwestern Europe at that time, and he may well have set foot himself on Doggerlandic soil. Not that he thought of it in that way. To his people, Doggerland would likely simply be considered “the lowlands”, and Britain to be “the highlands”.

Before I move on, I’d like to briefly point out that, amazingly, there exists genetic continuity between Cheddar Man and modern people still in the area. A history teacher living half a mile from Gough’s cave shares maternal ancestry with Cheddar man:

They even have the same nose.

While not a direct descendant, as is sometimes breathlessly reported by a media perpetually clueless on specialist topics, the teacher could be thought of as Cheddar man’s great-nephew or cousin, many times removed. Given the often critical relationship between family and land in small-scale hunter-gatherer cultures, Cheddar Man would likely be very happy to hear that his family was still in the area.

Now that we’ve been introduced to a Mesolithic European, let’s learn a bit about what his life was like. Deer, aurochs, and fish were important to the diet, as were caribou—traditionally called reindeer in Eurasia. I prefer to call them caribou not only to emphasize that they were not domesticated, but also to highlight some similarities between Mesolithic Europe and traditional Alaskan cultures. Like traditional Alaskans, Mesolithic Europeans lived in small, seasonally nomadic groups in the interior, dependent on big game and seasonal fishing, while on the coast larger semi-sedentary populations would have been feasible, sustained by fishing and marine mammal hunting. While interior populations did likely nomadize to fixed locations based on the season, they were nowhere near as mobile as their wide-ranging Paleolithic ancestors—another similarity with Alaska.

Alaskans are big on berries, especially blueberries, and I suppose that Mesolithic Europeans would have been as well. I love the idea of Doggerlanders gathering blueberries with berry forks, setting up caribou fences preparing to meet the annual migrations, or welcoming seasonal salmon runs to the river, just as their contemporaries in Alaska were doing and would continue to do until modern times. I think a traditional Interior Alaskan hunter and a Doggerlander would have a lot in common to talk about, especially in terms of hunting, processing, and butchering caribou and moose. I must note however that the diet in Mesolithic Europe included things unavailable in Alaska, like aurochs and wild horse. We know that Mesolithic Europeans enjoyed roasted hazelnuts, having found piles of them in Mesolithic fire pits. I must think pine nuts would also have been popular, which are an iconic Ket snack to this day.

The hunting and gathering cultures of pre-contact Alaska reached surprisingly large population sizes, especially along coasts and rivers, to the point where storytellers in modern times often make asides on how many people there were back then. Groups could have numbered into the hundreds, especially at periodic gatherings. It’s likewise possible that similar larger, possibly semi-sedentary communities, nevertheless sustained by hunting and gathering, flourished in the rich environment of Western Europe, especially Doggerland.

            Given the very low elevation of Doggerland, it would have been a fairly wet place in the summertime. Given also the heavy forest cover, people got around on rivers and creeks using dugout canoes. One of these vessels, known as the Pesse Canoe (5), was found in Holland in 1955:


            Although we have no idea what kind of languages these people spoke, they could have formed a dialect continuum stretching from central Europe to Britain, with its origins in Alpine Europe. I say this because of the lack of natural barriers in the region, because of the apparent cultural and genetic continuity of the people, and because a similar phenomenon has occurred through boreal North America with the Dene or Athabaskan languages, forming a continuum stretching from southern British Columbia to interior Alaska.

            Of these people’s cultural and spiritual lives we know little. One interesting glimpse can be caught on the island of Teviec, in Brittany, where two women were buried richly adorned with beads under a canopy of antlers, having apparently died violent deaths (6). Perhaps they were killed in a raid from a rival tribe, and their grieving families sent them off in style:


At the 11,000-year-old Starr Carr site in Yorkshire (7), an apparent headdress made from a deer skull has been recovered—it may have been used as part of a hunting disguise, for ritual purposes, or quite possibly both. We also have a pendant marked to amazing detail, apparently in multiple phases and potentially by different people (8). It was then deposited at the shore of a lake, as was the deer headdress:





Here we see an early example of late prehistoric Europeans’ fascination with bogs, lakes, marshes, shores and islands—any place where land and water meet and mingle. We see the same phenomenon with the Starr Carr pendant and deer headdress. Shores, marshes and islands were probably seen as the meeting point of two worlds—the material and spiritual, the living and dead, the profane and sacred. In peat bogs especially we’ve dug up everything from Mesolithic tools to mummified Iron-Age bodies. Also consider the Viking ship funerals, or how Beowulf swam down into the lake to kill Grendel’s mother. Europeans found spiritual significance in the meeting of land and water from the early Mesolithic all through the Age of Barbarians. This significance petered out of practice only with the spread of Christianity, and indeed remained embedded in folklore down to the present day. This is the kind of thing I mean when I reference the striking cultural continuity that existed over a period of many thousands of years.

            It was during the Mesolithic also that we see the first attestations of Late Prehistoric Europeans’ fascination with astronomy. At Warren Field, Aberdeenshire, we’ve found a series of pits, possibly for bonfires or wooden posts, aligning to the solar and lunar calendars (9). Meanwhile the first pinewood posts were raised, for reasons obscure to us, at what would become the site of Stonehenge (10).

Europe would have been divided by language, genetics, and culture into western, eastern, and Mediterranean groups. Now that we’ve talked about Western Europe, let’s see what was going on in Eastern and Mediterranean Europe at this time.

Europeans at this time were split into two major genetic groupings, known as “Western Hunter-Gatherers” and “Eastern Hunter-Gatherers”, with merging in Scandinavia and a divide around the modern Polish-Belarusian border. On Europe’s far eastern frontier, in the Ural Mountains, a humanoid sculpture has been recovered and dated to about 12 KYA—the very beginning of the Mesolithic. Known as the Shigir Idol (11), it is notable for its height—between nine and seventeen feet—and the intricate carvings along its length.




            The idol was found deposited, apparently intentionally, in a peat bog—of course it was! Even on the other side of Europe, they had a religious fascination with swamps and shores. Of course, we have no idea what significance the idol had to its creators, other than that they spent a good amount of time making it, only for it later to end up thrown into a bog. Really interesting.

            Further south, on the Pontic and Caspian steppes, we’re seeing a highly mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle, likely fueled by wild horse, aurochs, and sheep, that would in thousands of years eventually develop into pastoralism and transhumance (12). In this area the Eastern Hunter-Gatherers intermarried with groups in the Caucasus to the south; by the Neolithic, they would form a distinct population. It’s possible that some of these people spoke a language distantly ancestral to Proto-Indo-European—if we were to meet and speak to these people, we might even recognize a few of their words.

            Crossing over the Alps into Southern Europe, we find some interesting rock art depicting people and their lives that is absent from Northern Europe at the same time. Although Mediterranean and Western Europeans of the time were genetically and therefore perhaps linguistically related, their cultural practices differ in important ways. Firstly, as I mentioned, rock art is much less prevalent from this period north of the Alps, especially depicting people. Secondly, south of the Alps we don’t see the same fascination with water-land boundaries, although this could simply be due to the much drier Mediterranean climate. Mesolithic anthropomorphic rock art is attested from North Africa, which suggests a degree of cultural exchange or continuity with Mediterranean Europe—again, despite the genetic and potentially linguistic continuity across the Alps. Consider the similarity at first glance between Iberian and North African rock art:

Can you tell the difference? I can’t.

This disparity between genetics—held in common with Western Europe—and culture—held in common with North Africa—is really striking, and I’m not sure how to explain it. Most likely, I’m putting too much stock in either or both of these elements, and the real situation was an organic spectrum of culture, genetics, and language—as human behavior generally is.

