The Mysterious Fish People of Lepenski Vir

8,000 years ago, in the heart of the Iron Gate Gorge, where the mighty Danube flows between massive ancient cliffs, there was a remarkable society thriving on the water's edge. The people here built an array of unique trapezoidal houses with floors of colourful limestone plaster, forming what's been called Europe's oldest planned settlement. And inside them they erected haunting sandstone sculptures, some of the oldest monumental art in Europe, depicting what seemed to be human-fish hybrids. Living on a narrow promontory between the water and the steep cliffs, they were totally reliant on the river, and on the huge fish that swam beneath its surface. This site also reveals the monumental changes Europe went through in the Mesolithic to Neolithic transition. Hunter-gatherers had lived in this region for thousands of years, taking advantage of the abundant aquatic resources and unique environment. But an enormous change was about to sweep across Europe, as Neolithic farmers spread from the Aegean to almost every part of the continent. But here, archaeological excavations and new ancient DNA analysis shows a more complicated series of interactions, as the new outsiders mixed with the locals and developed a new, unique society with elements from both cultures. So when did this society first develop? What made this gorge so special? How did the two societies merge and why was it so different here to the rest of Europe? And what can the astonishing human-fish hybrid sculptures tell us about their spiritual beliefs and religious practices? This is the amazing story of the enigmatic fish people of Lepenski Vir. For thousands of years, most Mesolithic societies relied on the great abundance of fish found on the pristine coasts, rivers and lakes of Europe. From the Iron Gate gorge of the mighty Danube to the blazing islands of the Mediterranean and the lost wetlands of Doggerland, European hunter-gatherers simply could not survive without being expert fishermen. You have to imagine them, out there on those wooded riverbanks, the rocky beaches and amongst the waving reed beds of the lake shores, knowing that catching the next fish could be life or death for them and their tribe. And you can enjoy a similar experience from the comfort of your device thanks to this video's sponsor Fishing Clash. Fishing Clash is an immersive mobile fishing simulator designed for all fishing enthusiasts and for those who've always wanted to give it a try. The game is easy to pick up and play. You can jump in for a quick five-minute session or spend hours exploring exotic fisheries. It's completely up to you. I drop in for a couple of minutes and then keep catching just one more fish over and over again. You keep coming back because between exploring exotic fishing locations, levelling up your equipment and competing in events, you always have something exciting to look forward to. The best part for me is the hundreds of fish species from every corner of the globe you could catch and the over 50 unique fisheries you can explore. So if you like the sound of this then join over 50 million players worldwide and download the game using my link in the description box or scan the QR code displayed on the screen. Use my special code DANDAVIS to claim a $20 value reward including a unique avatar for free. Thank you to Fishing Clash for sponsoring the video. The site at Lepenskivir with its strange trapezoidal houses was excavated between 1965 and 1970. The excavation was carried out prior to the construction of a dam that would ultimately flood the site and destroy it and other sites in the society all along this part of the river. This unmovable time limit would underpin the archaeological excavations as they rushed to uncover and record a unique and confusing site before it was lost forever. For the first couple of years they didn't yet realise they were working on a site of international importance. The time pressure as well as other decisions made during and after the excavations and technical issues with dating methods has made reconstructing the exact sequence of events at the site a difficult problem and to understand why this site and the wider region was so special for the people who lived here we must first look at the geography and the ecology of the region. Lepenskivir is in eastern Serbia in the Iron Gates Gorge, a spectacular 134 kilometre stretch of the Danube river forming a natural border between what's Serbia and Romania today. The site was on a narrow crescent-shaped promontory on the Serbian side of the Danube. The gorge is formed by these impressive steep limestone cliffs and the complex dramatic geology continues under the water. Some parts of the riverbed are extremely deep with sharp changes in depth at various points and this complex geology along with intersections with tributaries creates different flow rates and swirling undercurrents. Lepenskivir is named after the whirlpool that formed in the river where the site was located at the intersection with the Lapina tributary. The complex eddies also funnel fish through certain parts of the river. This was well understood in recent historic times when fishermen favoured certain spots like Lepenskivir for capturing the huge sturgeon heading upstream to spawn and downstream back to the Danube estuary and the Black Sea. We'll talk more