The Age of Barbarians, Episode 3: The Caveman-to-Barbarian Pipeline

            Hello friends, welcome to Office Hours with the Brofessor: The Show that’s Proudly Irrelevant! Today is the third episode of my series on THE AGE OF BARBARIANS, or late European prehistory. We’ll look at the very first tentative steps into Europe by Anatolian farmers, first into the Balkans and then across the Mediterranean into Iberia.

Before we start, some stupid annoying Youtube stuff. I see a lot of other Youtubers doing this, so I thought I’d try it too. Here goes: when people like my videos and subscribe to my channel, it makes me happy, and inspires me to put out more than two videos a year. Also, I’m getting close to 1000 subscribers—quadruple digits!—which would be an amazing goal to reach. More likes, comments, and subscribers will also help me reach more people with these interesting stories. So, if you like my video, “like” it. If you want to see more of my mediocre content about interesting topics, subscribe! Also, I have a Facebook page! Join it! Link in description! I’ve just posted my first discussion topic, let’s talk about it!

In Youtube-related news that is neither stupid nor annoying, this video is dedicated to my bro Vizzini, whose comment “I love you Brofessor!” has kicked my butt into getting this video out. Interestingly, despite being named after the Sicilian kidnapper from the Princess Bride, his avatar is a picture of Steve Buscemi. Thanks Vizzini, your level of support is truly “inconceivable”! Maybe you can get Inigo and Fezzik into my stuff too. Ok, I’m done. No more Princess Bride references now, I mean it. Anybody want a peanut?

Today we are going back between ten and eight thousand years ago, to the very beginnings of Neolithic Europe, to look at the first steps of Europeans from the hunter-gatherer life into the settled agricultural life that characterized the Neolithic. This process ultimately spread irresistibly throughout the continent, leading to my characterization of the phenomenon as the “Caveman-to-Barbarian Pipeline”. Remember, by “Caveman” I mean “hunter-gatherer” and by “Barbarian” I mean “small-scale food producer”. By “Pipeline”, I mean that once the process began around 9000 years ago, Europe was placed on an inevitable trajectory into the settled agricultural way of life, and ultimately the rise of large-scale civilization. 9000 years ago, Europe’s first farmers entered a continent populated entirely by small-scale hunter-gatherers. They spread steadily and irrepressibly through the continent, and by 4000 years ago, all Europeans were food producers. The only possible exception here may be a few remnant hunting tribes remaining in the forests between Finland and the Urals, but even these would soon adopt small-scale farming or reindeer herding.

Let’s start by looking at a few easily confused words, all containing the word “lithic”, or “stone” in Greek.

Mesolithic—the middle stone age, which lasted from the recession of the glaciers to the adoption of agriculture.

Neolithic—the new stone age, which lasted from the adoption of agriculture to the first use of metal.

Megalithic—not a period of time, but an adjective used to describe monumental architecture using large stones, popular between the neolithic and iron age.

You may roll your eyes and think this is unnecessary to go over, but not everyone knows these words. Namely my parents, who constitute roughly half my viewership.

As for the very first farmers in Europe, they originated in Anatolia and moved across the continent in two waves—one overland through the Balkans into Central Europe, and another by sea across the Mediterranean. In this video as in the entire series, I’ll probably be spending more time on the northern group, rather than the Mediterranean, since I’m more attracted to the environmental and cultural aesthetic of Northern rather than Southern Europe. Basically, I like trees and snow more than sun and sand—apologies to my Mediterranean friends. However, we can’t ignore the Mediterranean completely, since the whole Neolithic package came from there, as would megalith-building in later years. With that said, let’s begin.