Let’s look at some examples of mesolithic rock art from Mediterranean Europe--the Iberian peninsula in particular is a treasure trove of the genre. Very importantly, in this period we’re seeing realistic depictions of people and their lives. Humans were much less common in paleolithic rock art, and when they are present they’re done in a fantastic style, often with animal features, depicting spirits and shamans—a great example is the Sorcerer of Trois-Freres, which is a Magdalenian work, about 15,000 years old, and therefore paleolithic:

Mesolithic art, in contrast, is a lot less trippy. It portrays people and their lives realistically. First of all, from about 8 KYA, let’s look at this really charming piece from Cova de l’Aranya, Valencia, depicting the everyday activity of gathering honey:

            We also have maybe Europe’s first depiction of clothing, giving us a look at how people dressed at this time. This painting of people dancing comes to us from about 10 KYA at Roca dels Moros in Catalonia. Note the striped skirts for women, and the guy with ornaments on his legs.

            We even see depictions of battle, something that has never shown up in the Paleolithic record. From 7.3 KYA we have a depiction of combat between archers at Morella la Vella in Valencia. To me it kind of looks like the guy in the middle is being ambushed by a group, although I suppose you could also make out two sides:

            The weirdest piece of the whole bunch I’ve saved for last. For this one we’ll need to go over to Sicily, where we find in Grotta dell’Addaura a really bizarre scene. People have been arguing for decades over what exactly is happening here:

            I have no idea myself, so I’ll just describe what’s in it. Here we have a circle of blobby-headed guys, maybe they’re wearing hoods or masks. They’re dancing in a circle around two more guys who appear to be tied up or contorted in some way, but are apparently very happy about it as they both have erections. Presiding over the scene with their arms raised are another two guys in bird masks, also with their junk out. In the background we have a red deer and some other people milling around, at least one of whom is female with a backpack and another of whom is in a bird mask. Another bird guy with a stick or spear seems to be walking toward the main scene.

This engraving is between 11 and 13 thousand years old, and may have even been made toward the very end of the Epigravettian culture, contemporaries and possible relatives of the Magdalenians. Given its age and cultural context, the engraving could arguably classify as very late paleolithic or epi-epipaleolithic.

Interestingly, if you look at the guys in the middle of the circle here, their dicks are drawn kinda similarly to the beaks on the officicants’ bird masks. Maybe that’s just a coincidence, but maybe it isn’t.

Perhaps not coincidentally, just a couple thousand years prior to this, the Magdalenians at the famous Lascaux Cave also drew a bird-headed guy with his junk out, suggesting a paleolithic cultural continuity:

At any rate, given the coincidence of naked bird dudes between Grotta dell’Addaura and Lascaux, there seems to have been a bird cult involving masks or simulated transformation into a bird, that stretched at least from Sicily to France and lasted several thousand years across the Magdalenian and Epigravettian populations.

Now, let’s talk about some possibilities as to what’s going on in the Grotta dell’Addaura scene, starting from the tame and working up to the bizarre and macabre. First, there might be some kind of acrobatic game going on, probably with ceremonial overtones. Next, and I think this is most probable, two new guys are getting initiated into the tribe. Fraternity brothers have always made their pledges do ridiculous stunts for their amusement.

            Moving into the more shocking interpretations, there could be some kind of homoerotic activity happening here, but to my innocent and naïve mind, that doesn’t explain the guys being tied up...I think. Finally, it’s been hypothesized that it’s depicting a human sacrifice, because archaeologists love that crap and of course they’re going to interpret it that way. Then again, as we’ve seen at Gough’s Cave, the Magdalenians did at least occasionally cannibalize people and drink from their skulls, so sacrificing a couple dudes to the ithyphallic bird god may not be completely out of character for their Epigravettian cousins. As for the red deer in the background, my thought is that it’s there for consumption at the post-initiation kegger, although I suppose feasting could happen after any of these possibilities. It could also be drawn in reference to what the ceremony was trying to accomplish.