about these sturgeon later because they're very important to this story. This region created a special micro-environment from the Holocene onwards that was attractive to the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the region. You can see why the Iron Gates hunter-gatherers would have favoured this area. They also hunted red and roe deer, wild boar and oryx in the forests of the hills all around the Danube. Hunter-fisher-forager societies also flourish in environments where a diversity of resources can be accessed in a small area, so changes in elevation and ecosystems within walking distance made for an ideal location. Throughout the Holocene, the populations here seem to have become increasingly sedentary. Spending more time at riverside sites, perhaps due to climatic changes, and as they better understood fishing techniques and technologies over the generations, becoming more specialised to take advantage of the unique opportunities of this location. The population living in the region during the Mesolithic from about 13,000 BC to about 6,000 BC were most similar to the population known as Western hunter-gatherers, but they also had admixture from the population known as Eastern hunter-gatherers. In fact, there was this blending between the two populations seen right across Europe where the two ancestral groups met, and the Iron Gate hunter-gatherers specifically also seem to have had some additional affinity with Anatolian hunter-gatherers. It could be there was gene flow between these regions, or it could be there was an older common ancestor linking them, or both of these things. This is interesting as some of the descendants of Anatolian hunter-gatherers would take up farming and move across the Aegean. These Anatolian farmers would eventually meet with European hunter-gatherers throughout Europe, mix with them to some degree, and ultimately largely replace them. Exactly how this happened across Europe during the Neolithic expansion is hard to pin down in most places, and it was probably different in different areas. This site illuminates one way this replacement happened, and with a detail unlike anywhere else. Although it may also be a unique example, not replicated elsewhere, because of the special circumstances of the Iron Gate gorge. For the first two years of the excavation at Lepensky Vir, the archaeologists believed it would be a typical Starcevo culture site. This was the archaeological name for the first Neolithic farm society that developed in the region after about 6200 BC. Their ancestors had moved north from farming settlements in the Aegean, colonising new lands by following the river valleys, and there were Starcevo culture artefacts at Lepensky Vir, so it seemed straightforward. But by 1967, the excavators realised that they had uncovered something quite different. The red-pink limestone floors of the 73 trapezoidal structures they uncovered, with the rectangular stone hearths, and the bizarre carved sculptures, weren't like anything from the Neolithic farming societies at all. Other broadly contemporary sites along the gorge were also excavated, and similar trapezoidal features were discovered, along with differently decorated sculpted boulders, suggesting there were related contemporary settlements dotted all along the river here. Lepensky Vir was first used by Mesolithic people between about 9500 and 7300 BC. They built open-air rectangular stone hearths, and occupied the site enough to leave scatters of bone and stone tool evidence, as well as burials. But Mesolithic groups here might have occupied and abandoned sites in turn, depending on local climatic conditions. And there was apparently no occupation at the Lepensky Vir site for about a thousand years, until after 6250 BC. There might have been flooding here, related to a centuries-long cold period known as the 8.2 kiloyear event, and it was only when this ended, and the climate warmed again, that people could live here again. And when they did, likely after about 6170 BC, they built these remarkable structures to create a large settlement with its unique artistic expression and culture. But who were the people who built these structures and lived like this? This is about the same time as the first Neolithic farmers began colonising the wider region. So were they Mesolithic hunter-fisher foragers, or were they Neolithic farmers? The ways of life practised by early Neolithic farmers and the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were quite different. They came from broadly related but distinct ancestries, and they relied on different technologies, and had different beliefs and ritual practices, different worldviews. The farmers relied on growing crops like wheat that they ground into flour, and on rearing domesticated animals like cattle and pigs, and so the two groups needed different environments to practise their ways of life. After the glacial period, Europe's hunter-gatherers preferred to live in environments with access to aquatic resources. At least, those who roamed the deep woodlands of Europe could not maintain a higher population density, but certain special locations provided enough calories for larger, less mobile populations. In Northern Europe, people fished the Baltic Sea and especially relied on the abundant seal populations for their nutrition. Dietary fat was especially important and hard to