We pick up the story 11,000 years ago, with the Mesolithic in full swing—for more on that, see Episode 2 of this series! But our story begins not in Europe itself, but in what is now Southwest Turkey, close to the border with Syria. And as soon as I say that, I’ll bet that lots of you already know what I’m going to talk about—the spectacular site of Gobekli Tepe! At this location, right at the transitional moment between the hunter-gatherer and agricultural modes of life, people came together to build an amazing monument. It was a stone temple complex that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for settled agriculturalists with big populations, but it boggles the mind when you consider that it was made by little bands of hunter-gatherers just starting to flirt with sedentary life. Here are some highlights from the site—and remember, this stuff goes back ten or eleven thousand years:

 

There’s nothing like it at this time depth that’s been found anywhere else in the world. It’s a very mysterious site, too. Goodness knows why it was built or what kind of rituals were performed there, but I think I read somewhere there’s evidence for food storage, which became ritualistic and managed by the priests. I like to imagine it as a center for religious feasting and partying. This is right at the time beer would have been invented, after all. It’s also interesting because it suggests the very early emergence of an elite priest class able to mobilize a lot of people for a whole lot of hard work on something not immediately relevant to survival, albeit in the case of food storage tangential to it.

On a fairly badass note, I’ll add that these guys had a skull cult that involved grooving, carving and plastering facial features onto the skulls of apparently important people (1). Cool. Compare with a similar plastered-skull cult that continued into the Neolithic Levant.

The reason I begin our story at Gobekli Tepe is because this is the first stirring of what would become the megalithic tradition of late-prehistoric Europe. As I mentioned, the builders of Gobekli Tepe were still hunter-gatherers, but they were gathering wild grains and likely standing right at the threshold of agricultural village life. Some two millennia later, the Gobekli people’s descendants would be more settled into sedentary agriculture and would have domesticated the sheep and goat. Likely pressured by the resultant boom in population, they crossed the Aegean into Europe. Nine thousand years ago, Europe’s very first farmers arrived in what is now Greece from Anatolia:

As you can see, agriculturalists entered Europe following two routes of migration: one through the Balkans into Central Europe, and another across the Mediterranean, eventually reaching the Iberian peninsula and then turning northward along the Atlantic coast. Let’s talk about the Balkans first.

As far as we can tell, the dawn of the Neolithic in Europe occurred just over nine thousand years ago, about one thousand years after Gobekli Tepe was abandoned. The oldest known agriculturalists in Europe are called the Sesklo culture—pardon as always my mispronunciation—named for the type site on the coast of Thessaly. These farmers of wheat and barley and herders of sheep and goats—no cattle for another millennium—expanded into the region historically known as Macedonia, inching closer the Danube in what is now Serbia:

As the Anatolian newcomers interacted and mixed with the indigenous nomadic hunter-gatherers, certain sites show a gradual sedentarization of the mesolithic Balkans, namely at the 9000-year-old Lepenski Vir site in modern Serbia. While the Lepenski Vir people remained hunter-gatherer-fishers for the next thousand years, they settled into at least semi-permanent population centers, influenced by the newcomers to the south.

The Lepenski Vir site is interesting because it shows a characteristically European culture adopting certain elements of the Anatolian agricultural lifestyle and cultural package. Remember what I said in my last video about Mesolithic Europe being divided into two groups: “Painters” in the western Mediterranean, and “Swampers” in the interior of Europe. Well, these guys were definitely Swampers. They were apparently interested in the idea of the meeting of land and water, and probably drew some sort of comparison between the material-spirit and land-water dichotomies. How do we know this? Because they made sculptures of fish people, probably representing either river spirits, or Spongebob background characters:

            According to Wikipedia, these fish-person sculptures were made from stones found on the riverbank, and kept in the shrine areas of houses, which sounds like textbook Swamper behavior to me. Another classic aspect of the Swamper cultural package is a fascination with astronomy. Across the Danube from Lepenski Vir there’s a cliff that briefly blocks the sun in the morning of the summer solstice, producing a “double sunrise” effect (2):

The Lepenski Vir people might have deliberately located their village at the spot where this phenomenon occurred, and indeed may have been so fascinated that they designed their houses, which have an unusual trapezoid shape, to look like the rock outcropping (3):

 

It may have also made sense to shape their houses like hills, since these guys were just transitioning out of living in caves. In fact, and this is really cool, they had their main fireplaces at the entrances of their houses, just like you do when living in a cave! They weren’t dumb, they could have built smokeholes in their roofs, but it looks like they just preferred a cave-like design to their houses. It seems that cavemandom was still alive in the memory of these people (4).