            One cool thing about the Grotta dell’Addaura engraving is that it really represents and encapsulates the transition from the Paleolithic to the Mesolithic. This piece comes to us from the very latest stages of the paleolithic Epigravettian culture, and may depict a paleolithic bird cult tradition. At the same time, the engraving is definitely done in a human-centered, realistic style clearly characteristic of later Mesolithic rock art. And its dating, between 11 and 13 KYA, is right at the moment of transition. I think we can really see here the interplay of new versus old ideas and ways of thinking that must have made this an extremely interesting and perhaps dangerous time to live. The Paleolithic-Mesolithic transition must have been even more jarring with the extinction of megafauna and the climatic chaos of the Younger Dryas.

            So as we’ve seen, Mesolithic Europe had two main cultural areas, overlapping with geography: the Mediterranean, where people depicted their lives through visual art in a way never done before, and the moister forested area north of the Alps, where people deposited ritual offerings into swamps and lakes, seeing them as representing the physical-spiritual boundary. Let’s call the two groups “Painters” and “Swampers”. The cultural differentiation apparently did not overlap with genetics. Everybody from modern Poland westward belonged to what geneticists call the “Western Hunter-Gatherers”—descendants of the Magdalenian and Epigravettian populations, although as we’ve seen in the case of Cheddar Man we also had populations moving in from the Middle East. Western Hunter-Gatherers were therefore split between Painters in the south, and Swampers in the north. In the Eastern part of Europe we see Eastern Hunter-Gatherers, who could well have been Swampers, if the Shigir idol is any indication:

            This brings me to the last part of today’s episode, which speculates about language. I’m going to frame this as a response to a question from a fan in my last video, who says:

            I wonder whether you will critically analyze some attempts at projecting certain languages and language groups on archeological cultures. Many archeologists I've seen try to shy away from that completely (or embrace it too wholeheartedly)” –Magnum Wurze

            It’s always tempting to conflate language, culture, and genetics, and it’s often done very badly by people with ulterior motives—whether those are nationalistic or even racist, or simply because they support such and such a hypothesis and desperately want it to be correct. As is often the case, the dumbest people are the loudest, while the real experts are often quieter than they need to be out of humility and understanding how little they really know.

            The truth is that whenever you conflate culture, language, and genetics, you’re on extremely shaky ground. If someone digs up my body in thousands of years and looks at my DNA, they might say “aha, this guy came from Central Europe and spoke German or West Slavic”, which of course is completely wrong. If I died today and was buried in a Warsaw cemetery, they would dig me up and think that I was a hometown boy—an assumption reasonable, but incorrect. I’m an Anglophone from Colorado. People have always moved around, people have always been diverse, and people have always had cool family and individual histories that lead to surprising personal identities. I always think of how ethnic Russians are a recognized minority in Mainland China. That means somewhere out there there’s a normal Chinese dude who’s a Chinese citizen, born in China, whose first language is Chinese, but happens to be white, blond, and named something like Sergei Danilovich, who gets people calling “hello, laowai” at him everywhere he goes. How frustrating that must be.

            On a very unfortunate note, linguists also have a hangover from some idiot back in the thirties who decided “Aryan” referred not to languages, but to people; and not to Indo-Iranian speakers, but to Germans. We all know how that turned out, even if it made as much sense as deciding that Icelanders were in fact Armenians. So, you can understand why serious linguists are hesitant to connect language to genetic—or worse, ethnocultural—populations.

            However, it’s perfectly fine to look at evidence from different fields, and by viewing the situation from each of these lenses, we can blend together a clearer picture of what really might have happened. Linguistics, archaeology, folklore, and genetics can aid and inform each other, and we’re missing out if we only depend on one of these. Real experts are quite happy to do this—my friend and mentor Ed Vajda comes to mind, blending these fields of study to refine the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis. So, let’s look at the non-linguistic facts, and see what linguistic conjectures we can draw. We can also compare Mesolithic Europe to other parts of the world, for example Alaska, New Guinea and Australia, and suppose a similar linguistic situation to those areas.

            Mesolithic Europeans were divided into two genetic groups, the Westerners and Easterners. They were divided into two cultural zones, the Mediterranean Painters and the Northern Swampers. The steppe hunters way out at the edge of Europe could arguably form a third genetic and/or cultural group, if we consider them European, but for now let’s set them aside.

