Mysteries of Neolithic Europe

Mysteries of Neolithic Europe, by D.W. Draffin. On the shores of Ohrid, a primeval lake at the border of North Macedonia and Albania, a mysterious discovery has been made beneath the waves. Outside the Albanian town of Lin, the remains of a lakeside village rest hidden in the mud. Researchers have identified thousands of wooden elements under the lake to reveal a location that was built on again and again over the millennia. Most of the wooden elements are piles of posts, generally around 40 cm in diameter, made from tree species such as oak, pine, juniper, ash, and hophornbeam. Dendrochronology on these posts indicates that there was intensive settlement here beginning over 8,500 years ago. This is the oldest lakeside village that has ever been discovered in Europe. The entire region has been intensively studied by archaeologists for generations. Over time, layers of mud and the evidence of other civilizations who built on top of the earliest foundations have been removed and dated. What had previously been mysteries here have been revealed as Neolithic ruins. The remains of the settlement outside Lin are the oldest. The structures were platforms, built on stilts, and may have permanently stood in the water. The density of the placement of the poles appears to cover large sections of the lake, with tens of thousands of these wooden post piles hidden in the mud under the waves. Another ten lakeside villages have been found nearby across the lake, where its west shore is known locally as Plocha Mychov Krad, or the Bay of Bones. This entire region of lakes and karst landscapes and mountains has been a permanent home to modern humans for 10,000 years or more. Although it is likely that humans lived here even longer, no direct archaeological evidence places us here before that. But genetic studies have shown that haplogroups of modern humans have at least transited the area for the last 40,000 years or more. Perhaps the most biodiverse lake in the world, Ohrid and its sister lakes Small and Great Prespa, allowed modern humans to settle and thrive in the region while the rest of the continent struggled during a time of great climatic and demographic transition, known as climatic refuges. These isolated mountain canyons across Europe were some of the incubators of humanity during the ravages of the Ice Ages. In the early days of modern archaeology, none of these details were yet known. Nearly everything remained a mystery. All that we had of the entire Neolithic was the neglected ruin of Stonehenge and a few curious trinkets. Today, looking back at the Mesolithic foundations of settlement and expansion, archaeologists and anthropologists are bringing more and more of this lost world into focus. Let's examine what the leading academic theories currently are on the sources and features of Neolithic Europe. 11,000 years ago, the last Ice Age is ending. The remnants of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which once covered the entirety of Western Canada, finally collapse into the North Atlantic, contributing the largest pulse of meltwater into these seas in 100,000 years. From 8740 to 8160 BCE, global sea levels rise over a meter, changing coastlines everywhere. This is a continuation of a series of meltwater pulses that led to post-glacial sea level rise of 120 meters over a period of nearly 20,000 years. These immense, catastrophic pulses have also already dramatically cooled the hemisphere and changed weather patterns. 11,000 years ago. Epipaleolithic or Mesolithic human civilization has firmly made its mark on every continent. In the Americas, the Pueblo are already building adobe dwellings and weaving baskets. In Anatolia, Gobekli Tepe is likely a religious site for the entire region. Byblos, on the Lebanese shore of the eastern Mediterranean, is founded as a fishing village and the walls of Jericho are being raised nearby. In Africa, Lake Chad is one of the largest inland seas in the world, perhaps hosting permanent settlements, and the Sahara is a green savannah. On the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, cave walls have been painted for over 30,000 years, and in China, the Nanzhuang Tou have settled in the northern province of Hebei. 