Since the Lepenski Vir village developed just under nine thousand years ago, right after the arrival of Anatolian farmers in Europe, it makes sense that the new arrivals gave them the idea to sedentarize. We know they interacted in some way with the coast-dwelling agriculturalists, since they traded with them for seashells. Interestingly, however, there was no genetic admixture from the newcomers until almost a thousand years later, about 8200 years ago. As the paper I reference puts it, “mating was not part of regular interactions between Iron Gates [i.e. Lepenski Vir] and Aegean populations before the advent of agriculture in the Central Balkans, ~ 6200 BC” (5). Why did it take so long for the populations to begin mixing, despite the trade and cultural exchange?

Let’s head back to Greece to look for the answer. The Sesklo culture continued to flourish through the seventh millennium BCE, but again did not penetrate as far north as Lepenski Vir territory. While the groups traded and possibly fought, the populations themselves did not mix until almost eight thousand years ago. Reasons for this could have been cultural, medical, and geographical.

Considering culture, we’re looking at two very different groups of people. The Sesklo people came from a tradition of settled agriculture that was already over a thousand years old. The Lepenski Vir people were hunter-gatherers still experiencing cave nostalgia. They also would have spoken completely unrelated languages. The difference between their lifestyles would have also led to mutually baffling values, behavior, and religion. They may have looked down on each other. Consider how in the historical record, agriculturalists have always seen non-agros as uncivilized, and non-agros have seen agriculturalists as unfree. People at this time thought and behaved the same as we do today, so there’s no reason we can’t apply the historical record to reconstruct how they may have perceived one another.

As for medical reasons, the populations may have gotten each other sick through the exchange of diseases. The Sesklo people had domesticated livestock, so they could have been intermediaries for germs between animals and non-immune hunter-gatherers, as infamously happened to New World populations during the Age of Discovery. People could have gotten sick if they spent too much time around each other.

Finally, in terms of geography, the Sesklo Culture was geographically used to a hot, dry Mediterranean climate. This doesn’t really change between Anatolia and peninsular Greece. When you get up over the Macedonian mountains, which themselves constitute no small obstacle, and into the Danube watershed, you find yourself in a cooler, wetter, woodland climate that’s very different from the Mediterranean coast. The Sesklo people would have had to develop an entirely different cultural toolkit to thrive there, and that takes time. Finally, the Sesklo people probably continued to have strong cultural, linguistic, and maybe even familial links across the Aegean with their cousins remaining in Anatolia. The culture would have faced east to Anatolia, rather than North to the Balkans. Consider how the US has always been European-facing culturally, rather than Indigenous American-facing. We took our cues from Western Europe, rather than from Native Americans, and have developed as essentially a branch of Western civilization.

Which, if I may tangentialize for a moment, is a real shame. I would love to see a US that kept Christianity and Western technology but assimilated into Native American culture. I’ve always said that we should abolish the states, restructure along traditional territories of Native nations, and make Native languages official while keeping English as a lingua franca.

            Moving on from my weird fantasies, I think at least a few of the above reasons may explain why the Sesklo people took so long to penetrate north. When they finally did, they had already been in Europe for almost a thousand years, and moved into the Lepenski Vir area around 8200 years ago. What pressured them to finally move northward into the Danube watershed, I’m not sure. As before, the easiest explanation would be that agriculture and livestock domestication led to ever-higher populations back in Anatolia, which led to more people crossing the Aegean, which led to people getting population-pressured up into the unfamiliar but less densely populated environments of the Balkans. While there was some cultural exchange during this time—for example, the newcomers seem to have become more reliant on fishing—they retained a certain separation from the indigenous hunter-gatherers, as evidenced by separate burial practices, food sources, and maybe even restrictive marriage practices leading to inbreeding.