            The first possibility is that all of Europe was united into a single huge language family.

This would mean the genetically disparate Westerners and Easterners, and the culturally disparate Swampers and Painters, all spoke related languages. That the Shigir Idol people spoke a language related to the honey gatherers of Valencia. It would also mean that the previous late paleolithic cultures, such as the Magdalenian and (Epi)Gravettian, spoke languages derived from the same source, which in this scenario would probably be a language spoken by the early Aurignacian culture of 30-40KYA. On this scale, regional differences would be so pronounced that they wouldn’t seem like the same language family anyway, but rather several large clades that were for all intents and purposes their own language families with typological similarities. Bob Dixon, the eminent Australian linguist, proposes a similar scenario for Australia. While most of the continent is dominated by one language family, a more diverse tapestry of small families exists along the resource-rich North Australian coast. Dixon groups all of these together into a single family, having arrived on the continent with the first settlers of 60KYA. Since so much time has passed since then, according to Dixon, they superficially appear to be different families. This is not the mainstream opinion, but I don’t know enough about Australian linguistics to challenge him. If in fact his hypothesis is correct, it seems reasonable to think the same thing could have happened in Europe.

            The second scenario is that there were several unrelated language families, perhaps spoken by Western Swampers, Easterners, and Painters, or by any combination of them.

I doubt that Easterners and Painters spoke related languages, since they were both genetically and culturally distinct populations. However, all Westerners, both Swampers and Painters, may have spoken related languages, as opposed to Easterners speaking languages of a different family.  This could match the paleolithic divide between Magdalenians and (Epi)Gravettians.

Or all Swampers, both Western and Eastern, could have spoken related languages, while southern Painters spoke a language related to whatever was in North Africa, given their cultural similarities. Language families could have also been divided between the coasts and interiors. In many parts of the world, for instance Alaska, Australia, and the Pacific Coast of North America, there is more diversity along the resource-rich coasts, which can sustain higher populations. Doggerland, therefore, may have been a hotbed of linguistic diversity.

This point about the coastal and interior peoples brings me to my third scenario: that there was one large language family, probably across the interior of Europe, and many small language families along the coasts and in refugia such as Scandinavia and the Alps.

            My fourth and final scenario is the opposite of, but in some ways similar to, the first: that all of Europe was a patchwork of small, independent language families, that would perhaps resemble New Guinea before the expansion of Trans-New Guinea, Australia before the expansion of Pama-Nyungan, or the Americas before the expansion of large families like Algonguian, Dene, and Arawakan.

            Very much worth mentioning here is that the “language family tree” model may be entirely inappropriate for talking about languages in deep prehistory. A point made by Dixon in his excellent book “The Rise and Fall of Languages” is that the tree-model representation of language families really only works for quickly-expanding families like Indo-European (13). These are waves that suddenly rise and fall on the otherwise calm sea of linguistic diversity, wherein groups of languages will maintain a degree of equilibrium and internal mingling for long periods of time. He calls this the “Punctuated Equilibrium Model” of language change.

Consider how linguists have spent the last century beating their heads against walls trying to come up with a consistent tree model for the Northern Dene languages, or for what has frustratingly come to be known as Tibeto-Burman. It may simply be that the tree model is inappropriate for these long periods of linguistic stasis, and it would be much more profitable to track these language areas by typological rather than genealogical relationships. This over-application of the tree model is what happens when you develop the science of classical linguistics from observations of Indo-European, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic, then go out into the world and realize these families may in fact be exceptions to typical language behavior, rather than the rule.

Regardless, it is deeply unwise to put any stock in the ramblings of any madman who claims to know anything about the languages of prehistoric Europe. Don’t listen to me, I have no idea what I’m talking about.