11,000 years ago, the Quaternary extinction event is coming to a close worldwide, a process that had begun 40,000 years earlier when megafauna such as mastodons and woolly rhinos ruled the Paleolithic plains. Across the world, as the coastlines rise and the weather changes, people migrate. Herds move, seeking new pasture, and predators follow. It is likely a time of ferment across every continent, across species, as they hunt each other and come into contact with a wider array of travelers. Perhaps disease decimates the Pleistocene mammals, as has been postulated. Overkill, by our ancestors, remains a widely accepted cause, as well as dramatic and deadly shifts in their environments. When the last mammoth falls to their rockfall ambush, do they feel any regret, or is it an old enemy finally defeated? How about the last of the dire wolves? For generations after, the descendants of the great hunters of the Ice Age must have heard tales of storm and ice and giant monsters who hunted humans. On the other side of continental Europe, hidden in the steep valleys of the Pyrenees, there is a curious and significant insight into this period. The Azylian culture, which follows the great Magdalenian Ice Age hunters, leaves weapons and artifacts that are less refined, less complex, and smaller in size than their forebears. Here is one of the great, outstanding mysteries of the Neolithic. Perhaps life has become too easy, or conversely, perhaps a warmer climate or the proliferation of disease has led to a decline in quality of life. Now their stories, too, have been lost. Eleven thousand years ago, in the Pontic-Caspian steppe of Ukraine and southeastern Europe, many lowland river valleys and coastal regions favored by early pastoralist communities are submerged by the rising tides. Researchers have shown that regions which face dramatic climatic effects, such as flooding, and the disappearance of glaciers, show a more pronounced Mesolithic era. When the ice fields retreat from northern Europe, the rich landscapes that appear beneath are soon colonized by every kind of life. Forced to move for the first time in generations, these early European farmers migrate north and west across the continent. They begin a transition to a more modern world, ushering in the European Neolithic. Movement occurs within every region of the continent as peoples go in search of new lands. But Europe does not have a continental outline we would necessarily recognize. Doggerland still connects the British Isles to mainland Europe, the Adriatic Sea is nearly half its current size, and Denmark makes firm contact with Sweden. These rich lowlands feature marshlands thick with life, river systems, and flat pastures for grazing species. They provide all the resources communities of Mesolithic humans need. But these rich lands also rest at the lowest points of the continent, and they are the first to disappear under the rising waves. Inland, the migrants go, up to the hills, into dense forests only navigable on game trails and along countless rivers. The entire continent has long been dominated by wildwoods, although the earlier idea of an impenetrable Mesolithic wall of vegetation has given way to a more nuanced view of open grassland, delta and marsh, and wilderness already shaped by human hands. The Neolithic period of global warming, from about 11,000 to 6,000 years ago, becomes the most recent golden age of European forests. In the north, on the soil formerly covered by glaciers, great woods spring up. Trees everywhere grow thicker and taller than during the cold winters and cloudy days of the Ice Ages. In valleys, at river fords and junctions, and in sites near concentrations of resources, the migrants most likely encounter indigenous populations of hunter-gatherers and early pastoralists in small communities. Genetically, early Europeans are generally descended from three distinct ancestral components – western hunter-gatherers, early European farmers, and ancient North Eurasians. The West refers to the west of the entirety of Eurasia. Eastern hunter-gatherers existed as well across Central Asia and mixed with the ancient North Eurasians of Siberia, whose genetics eventually spread across both Europe and the Americas. Eastern and western hunter-gatherers also mixed in northern Europe, creating a unique Scandinavian hunter-gatherer component. Linguistically, Paleo-European language families such as Vasconic, which became modern Basque, or the surviving fragments of Tyrrhenian or Tyrsanian, may reveal glimpses of what was spoken on the European continent before the advent of Proto-Indo-European languages over 8,000 years ago. But several earlier theories, such as attempts to catalogue European river and lake names – hydronyms – as Paleo-European, have generally fallen out of favor. Now most of the continent's hydronyms are considered to have Indo-European sources. The most sophisticated civilizations arise in southeastern Europe. At their zenith, 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, Neolithic Europe along the Danube and Rhine River valleys have become home to the largest cities, the most advanced metalsmiths, and the most diverse trade networks in the world. Although societies around the world have been building structures for thousands of years by this time, none have the sophistication of Magura-Gumelnitsa or Čirkvina-Stublina. The first pyramids in Egypt won't be built for another thousand years or more. Eridu, the first city of Sumer, is just being built on virgin