It’s possible the first wave of immigrants came as “marriage partners, slaves or war captives”, but we also know that there were equal numbers of men and women among the immigrants, male hunter-gatherers typically didn’t marry female farmers, and the immigrants might have brought children with them (5). This suggests agriculturalist families, rather than individuals, coming over as pioneers and living as agriculturalists among the hunter-gatherers. Within 300 years—by 7900 years ago—Anatolian farmer DNA had become predominant over indigenous hunter-gatherer DNA at the Lepenski Vir site. The newcomers had colonized the Danube and were poised to expand into Central Europe. The mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Lepenski Vir had either assimilated or been pushed out of their homelands, into the northern forests and eastern steppes.

            As Anatolian farmer populations in the Balkans grew, these people adapted to the colder, wetter environment of the European interior, and within several centuries would expand across Central Europe. This would come to be known as the Linear Band Ceramic Culture—Europe’s first truly native food-producing culture. And boy, are these guys fascinating. We’ll pick up their story in our next video, but just as a teaser, this was a culture natively European not only in its soil, but in its spirit. While agriculturalists, these people adopted aspects of the Mesolithic Swamper cultural worldview, just as the newcomers at Lepenski Vir remained agriculturalists, but raised their children in the local fishing tradition. The Linear Band Ceramic Culture is one of my favorites, though as Youtuber Stefan Milo pointed out, I’d be careful about going there. I call this the “New Guinea” period of European prehistory. Endemic warfare and cannibal feasts of course, but also longhouses and big-man cultures.

            But I must restrain myself, lest I get ahead of the story, and so for now we’ll leave the Balkans settled with early farmers, poised to enter Central Europe, right around eight thousand years ago. Over the last several centuries, while the Sesklo people gradually farmed their way into the Balkans, another wave of Anatolian migration has spread westward across the Mediterranean. From the Aegean, these pioneers would hop between islands and peninsulas, across the Adriatic to the Italian peninsula, and from Sardinia to the Iberian Peninsula. These people are known today as the Cardium Pottery culture, named for the heart-shaped shell impressions with which they decorated their ceramics. Between 8500 and 7000 years ago they introduced agriculture across Mediterranean Europe, and likely the north coast of Africa too. In the Western Mediterranean they would have encountered the local mesolithic hunter-gatherers who belonged to the “Painter” cultural continuum that I discussed in Episode 2. I can’t find as much information about the Cardium Pottery people’s way of life, or their interactions with indigenous populations, as I have with Lepenski Vir. However, we may think of them as being the first to follow the template that would later be practiced by the Phoenicians and Greeks, working their way along the islands and coasts of the Mediterranean and setting up colonies, probably having a common language, religion and way of life.

            The Cardium Pottery people reached the Iberian Peninsula between eight and 7.5 thousand years ago. Around the same time, we start finding pottery colored with red ochre, suggesting a different cultural tradition around the same time—possibly imported from North Africa. This ochre pottery tradition is differentiated from the Cardium Pottery Culture as the La Almagra Culture:

Map from Sjur Papasian: aratta.wordpress.com.

Cardium Pottery

La Almagra Pottery

This is a big mystery right now, since we know so little compared to what was going on in the Balkans. Was the La Almagra tradition simply a new development of the Cardium Pottery Culture? It could have simply been a new ceramic technique that became fashionable in that geographical area. Nothing unusual about that. Still, it differs from the rest of the Mediterranean enough for us to think that there was something different going on here. Remember that the indigenous hunter-gatherers of Iberia would have belonged to the “Painter” group from my last video—it’s natural that once these guys got a hold of pottery, they’d start adding ochre to color it! La Almagra pottery could simply be the result of local hunter-gatherers and Cardium Pottery people mixing and integrating. It could also be related to the fact that in Iberia there was more of a focus on animal herding than elsewhere (6), which would have presumably been more appealing to the nomadic hunter-gatherers of the area. But again, we can’t rule out influence from North Africa, since there’s a Mesolithic precedent for it—see the rock art I showed you last time—and we don’t know much about North Africa at this time. We’re just not sure.