            The only area that I feel any confidence talking about is the very southeastern corner of Europe, at the Pontic-Caspian steppe and into the forests of the Volga region, where a language ancestral or anciently parallel to Indo-European may have been spoken. Further north, it’s not impossible that the guys who carved the Shigir Idol may have spoken something ancestral or parallel to Uralic. Going back to Dixon’s point about typology, here we see that regardless of genealogical relationships, the area from Eastern Europe into the Ural region and the Western Steppes probably had a typological zone that featured suffixing singular-dual-plural verb conjugations and noun declension, which likely included case systems. These features, which are documented in extant and reconstructed European languages, can’t have popped out of nowhere. That’s about all I’ll say for now, and even then, I want you to take the preceding paragraph as, once again, the ramblings of a madman.

            I’m going to finish here before I embarrass myself further. Next time we’re going to discuss the arrival of the very first food producers in Europe between eight and ten thousand years ago, and their tense coexistence with the local hunter-gatherers. To put it another way: the first barbarians face off with the last of the cavemen. Check it out!

SOURCES

1.  1. https://earthlymission.com/europe-at-the-end-of-the-ice-age/

2. 2. https://images.nationalgeographic.org/image/upload/v1638889912/EducationHub/photos/doggerland.jpg

3.  3. https://www.deviantart.com/philipedwin/art/Cheddar-Man-867446577

4.  4. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/oct/uks-oldest-human-dna-obtained-revealing-two-distinct-palaeolithic-populations

5.  5. http://bootvanpesse.com/

6.  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A9viec

7.  7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Carr

8.  8. https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue40/8/index.html

9.  9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Field

1010.  https://www.silentearth.org/10000-year-old-stonehenge-monument/

1111.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigir_Idol

1212.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Steppe_Herders

1313.  RMW Dixon—The Rise and Fall of Languages. 1997.

Monday, May 22, 2023

The Age of Barbarians, Part 1: Mounds, Rocks, and Heads



            Hi everybody, welcome to Office Hours with the Brofessor, the show that’s Proudly Irrelevant! Today we’re going to start a new series, which given my rate of putting out videos will probably be the focus of the next several eternities. Originally I had planned to remake my Evenki video, but unfortunately I don’t have my notes on that language here in Warsaw. Instead, we’re going to take a look at late European prehistory, covering the period between eight thousand and one thousand years ago. This is a time that I like to call: the Age of Barbarians!

            Earlier this month I visited the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern region of Germany, and was very privileged to explore the Tollensetal Battlefield, where a bunch of bronze-age badass bros got together 3300 years ago and fought to the death in an all-out boss-championship battle royale. What they were fighting over we may never know, other than that some of them felt like crossing a bridge, while others strenuously objected to their doing so:

The candid dialogue that followed is still observable today in the form of disarticulated bones and weapons dredged up from the river, and the several surviving tombs dotting the landscape. Archaeologists think that at least three thousand men took part in the battle, a huge number by prehistoric standards.

3300 years later, here I am crossing a much nicer modern bridge in the same area without so much as a peep from the guys weed-whacking nearby. Casually doing what thousands of prehistoric badasses fought and died to do:

And here I am laying down in some poor schlub’s final resting place. To this day there are several stone tomb chambers in the woods nearby. It’s very possible that the original inhabitant of this tomb died in the battle here, and was honored with a relatively fancy tomb for his mighty deeds.

            The legacy of Late Prehistory is woven intimately into the landscapes, languages, and folklores of Europe to this day. From Shetland to Malta, from the Urals to Portugal, the silent specters of distant days have always haunted the European consciousness. Since the Neolithic, Europeans have gazed with wonder upon the burial mounds and standing stones of other years, and farmers have turned up with their plows the weapons and bones of mighty heroes fallen and forgotten, left long behind by the rolling tide of ages. For the last eight thousand years, Europeans have inhabited a landscape filled with subtle reminders of mysterious and long-gone peoples utterly alien to themselves.


            So this is a video series covering a period of about 7000 years, from 6000 years before the Christian Era to 1000 years into it. Given that Christianity is irrelevant for most of this series, I will attempt to follow the “years ago” format in my dating, as opposed to the “(Before the) Christian Era” dating commonly used when discussing written history.