sand dunes. And the unifying elements of this wider European culture, such as decorative work on their buildings, handmade pottery, and goddess figurines, led some archaeologists to propose a concept which was quite popular throughout the previous generations of anthropology and archaeology but has fallen out of favor in recent times – the concept of Old Europe. Led by the groundbreaking work of Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, the theory describes a nearly utopian era of regional groups living in mostly small, egalitarian villages throughout the continent, but originating in the forests and valleys of the lower Danube Valley of southeastern Europe, trading and living in relative peace for millennia. The theory of Old Europe paints a picture of a lost continental culture that is very different from the proto-Indo-European one that replaces it. And for several decades, Old Europe was the most successful model that matched the archaeological, linguistic, and genetic discoveries that were made in this region. As Gimbutas developed her theories, they became more ambitious and all-encompassing, characterizing the matrilineal cultures of Old Europe as a kind of romantic lost world of living in harmony with nature and in peace with our neighbors. The setting for these theories is truly one of the richest locations on the continent for Neolithic discoveries. The lower Danube Valley begins where the course of the Danube River flows from present-day Hungary, through the Balkans, and issues from Bulgaria into the Black Sea. Here is a climatic refuge, where the local populations of Ice Age Aurignacians shelter from the worst effects of the environment in the mountains and valleys of the Carpathian and Transylvanian Ranges. They give rise to Gravetti and Epigravettian culture nearly 33,000 years ago. Their shards of pottery and hearth sites provide evidence of the first permanent settlements in Europe. For the last 20,000 years of the Ice Age, humans live lightly upon the land. In the gorges that cross the Carpathian Mountains, in particular the famous Iron Gate of Gospodjen Vir, within this narrow passage is a rock shelf on the south bank of the Danube, on the Serbian side. It holds the well-preserved remains of Lepenski Vir, called the oldest city in Europe. Human occupation of the site begins nearly 12,000 years ago. The location is unique, just high enough and durable enough that the Danube cannot erode it away. Massive boulders anchor the site, blocking the endless currents. In the water here, the narrow gorge and the jutting cape of rock shelf create a whirlpool where the river's life is concentrated. Here fishing is better, as well as trapping and foraging. The huts they build on this rock shelf have a trapezoidal floor plan which includes sites on terraces above that have been shaped from the incline of the bank. In an indication of this society's development, each hut is exactly the same in design, changing only in size. But the trapezoidal floor plan, unseen anywhere else in the ancient world and preserved for millennia by their use of clay, dung, and ash, which is hardened into a concrete, forms a wedge whose widest side always describes exactly 60 degrees of a circle. An equilateral triangle's point always faces the prevailing wind, yet what that structure may have looked like is anyone's guess. Whatever covered these dwellings, whether wood, bark, or reeds, has been lost to time. There is evidence that the structures may have begun as temples, and only over time did they become homes. Lepenskivir was continuously inhabited for thousands of years, and the eras have been divided into periods of Lepenskivir I and II. Moving from its earliest days as a kind of pioneer village, the Golden Age of the Iron Gate culture begins around 6600 BCE. This is when the local people begin to truly turn to the Danube as their main source of food, as evidenced by increased nitrogen isotopes in the remains found from this time period. They also contain a higher nitrogen percentage than other contemporary bodies found in nearby regions, showing that their riparian bounty might have given them a resource advantage over their neighbors. The people of Lepenskivir settle, become sedentary, and develop, or are introduced to, agriculture. The developments that divide the Mesolithic from the Neolithic are a wide-ranging suite of skills and developments known as the Neolithic Package. It is not only the domestication of crops and the corresponding drop in the diversity of human diets. City-sized populations appear for the first time in recorded history in what is known as the Neolithic Demographic Transition. We find the record of these changes across Europe, in the bones of an increased number of juvenile skeletons in burials, and written upon the land, in ancient canal systems used as the first crop irrigation and deforestation