            It’s a shame too that we’re not so sure about what was happening in Iberia, because it’s out of this culture that we see the start of something that would come to dominate later European prehistory—megalithic monuments. In the first half of the sixth millennium before Christ, in Southern Portugal, there was raised a circle of standing stones, the very earliest one we know about in Europe. Known as the Almendres Cromlech, this is the first rumbling of a tradition that would explode across Europe over the coming millennia, dotting the landscape with stone circles, standing stones, and burial mounds, a tradition indeed that would last into historical times among the Celtic and Germanic peoples. The building tradition echoed in the standing stones of Ossian and the barrow of Beowulf can be traced over six thousand years before their time to southern Iberia. And here it is:

Photo by Miguel Costa

(7)

            In its earliest form it wasn’t that huge—just thirty or forty feet in diameter, and in subsequent millennia a larger circle was added to it, as were carvings onto the surface of the stones. The original circle, which is our concern for now, can be dated to between 7500 and 8000 years ago right about the time the Cardium Pottery people brought agriculture and animal husbandry to Iberia. Their interactions with the locals, and perhaps other migrants from North Africa, gave rise to the culture that would raise this distant ancestor to Stonehenge. Like later stone circles, the Almendres Cromlech likely served religious or ritualistic purposes related to astronomy; marks on the stones may represent equinoxes, and the stones are aligned to the sun and moon on those days (8). Remember also, the Swampers really liked astronomy, so Swamper influence from the north might have influenced the building of the Almendres Cromlech.

You might have noticed, however, the conspicuous lack of megalithic constructions between the stones of Almendres and my earlier discussion of Gobekli Tepe. Europe’s first farmers came from Anatolia. They might have been descendants of Gobekli Tepe’s builders. Why are there none of these constructions elsewhere in the early Cardium Pottery Culture, or among their cousins in the Balkans? With just over two thousand years (and miles) between the sites, seems like there was a break in continuity between the megaliths of Gobekli Tepe and those of Almendres. We do know that Gobekli Tepe was abandoned around 10 thousand years ago, one thousand years before the Sesklo culture emerged in Greece and two thousand years before the Cardium Pottery Culture expanded across the Mediterranean. The Gobekli Tepe culture collapsed, and people weren’t into the megalith thing anymore. Maybe it had to do with the depredations of a powerful and oppressive priest class, which annoyed people enough that subsequent cultures left the whole system behind after their overthrow. By the time Anatolian farmers entered Europe, all that was left was the distant memory of somebody, long ago, building great monuments. I imagine something like our story of the Tower of Babel.

It’s important to note that Gobekli Tepe was probably built at the instigation, coerced or otherwise, of an emergent priest class. I imagine something similar happening at Almendres. Let’s take the Wu-Tang elevator back 8000 years and meet the men raising this monument:

Image source unknown.

Talking to them—in goodness knows what language—we’d probably hear a lot of stories and songs. My favorite expert on the topic of late European prehistory is Dr. Ronald Hutton at the University of Hull. One of my favorite observations of his is that while the builders of Stonehenge in England probably couldn’t explain why they were toiling away, such a question wouldn’t make sense to them. Rather, we should instead ask them to sing us a song about it, which they would be happy to do.

I imagine the Almendres builders would be semi-settled farmers working on the monument in the off-season. They were the descendants of long-ago seafarers who lived on the coast and gradually worked their way inland. Maybe they still tell stories about nautical migration, and they would likely have had connections cultural, familial and linguistic to the islands and peninsulas of the Mediterranean. Generations passed, they became more settled into the agricultural cycle, and more comfortable in permanent villages. Soon they felt the need to make their mark on the landscape in some permanent fashion, reflecting the mindset of settled villagers rather than as nomadic wanderers. Closely in tune with the seasons, and probably having culturally significant rituals around solstices and equinoxes, it makes sense that whatever they build was in some way tied thereto.