            As I say, this series is going to focus on the cultures of the European Neolithic through Iron Age. I’m calling this period “The Age of Barbarians”, in keeping with my convention of using pop-culture nomenclature to talk about real prehistory. I’ve previously used the word “cavemen” to talk about Paleolithic populations, because cavemen are awesome and framing the discussion in those terms makes it a lot more fun. Likewise, I’ll use the term “barbarians” to refer to Europeans of Late Prehistory. As with “cavemen”, I am stripping the word of any negative connotation whatsoever—while the term in popular parlance connotes unsophistication and brutishness, I use “barbarian” as a complimentary term of endearment and admiration. For the purpose of this series, let’s have the word “barbarian” connote resiliency, heroic deeds, and a rich, orally transmitted intellectual and folkloric tradition. We’ll have it denote “small-scale food producers of Late European Prehistory”.

            You’ll also hear me refer to Europeans of this time as “Those Dudes”, something I’ve done mentally for years now, in acknowledgement of the fact that we really don’t know what they called themselves or what languages they spoke, which were diverse in spite of many shared cultural elements.

The Neolithic through the Iron Age is of course a very long time, and although the peoples inhabiting Europe at this time formed many distinct populations in terms of culture, language, and genetics, I cannot help but be struck by the level of cultural continuity that existed throughout the period.

            The setting sunlight glows soft as you sling your plow over your shoulders, leading the cows back to their enclosure. Mist gathers along the distant trees, and an evening chill is in the air. Returning home for the day, you pass the barrow, ringed by mossy standing stones, that lifts its green head a short distance from your village.

What mighty king rests beneath this monument, or what primordial magic is sealed within, has been long lost to the ages. Your people may tell stories about an ancient battle fought here, its heroes sleeping with their treasures in the narrow halls of death--or it may be that some sorcerer, fairy or troll raised his dwelling here from the living earth. Whatever the case, it is clear to your people that the fertile lands you call home have been inhabited for a long, long time, whether by spirits or men. Tales of the ancients live on among your people in your oral history, for writing is an art yet unknown.

            Returning to the village, you cross the protective ditch and palisade to a ring of dwellings.

Depending on the era, you may live with your extended family in one of Europe’s longest-enduring cultural institutions: the communal longhouse, which remained a fixture of life from the earliest Neolithic through to the Medieval period, and is the architectural ancestor of the mythical Heorot and Valhalla.

HEOROT, MARK 1, 7000 YEARS AGO

HEOROT, MARK V, 1500 YEARS AGO

Shout out to Burden of Ymir, Ontario’s most criminally underexposed one-man viking metal band.

A typical village contains two to five longhouses or six to ten single-family huts. Entering the village you hear the otherworldly whistle of a flute, let’s imagine it’s being played by a guy hopping around on one foot who looks exactly like Ian Anderson:

After dropping your grain off at the miller, you walk into your family home, and the aroma of cooking meat fills your nostrils. You help yourself to a ceramic beaker of barley beer, or perhaps a horn of mead, and join your friends and family around the fire. They, like you, are dressed in pants, shirts, and cloaks of leather or rough-spun wool. Above you, suspended on a string from the rafter, hangs a thunderstone, or an ancient stone axe-head turned up by your plow in the fields—these are occasionally found by your people, and are thought to have been cast down by the thunder god in his rages. To hang it up in your home is a protection from lightning, fire, and the mischief of the elves. Some believe that it was in fact the work of the elves, while others see them as the ancient weapons of mortal warriors.