and selective burning of forests. Certain animals are domesticated, pottery is developed, huts evolve into rectangular houses, and polished stone tools and weapons far outperform the crude bifaces of their ancestors. These factors soon give rise, as players of civilization simulation games might somewhat inaccurately tell you, to everything from formal religious practices, to divisions of labor, to hierarchical ideologies and depersonalized knowledge systems such as pictograms and proto-writing. Throughout the world, in Sumatra and Niger, in Alaska and Arizona and the Amazon, in the Fertile Crescent and along many of the world's new shorelines, these developments unfold in isolated regional events that respond to local climate and demographic conditions and often last a millennia or more. In Europe, the Neolithic is in full swing, by 7,000 years ago. It is likely that places such as Lake Ohrid at this time might host entire Stilton platform villages extending far out into the water. Many other southeastern European settlements grow into cities. Over 300 kilometers to the southeast, the city of Sesklou is founded near the Pagasetic Gulf in Thessaly, Greece. They possess well-developed agriculture methods and a relatively early use of pottery. The people of Sesklou practice early and advanced forms of animal husbandry, domesticating cattle by 6300 BCE, hundreds of years before such advances have been recorded at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia. They also raise sheep and goats, swine and dogs, and cultivate barley and wheat. Their pottery begins as coarse earthenware but soon becomes a distinct artistic style that is traded and emulated throughout the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. The figurines of women, often pregnant, often in the Venus style that gave rise to the theories of old Europe's universal goddess religion, are plentiful in Sesklou. These figurines are continuously manufactured over thousands of years, indicating the cultural importance of these icons and their long-lasting relevance. The Starcevo-Koroš-Kriš culture dominates the Balkans and southeastern Europe from nearly 6200 BCE onward. They are a combined regional culture inhabiting several neighboring river valleys, which share many attributes. Like the Iron Gate culture to the east, the Starcevo also develop their civilization along the banks of the Danube in present-day Serbia, on the north banks this time, near the modern village of Starcevo across the river from Belgrade. The site has been formally worked by archaeologists since 1928 and the excavations have revealed dugouts, some nearly six meters in diameter, both round and ellipsoid in shape, containing evidence of masonry within them. Also found have been tombs with the bodies inside curled into fetal positions. Terracotta figurines have been retrieved from the site, ceramics painted with geometric designs, as well as metal and bone weapons. The earliest of these people were known as the Kardial Ware or Impressed Ware people. Their iconic cockleshell designs, found nearly everywhere in the Mediterranean region, from the Near East to North Africa to the Italian peninsula, beginning along the Adriatic coast around 9600 BCE, they eventually split into their own distinct tradition, following the North Mediterranean coastline westward while the Starcevo-Koroš-Kriš culture flourishes inland. The Koroš or Kriš culture refers to two names for the same river, which runs from the Transylvanian mountains of Romania, where it is known as the Kriš, into Hungary, where it is called the Koroš. There it joins the Tisza river, which further downstream in Serbia joins the Danube. The first evidence of this culture is from 5800 BCE in the southwest foothills of the Transylvanian mountains and on the Banat plain of the Pannonian Basin. The northern neighbors and perhaps partial descendants of the Starcevo-Koroš-Kriš culture are known as the Linear Band Keramik, LBK or Linear Pottery culture of Central Europe. In a 2015 PLOS Genetics research paper, A Common Genetic Origin for Early Farmers from Mediterranean Kardial and Central European LBK Cultures, the authors write in their abstract, The spread of farming out of the Balkans and into the rest of Europe followed two distinct routes. An initial expansion, represented by the Impresa and Kardial traditions, which followed the northern Mediterranean coastline, and another expansion, represented by the LBK, Linear Band Keramik, tradition, which followed the Danube river into Central Europe. Although genomic data now exist from samples representing the second migration, such data have yet to be successfully generated from the initial Mediterranean migration. To address this, we generated the complete genome of a 7,400-year-old Kardial individual from Covabonica in Vajerana, Barcelona, as well as partial nuclear data from five