come by for all ancient populations. Groups that worked out ways of accessing or cultivating dietary fat could produce large, healthy populations and large, robust, energetic people. Think of dairy for the steppe herders of Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe, the coconut cultivation of the Polynesians, and salmon harvesting of the Tlingit of the Pacific Northwest. On the other hand, Neolithic farming societies tended to do no fishing at all, even when they lived near rivers or the coast. And the people of Lipensky Vier were fishers who also hunted terrestrial game in the surrounding woodlands. They must have relied on boats for fishing and to get to and from the site and around the region. This location was not suitable for farming and there's no evidence for growing crops or grinding large quantities of grain. The only domesticated animals here are dogs, which European hunter-gatherers had for thousands of years before the Neolithic. Human remains can be analysed for certain chemical signatures that tell us the kinds of diets the people ate in their lives. Testing human remains here shows most of the population ate a largely aquatic diet, supported by animals like deer and oryx. And we also know they relied on fish here because of the high proportion of fish bones at the site and the others nearby, from species like carp, catfish, bream, pike, perch and various sturgeon species. Here in the Iron Gates, there was a steady supply of river fish to be caught, but the real prized resource was the enormous beluga sturgeon. They lived in the Black Sea and the Caspian, as well as the many river systems like the Danube flowing into them. They migrate upstream to spawn in what could be very long and complex migrations. And before industrial harvesting destroyed their numbers, they were plentiful. And they could grow to great age and enormous sizes. Really enormous. The largest accepted record is a female taken in 1827 in the Volga estuary, weighing 1571 kilograms or 3,463 pounds. And it was 7.2 meters or 23 and a half feet long. And there are perfectly plausible claims of ones even larger than that. And generally, 10% to 25%, but potentially even more of a spawning beluga female's weight can be the eggs she carries. Catching a mature sturgeon could provide an enormous amount of protein from its flesh, but the real prize would be the nutritious, fatty caviar. The caviar from a single large sturgeon could provide millions of calories. Catching one might be a difficult task, but the payoff would be enormous. An almost overwhelming abundance. Catching these fish would have been a difficult communal task, requiring strength, courage, and ingenuity. There's bone fish hooks here, and also stone weights from the site they probably used to weigh down nets. Unfortunately, no organic material survives here, so whatever nets, baskets, lines, and fences they used to funnel and catch fish, we will have to imagine. I would imagine they used wooden spears too. But there's also a unique class of tool they used here, stone clubs, some of them engraved with symbols. Damage to the ends of them shows they were grasped at one end and used to whack something with the other. They likely used these to kill sturgeon by bashing them on the heads. The way they're polished and engraved suggests they were very special tools, used for a special task, dispatching the incredible animals that pass by here every year, perhaps in a ritualised public manner. It's perhaps this regular sturgeon migration that is key to understanding the site, to understanding why it was here and why the people developed this unique culture. They were so reliant on fish, and especially the great bounty of the massive, eternally returning sturgeon, that it seems to have formed part of their cultural identity and perhaps influenced their beliefs about death and rebirth. There were around 136 graves at the settlement, containing the remains of 180 individuals. Some were in or beneath houses, others were outside of the houses around the settlement. Those remains in the houses were sometimes beneath the floors, as if they were there before the floors were laid. Others had been cut through the floors, and there were bones seemingly on the surface of the floors. Some were bodies with no heads, others were heads with no bodies. Some burials were just the mandible, and others were different disarticulated bones. Some of the burials beyond the houses on the upper slope were in large pits 3-4m in diameter, with multiple bodies in them, deposited one on top of the other in disarticulation, or lying on their backs parallel to the Danube. Remember these pits, as we'll come back to them in a minute. The most common full burials at Lepenskivir are of people buried on their backs with their heads facing downstream. This has been interpreted as a manifestation of a belief that fish would carry the deceased soul on its downstream voyage in the autumn, and bring it back upon their return next spring. It might be that the river itself was a physical manifestation of the metaphysical River of Souls. Some researchers suggest the different settlements of this wider culture dotted along the river, with their slightly different monumental boulder-style traditions, also represented different stages in the spiritual process. Lepenskivir might have been the best location for the harvesting