            The scene that I have just described is a mundane one, depicting typical people living typical lives; but it is remarkable in that it could just as easily describe life in the sixth millennium before Christ as in the first millennium after. Consider also the pictures provided, which could reasonably depict life at any point over a period of thousands of years. Certainly, the details change over this period, most notably in the introduction of metal tools, the religion practiced by the people, and the languages spoken. But if we consider these elements to be window dressing to the basic surroundings, cycles, and institutions of daily life, it is truly astonishing how little things change over a 6000+ year period. From the sixth millennium BC, from Poland to Britain, you’re basically living in a Jethro Tull song. Check over the same region in the first millennium after Christ, and you’re still living in a Jethro Tull song:

SITTING ON A PARK BENCH….

No, no! Not “Aqualung” Tull, you understand, but “Songs from the Wood” Tull:

That’s better.

And I’m not just making this series for an excuse to plug his new album, although that certainly helps.

Suppose we took a guy from the Central European Linear Pottery Culture of 7000 years ago, and a Scottish Pict of fifteen hundred years ago, and had them trade places like Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy:

Each of them would experience pretty severe culture shock and have to learn languages completely unrelated to their own. The presence or absence of technology like the wheel, the sail, and domesticated horses would be a pretty big deal too. The Linear Pottery guy would have to get used to a hierarchical pantheon of Indo-European gods and goddesses, while the Pict would have to get used to a much more diffuse, animistic, and shamanistic religious tradition. However, each would find a comfortable familiarity in a surprising number of institutions that have remained more or less unchanged from one to the other. The communal hall or longhouse, the burial mounds and megaliths, the small-scale farming and herding economy, and the endemic tribal warfare including headhunting practices are all elements held in common. Certain beliefs may have even crossed that gulf of time, including but not limited to a parallel world of elves and fairies, a psychedelic drug cult, and a belief that swamps and islands as the meeting points of land and water constituted special places where the natural and supernatural met. Once each of our time travelers has settled in, learned the language, and decapitated a few rival tribesmen, I think they would be pleasantly surprised by how at home they felt:

            Given the legacy of late prehistory, which hangs heavy on the European consciousness, I don’t think it is any surprise that High Fantasy is a primarily a genre of Western literature. For thousands of years, Europe effectively was a fantasy world, complete with elves, trolls, and wizards in pointy hats (!) that were very real to its inhabitants, though your mileage may vary today. In the same way that fantasy worlds will go millennia without advancing past the Middle Ages, Europeans spent thousands of years headhunting and raising monoliths in what must have seemed like a static or at least highly cyclical universe. To be sure there were differences between groups in culture, worldview, and language, but even this must have highlighted the mystery of the past and reminded Europeans that they, too, would someday be known only by their silent monuments.

            Living in a landscape of monuments raised by unknown hands, and walking on a ground that occasionally turns up mysterious axe-heads leads the imagination to run wild, especially when one meditates on the understanding, however nebulous, that these people were not your own. It is thus entirely unsurprising that Europeans would imagine a past age of magic and heroism, especially given the absence of written records. As some of my viewers know I am a massive Lord of the Rings fan, and it is easy to imagine how Tolkien could look at the weapons and monuments of prehistoric Britain and allow his imagination to conjure up kingdoms, heroes, and races now lost to time—just as Europeans have done since those very days. In a sense, Middle-Earth was a real chapter in the story of Europe. Reading his work, especially the chapter about the Barrow-Downs, really ignited my interest in this area of prehistory.

In the age of modern archaeology, anthropology, linguistics and folkloristics, we are gaining a greater understanding of that long-lost world, and its secrets are becoming known to us once more.

            Along with Lord of the Rings, a slightly guiltier pleasure of mine is Conan the Barbarian; I believe Howard would be thrilled to hear that the world of his imagination was indeed not that far off from reality. Conan would have felt right at home in most of the real-world Hyborian Age! This is a time when tribes and kingdoms rise and fall, a time of bloody battles and wise wizards, and a time when nubile priestesses seek out hunky partners for their fertility rituals. Right up Conan’s alley.

            Our next video will talk about the conditions and players in the Europe of 8000 years ago, and the generations of struggle between the hunters and farmers, the shamans and the priests--the last of the cavemen and the first of the barbarians! Or, if you like, the “Caveman to Barbarian Pipeline”!