others excavated from different sites in Spain and Portugal. This Kardial individual clusters with all previously sequenced early European farmers and modern-day Sardinians. Furthermore, our analyses suggest that both Kardial and LBK peoples derived from a common ancient population located in or around the Balkan peninsula. The Iberian Kardial genome also carries a discernible hunter-gatherer genetic signature that likely was not acquired by admixture with local Iberian foragers. Our results indicate that retrieving ancient genomes from similarly warm Mediterranean environments such as the Near East is technically feasible. Such retrievals have continued. One nature study from 2017, Parallel Paleogenomic Transects, revealed complex genetic history of early European farmers, cast a much wider net. Its authors state, Ancient DNA studies have established that Neolithic European populations were descended from Anatolian migrants who received a limited amount of admixture from resident hunter-gatherers. Many open questions remain, however, about the spatial and temporal dynamics of population interactions and admixture during the Neolithic period. Here, we investigate the population dynamics of Neolithicization across Europe using a high-resolution, genome-wide, ancient DNA dataset with a total of 180 samples, of which 130 are newly reported here. 100 samples from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods of Hungary, 42 from Germany, and 38 from Spain. We find that genetic diversity was shaped predominantly by local processes, with varied sources and proportions of hunter-gatherer ancestry among the three regions and through time. Admixture between groups with different ancestry profiles was pervasive and resulted in observable population transformation across almost all cultural transitions. Our results shed new light on the ways in which gene flow reshaped European populations throughout the Neolithic period and demonstrate the potential of time-series-based sampling and modeling approaches to elucidate multiple dimensions of historical population interactions. And also, from nature, in 2018, the genomic history of southeastern Europe. We analyzed genome-wide, ancient DNA data from 225 individuals who lived in southeastern Europe and surrounding regions between 12,000 and 500 BC. We document a west-east cline of ancestry in indigenous hunter-gatherers and, in eastern Europe, the early stages in the formation of Bronze Age steppe ancestry. We show that the first farmers of northern and western Europe dispersed through southeastern Europe with limited hunter-gatherer admixture, but that some early groups in the southeast mixed extensively with hunter-gatherers without the sex-biased admixture that prevailed later in the north and west. We also show that southeastern Europe continued to be a nexus between east and west after the arrival of farmers, with intermittent genetic contact with steppe populations occurring up to 2,000 years earlier than the migrations from the steppe that ultimately replaced much of the population of northern Europe. As we can see, certain mysteries are being solved, but here's another one. Despite researchers' best efforts, there is a 4,000-year gap in the archaeological records of Bulgaria, stretching from the end of the Mesozoic well into the Neolithic. No one is sure why. Yet, after that barren period, Neolithic sites in Bulgaria appear seemingly everywhere. The Kara Novo, who established their culture as their Starcebo neighbors to the west enter their late phases, become the dominant culture along with the Gumelnitsa of the East Balkans for the next 5,000 years. Their heartland is near the town of Stara Zagora in southern Bulgaria. Famous for their white and dark-painted pottery, their tells and grave sites have been examined by succeeding generations of archaeologists, like elsewhere, revealing deeper insights each time. Further east on the western shores of the Black Sea, the Hamangia culture flourish on the Dobruja Plain that is today shared by Romania and Bulgaria. Although generally poor in natural resources, what makes this site such a success over the millennia is its easy access to spondylus, glycemeris, and dentallium mollusk shells, which are widely traded and used throughout the Mediterranean for ornamentation or perhaps value transactions. The Hamangia culture could be thought of as being among Europe's first bankers, literally digging in the mud banks of the rivers and lakes for shells that could be traded for the resources the Hamangians didn't have. What makes this culture even more valuable to current researchers is its placement between the old world of Anatolia and the Pontic-Caspian steppe and the new world of southeastern Europe. Able to use more than genetic data to characterize the movement of these early Neolithic peoples, researchers have learned that the