of sturgeon, and so was the best spiritual location, too, for those individuals who deserved rebirth. Maybe not everyone buried here was a resident. Maybe some of those selected for burial lived at other nearby settlements, but were buried here specifically to enhance the transition of their soul in the proper manner. There are also burials of people in a seated position, with legs crossed and facing the river, as if, as some researchers believe, they were sitting down to watch for the return of the fish. The sculptures with strange human and fish features, perhaps then, represent various stages of metamorphosis of the deceased into fish. These boulders appear at other local sites, but those are undecorated or have patterns without features. The boulders here were placed inside the buildings, often at the back of the hearths. It's possible they relate to individuals buried in those same houses, maybe commemorating them or marking the transition of their spirits or something. This fish and hunting-based economy and fish-focused ideology is very Mesolithic in character. And yet the site also has pottery like that of Balkan Neolithic farmers, as well as Neolithic-style polished stone axes and bone tools like those of Neolithic farmers. Similar to the technique of testing human remains for chemical signals to detect lifetime dietary patterns, human remains can also be tested for certain isotope ratios. These are formed during childhood and reflect the natural environment you grew up in. These kinds of tests, along with the dietary testing techniques and also new ancient DNA testing, has revealed that this was in fact a mixed population of locals with Mesolithic ancestry and foreigners with Anatolian farmer ancestry. The early DNA studies suggested this was essentially a Mesolithic settlement that brought in especially women from Neolithic farming societies and they had mixed offspring. Similar mixing was seen at other nearby sites along the gorge, where one burial, for example, was almost entirely Western hunter-gatherer ancestry, while another was 50% Anatolian farmer, clearly the descendant of a hunter-gatherer and a European Neolithic farmer. In this scenario we might imagine the two societies in some kind of contact with technology, goods and people being voluntarily exchanged between the two groups, and also perhaps exchanges based on violence, raiding and abduction. Hunter-gatherer men stealing away farmer women in raids, making their escape in canoes with women bundled up inside them. This would also perhaps explain the piecemeal adoption of Neolithic technologies. Polished stone axes can be traded or stolen and generally it's thought in most ancient societies it was women who created the ceramic pottery. So Neolithic farmer women could have brought their skills and knowledge in ceramics with them into this fisher-forager society. In this interpretation the essentially Mesolithic groups here are gradually overwhelmed in a few generations by the incoming Neolithic ancestry within the group and around them across the region until their way of life is no longer sustainable. This contact and integration is thought to also explain the innovation in artistic expression not seen in previous Mesolithic groups here. Not necessarily that they were inspired by seeing ceramic figurines of the Neolithic farmers to create their own sculptures, but perhaps contact with an alien society stimulated them to express and reinforce their own identities in opposition to those encroaching nearby. But not everyone agrees with this interpretation. For example a 2022 paper looked at the DNA evidence along with the archaeological data on a sample of burials across the site. Their study showed men and boys of entirely Neolithic farmer ancestry were also buried at Lepenskivir, suggesting entire families or at least a cross section of Neolithic society moves there, not just women. Another point they raise is that not all bodies from the site are necessarily former residents. Those skulls for example like one of a young Neolithic farmer man could have been headhunting trophies buried in the floor of a house to imbue it with power or something like that. The male and female haplogroups found from the dead at Lepenskivir also show a mixture of hunter-gatherer lineages and farmer lineages during the main phase when the trapezoidal houses were built and used. But in this study they found that those burials with Neolithic farmer ancestry tended to be associated with the houses, while those with hunter-gatherer ancestry and lineages were buried in those multi-burial pits. These people also ate a high proportion of fish, while those buried in and around the houses ate a more mixed diet including terrestrial animals. And while all the hunter-gatherer burials of full skeletons were buried in the classic Mesolithic style head pointing downstream fashion, those with more farmer ancestry were also buried in a flexed position like Neolithic farmers of the region. Now there could be many reasons for these differences. Their sample might not be representative of the whole site for one thing and it's tempting to think that those of Mesolithic descent may have been likewise excluded from the houses in life or were somewhat peripheral to the core life there, but we don't know if burial practices reflected how they actually lived. The researchers don't go so