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:
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:
(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:
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.
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