We learn that the raising of the circle was spurred on by the priests. While a shamanistic element still exists in their religion, their priest class has been ensconced in a position of authority since they settled down as agriculturalists. The priests, holders of esoteric and ancient knowledge, may tell stories of ancient men or spirits, known to their ancestors in a distant land, who built monumental structures of stone with some spiritual significance. Remembering these stories, they urge their people to a megalithic project of their own, this time a stone circle aligned to the sun and moon on the year’s most ritually important days. The circle is to be raised at the top of a hill, thereby placed closer to the heavens themselves.

Observing the builders at their work, we hear a lot of songs. First of all, they serve a practical purpose when coordinating effort to move heavy stones, but they also refer to the spirits and stories inspiring them. Likely sharing the cyclic view of time and space held by many small-scale and Indigenous cultures, their work is a ritual whereby they become the ancient builders of half-remembered yore, or the spirits setting the heavens and seasons in their places. The clothing of the workers is crude, mostly skins and furs which may have been cast off in the hot Portuguese sun. The priests directing their work may have worn primitive textiles as a marker of their higher status. Maybe one priest, having painted himself or donned a mask, shamanistically channels one of the spirits as he manages the work crew, giving their work a directly divine approval. At the beginning and end of each work day, the builders enter and exit a special ritual state, perhaps by eating a special food or ritual washing. Probably not by taking psychoactives, as I would imagine moving around heavy stones, while stoned, might be dangerous. Once completed, the circle would function as a ritual center for the community over many generations, and as a locus of power for the priest class. Word of this special place spread far and wide over the region, igniting a spark in related peoples’ imagination that, in coming millennia, would fan into flame across Europe in a series of monuments still standing to this day.

Conclusion

            We’ve covered a lot of ground today. First we looked at the Anatolian origins of Neolithic European farmers, with special attention drawn to the megalithic complex of Gobekli Tepe, which may have been a distant ancestor to later European constructions. We then spent some time discussing the very first European farmers who crossed into the Balkans from Anatolia and had the first interactions with local hunter-gatherers. They split into two waves of migration, one which worked its way up the Balkans into Central Europe, and another maritime group which worked its way across the Mediterranean to the Iberian peninsula. The third part of our video focused on the latter group, who raised the first known Neolithic European Cromlech, or stone circle, at Almendres in Portugal. As this first chapter of Neolithic European history closes, we leave these two groups—one at the Danube, another at the Atlantic—eight thousand years ago, as they gradually adapt to the land and climate of Europe. Our next video will discuss the spread of the first fully European Neolithic Culture, known to us as the Linear Band Ceramic Culture, which rose, flourished, and came crashing down over the course of the sixth millennium BC. I’ll see you then!

Sources:

1.     Gresky et al. “Modified human crania from Göbekli Tepe provide evidence for a new form of Neolithic skull cult”. Science Advances: DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1700564, 28 June 2017, Sci. Adv. 3, e1700564 (2017)

2.     wikipedia.org/en/Lepenski_Vir. Photo by Vanilitsa.

3.     Jubinka Babović: Sanctuaries of Lepenski Vir: Location, position and function. Archaeological monographs 17, National museum, Belgrade, 2006. Images by Philip Wiegell, Dusan Pavlic, and Unknown.

4.     Hristivoje Pavlović (28 August 2017), "Tajne Lepenskog Vira IX - Vatra kao zaštita i čarobna svetiljka", Politika (in Serbian)

5.     Brami, Maxime (11 October 2022). "Was the Fishing Village of Lepenski Vir Built by Europe's First Farmers?". Journal of World Prehistory. Springer Science+Business Media. 35 (2): 109–133. doi:10.1007/s10963-022-09169-9.

6.     https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opar-2020-0196/html?lang=en

7.     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almendres_Cromlech. Images by Dicklyon and Fulviusbsas.

8.     Calado, M. (2012). All quiet on the Western Front? In Statues-Menhirs et Pierres Levées du Néolithique a Aujourd’hui. Actes du 3 colloque international sur la statuaire mégalithique, Saint-Pons-de-Thomières, pp. 243–253.

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.

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.