Hamangia manufactured pottery with strong Anatolian influences, indicating their descent from peoples further east. This pottery includes painted vessels and goddess figurines such as the Sitting Woman, similar to those found elsewhere, but also include male statuettes such as the Thinker of Cernavoda, whose purpose may have been the Yamnia-like worship of ancestors. Beginning circa 5700 BCE, the evolving Starcevo culture gives rise to agriculture and the real beginning of the Neolithic age in Europe. The civilization that likely arises from this movement is known as the Vinca, occupying the central Balkans and drawing from many of the preceding cultures, the Vinca become one of the most successful of all Neolithic cultures. During its existence, no other civilization has as many settlements, nor as large. None has such extensive trade networks, bringing a uniform culture across the Balkans' interior, although evidence indicates that each population center most likely maintains its own political autonomy. Vinca farming introduces common wheat, barley, and oats to Europe. Beginning as a synthesis of hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists who practice animal husbandry, their agricultural practices are refined and made more efficient, leading to a population explosion in the region by around 5200 BCE. Yet early Vinca economic activity shows no real specialization. Each household is still responsible for its own crafts. Although there is no shortage of technical skill among its practitioners, rainbow-glazed pottery is notable from this period and clothing, which can be inferred from remarkable statuary that includes what the subjects wore, indicates the fashion of the time is open-necked tunics and decorated skirts. Racing ahead of neighboring cultures, the Vinca are mining, smelting, and working copper before the European Copper Age or the Chalcolithic even begins. Its most important settlement is Vinca Bello Brutto, only 14 kilometers downstream of the early Starcevo sites outside Belgrade. The earliest bodies found in the tell or grave of Bello Brutto are 11 males who belong to the later Starcevo phases. But then there is a disruption of the site that lasts hundreds of years. This gap remains a mystery. Around 5200 BCE, the people return, and this time they build. Over the next 300 years, Vinca Bello Brutto becomes one of the most important sites in the entire Vinca world, with up to 2500 citizens and a population density that rivals modern cities. They build a city plan, with straight streets and fences, internal divisions in their homes, and leave evidence of structural advances such as water wheels. From iconic pottery and imagery recovered, it appears to be a center of ritual or religion for the whole region. Mushroom amulets first manufactured here soon spread throughout Vinca society, and anthropomorphic statuary and figurines are made here in abundance. By 4900 BCE, Vinca Bello Brutto is abandoned, perhaps due to collapse of the over-farmed soils in the region. For a brief time, nearby Vršac grows influential with its export of spondylus shells and related artifacts. Other cities, such as Črkvina, Stublina, flourish beside creek tributaries of the Danube, which grows to nearly 4000 people. In Divostin, over 100,000 Neolithic artifacts have been excavated and studied. One study, concluded from the growth of their housing that the average lifespan of their households is 56 years. This is what is known as the Early Vinca Period. The Later Vinca Period begins in 4800 BCE and concludes in 4200 BCE, with the widespread abandonment of many of their sites. The Vinca have also, possibly, given us the first evidence of a formal writing system in the world in what is infamously known as the Tartaria tablets, a great mystery here. Mishandled upon their discovery in 1961, their provenance and importance have been in dispute ever since. Certain researchers have claimed that these three tablets discovered in a Transylvanian village are early Vinca relics from 5300 BCE, which significantly predates Mesopotamian pictographs. Others say the tablets have intruded from a different chronological strata, meaning that they are likely thousands of years younger. But because the origins of the tablets remain in dispute, with the original preservation team at Cluj baking the unfired clay tablets to preserve them, thus destroying any chance of dating them with radiocarbon methods, and criticisms cast upon the original excavating team's methods, means that the wider archaeological community remains unconvinced. Some even consider the tablets to be a fraud, while others have done more detailed dating work at the site and come back with an even earlier result of 5500 BCE. Founding in 4600 BCE in northeastern Bulgaria along the Black Sea coast, the Varna culture perhaps possesses the finest expressions of these Neolithic cultures