far as to imagine them as slaves or even second-class citizens because they did have proper burials in those pit features and the Mesolithic cultural influences on the society as a whole was profound. But maybe it does suggest the two lineages weren't as integrated as we had assumed and instead of a Mesolithic society bringing in Neolithic people, it looks like the settlement was founded or re-founded after a thousand year hiatus by a mixture of hunter-gatherer families along with Neolithic farmer families and additional Neolithic farmers continued to move here over time. This phase of a mixed ancestry society dates to between about 6170 and 5940 BC and this phase might only have lasted between about 80 to 200 years or so. So the settlement at Lepenskivir perhaps reflects Neolithic migrants as individuals and or as family groups adopting the life ways and some of the beliefs and practices of a thriving fisher-forager society in the gorge. Remember I said at the start the Iron Gates hunter-gatherers had some genetic affinity with the Anatolian hunter-gatherers who adopted farming and moved across the Aegean to become Neolithic farmers. I wonder if there was some vestige of this ancient link between the two groups that somehow helped facilitate the merging that happened after 6200 BC. Maybe on arrival in the region, the farmers learned from the fisher-foragers how to exploit the incredible abundance of the annual sturgeon run and maybe that's what attracted them in the first place. Unlike other parts of Europe, Iron Gates fisher-foragers might have had something really attractive to offer the newcomers, their skills and knowledge in exploiting this miraculous resource. Maybe it was enough to convince an enterprising colonist group to go native in a landscape they wouldn't otherwise have been able to settle in and maybe they wanted to take control of this part of the river as it was a crossroads and highway through the mountains. Something similar seems to have happened much later in the Eastern Baltic, where expanding corded-ware culture cattle herders adopted fisher-forager lifestyles in lakes and coastal regions. Here at Lepensky Vir, with generations of intermarriage, a new mixed society emerged with an economy based on fishing and hunting, but combining technologies and traditions. This is perhaps best exemplified by those houses. There was a Mesolithic tradition of temporary structures of this shape in the gorge, along with rectangular open-air hearths. Their trapezoidal shape might be a reflection of the huge cliff dominating the skyline opposite the site, but making them into permanent houses might have been an idea from the Neolithic tradition and the limestone plaster floors almost certainly were too. To make them, they had to collect the limestone from the slopes above the site, crush it and burn it, and then mix it with ash and water before pouring it and smoothing out the surface before it hardened. Making plaster for houses was much more of a Neolithic kind of thing to do, as was burying people beneath the floors of houses. Erecting domestic shrines inside homes, perhaps with clay figurines, was also a practice that would be seen throughout southeast Neolithic Europe. But into this unique mixed society of fisher-foragers, new people kept arriving from the south. Sometime between about 5900 BC and 5600 BC, the ancestry here becomes overwhelmingly Neolithic farmer. Female hunter-gatherer lineages also largely come to an end. It seems as though increasing migration from the Neolithic groups overwhelmed them and perhaps mating with people with hunter-gatherer ancestry was socially limited or perhaps people with those lineages were driven off or killed. The site during this phase becomes more like a typical Neolithic settlement in terms of material culture and burial type. After about 5600 BC, the site seems to have been abandoned. Neolithic farmers would continue to expand across southeast Europe, establishing more settlements and developing regional variations. Their cultural expressions became increasingly sophisticated and their technologies soon included metalworking in copper and gold. After 5400 BC, this region would see the rise of the Vinča culture, whose fortified settlements would be founded in various uplands as their frontiers expanded into new resource-rich environments. I do wonder if these massive fortifications were not only erected to defend against other Neolithic communities but also against raids from hunter-gatherers still living in the uplands, holding out as long as they could against the ever-multiplying colonists. The Mesolithic population here would fade from the archaeological record, but their genes would continue in the admixed Neolithic descendants across the region. And later in Neolithic Europe, other hunter-gatherer descended populations would experience a remarkable resurgence. But I'll talk about that another time. Thanks again to Fishing Clash for sponsoring the video. Don't forget to use my special code DANDAVIS to claim a $20 value reward. And thank you very much indeed to my Patrons and Channel Members. By supporting the channel you get exclusive content and ad-free videos. The links to join us are in the description below. Now, to continue the story of this region, please watch this video on the incredible Vinča culture of the Neolithic Balkans. Thank you for watching.