that have yet been found. In the necropolis of Varna, where bodies have been buried both straight and in crouched positions, a vast collection of the earliest gold, jewelry, and artifacts in world history has been discovered. Part of a regional movement of gold metallurgy, with smaller hordes of equal age found in other Varna culture sites, these discs, bangles, pendants, and scepters of solid gold decorated only the tombs of a select few, giving some of the earliest evidence of social stratification in history. A golden penis sheath assured the wearer that even his genitals were made of gold. The sheer amount of gold here, 3,000 artifacts that weigh nearly 6 kilograms, is greater than all other contemporaneous sites in the world combined, and the quality of the pieces is astounding for that period of human development. The Varna gold is the greatest single treasure in the popular sense, recovered from the earliest days of human civilization. By the end of Neolithic Europe, its advances have spread throughout the continent. By 4000 BCE, lakeshore villages have been found everywhere from Britain and Switzerland to Spain. Only isolated remnants of pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer populations remain in the remote west of the Pyrenees and a few other locales. The modern humans have arrived. This is just a brief catalog of some of the more notable cultures across southern Europe at the outset of the Neolithic phase. As the era progresses, these cultures synthesize into new ones. The Iron Gate and Starcevo cultures helped to give rise to the Vinča, who in turn give rise to the Tisapolgar, the Gumelnica, and the Cucuteni-Trypillia of the early Eneolithic and Copper Ages. The decline and fall of these Neolithic cultures has been one of the greatest mysteries in all of archaeology. This cultural horizon is inextricably bound up in the very roots of modern identity for a majority of Eurasia and in the basis for the most successful language family the world has ever seen. The Proto-Indo-Europeans arrived, migrating from the steppe beyond the north shores of the Black Sea. Long known as the Kurgan peoples, that name appears to now be falling out of favor in the archaeology community for various types of Yamnia and Samara culture, nomadic pastoralists. Their waves of migration through the Pontic-Caspian steppe into Europe has been characterized as everything from a farming revolution to an invasion. The more we discover, the more we learn that it may have been all of that, and then some. At such a remove, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of these massive, transformative events as monolithic, like D-Day, a binary reality where one day the Allies weren't on Normandy's beaches, and then the next they were, fighting for every inch of land. And in places, perhaps it was like that. There may very well have been regions that changed hands over the result of a single bloody battle. But this is a transformation that occurs over hundreds of years, if not more, in some places. To provide a better example, think of the European colonists and pioneers of North America instead. From their arrival in the early 16th century, they both lived alongside the Native American populations and warred with them, also enslaving some and eradicating others while suffering setbacks and counterattacks and getting enslaved in turn. And this was a process that lasted 500 years, until the early 20th century. It was not a single invasion. The Proto-Indo-European expansion was also a process, this one lasting millennia, and may have likewise begun with the spread of disease. In the Americas it was smallpox and cholera, but in ancient Europe, cases of Yersinia pestis – the Black Death, the plague – have been found in Neolithic bones in Sweden, although they are of a septicemic, not bubonic, variety and thus most likely less virulent. It was also a process of assimilation. The Cucuteni-Trypillia culture of Romania appears to live alongside the newcomer Yamnia for some time, engaging in trade and living in relative peace. But at a certain point, the trade stops. The Cucuteni-Trypillia withdraw, hiding in caves and remote valleys, dispersing every direction but to the east. East is where the Yamnia emerge. Gimbutas described this Neolithic revolution as a military invasion, led by patriarchal, warlike tribes from Central Asia who upend the eons of peace that Europe has enjoyed. But the growing archaeological record does not always agree with her hypotheses. In Schönick-Killianstedt in Germany, remains of a Linearband Keramik culture site known as Deviant Graves, for providing counterexamples to the pacific nature of these people, feature bones that were cracked and broken before the victims died, indicating torture. From an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the massacre mass grave of Schönick-Killianstedt reveals new insights into collective violence in early Neolithic Central Europe, the author's state. The early Neolithic massacre related mass grave of Schönick-Killianstedt presented here provides new data and insights for the ongoing discussions of prehistoric warfare in Central Europe. Although several characteristics gleaned from the analysis of the human skeletal remains support and strengthen previous hypotheses based on the few known massacre sites of this time, a pattern of intentional mutilation of violence victims identified here is of special significance. Adding another key site to the evidence for early Neolithic warfare generally allows more robust and reliable reconstructions of the possible reasons for the extent and frequency of outbreaks of lethal mass violence and the general impact these events had on shaping the further development of the Central European Neolithic. Although it is safe to say that the unique cultures of Neolithic Europe were dramatically different from the Proto-Indo-Europeans who followed, continuing discoveries into the unique qualities of these Old Europe cultures show that they are possibly as diverse as the Native American cultures in my earlier example. By continuing to paint them all with the simple broad brush of Old Europe, we run the risk of falling into a similar nostalgia trap of romanticizing the native, the savage who came before and could speak to the plants and animals and live much closer to nature's cycles. The truth is far more complex, as it always is. One last note on the origins of the Neolithic Age. At the beginning of this episode I described the causes of the end of the Ice Age and the resulting changes in the world's coastlines and weather patterns, but brand new evidence from teams of researchers studying a village in Syria point to an even more dramatic cause. 12,800 years ago, the settlement of Abu Huraira already exists near the banks of the Euphrates River. The world is already warming and the glaciers have long been melting. But one last dramatic climate disruption delays this process. The Younger Dryas occurs, reversing this course for nearly a thousand years, cooling the planet abruptly, although unevenly, until warming trends eventually overcome it and usher in the sunny, stable world of the Holocene. These researchers have published four related papers at ScienceOpen.com, which argue that a series of comet airbursts in Earth's atmosphere dramatically changed the climate at this time. We can see the remains of this comet in what is called a torrid complex, a surviving swarm of 88 near-Earth asteroids that most likely comprised a megacomet that broke apart 20,000 years ago. During a single event, an entire cascade of comet fragments hit the upper atmosphere and changed the climate for over 800 years. From the introduction of their third article, this study investigates the hypothesis that Earth collided with fragments of a disintegrating comet, triggering Younger Dryas climate change 12,800 years ago. This collision created environmental conditions at Abu Huraira, Syria, that favored the earliest known continuous cultivation of domestic-type grains and legumes, along with animal management, adding to the pre-existing practice of hunting and gathering. The proposed airburst coincided with a significant decline in local populations and led to architectural reorganizations of the village. These events immediately followed the deposition of the Younger Dryas boundary layer that contains peak concentrations of high-temperature melt glass, nanodiamonds, platinum, and iridium. These proxies provide evidence of a nearby, low-altitude airburst by a comet-like fragment of a former centaur, one of many sub-300 km wide bodies in unstable orbits between the giant planets. This large body is proposed to have undergone cascading disintegrations, thus producing the torrid complex containing Comet Encke and maybe 90 asteroids with diameters of nearly 1.5 to 5 km. Here we present substantial new quantitative evidence and interpretations supporting the hypothesis that comet fragments triggered near-global shifts in climate around 12,800 years ago, and one airburst destroyed the Abu Huraira village. This evidence implies a causative link between extraterrestrial airbursts, environmental change, and transformative shifts in human societies. Mysteries upon mysteries. When one is solved, more questions arise. Neolithic Europe provides more answers every day. And as I've written this episode, yet more discoveries of ancient settlements and unearthed artifacts have come to light. Using classic archaeological techniques, as well as new technologies such as genetics and ground-penetrating radar, the land is slowly relinquishing its secrets. Trying to peer back through a veil of time 10,000 to 12,000 years thick, the images become clearer and clearer with each passing generation.