Neolithic massacre

The other day I came across the article entitled: "Unraveling ancestry, kinship, and violence in a Late Neolithic mass grave". It talks about the discovery of a very strange grave, during the 2011 archaeological excavations conducted on site 3 in Koszyce, Poland. 

The grave, dated to the turn of the Late and Final Neolithic, 2875–2670 BC, is believed to belong to the Globular Amphora Culture (3400–2800 BC), which got its name from the characteristic vessels found in their graves...

The first grave contained the remains of 15 individuals of various ages and both sexes. 

Plague victims? Like the people from the grave from the same time period from Sweden? The one I talked about in my post "Burned house horizon"?

Nah. These people from Poland were brutally murdered. Bone examination showed numerous unhealed injuries on the skeletons, mostly traces of skull strikes. Each of the victims got up to four blows to the head probably with an axe...

You can read the detailed forensic analysis of the bodies in the article entitled "Evidence of interpersonal violence or a special funeral rite in the Neolithic multiple burial from Koszyce in southern Poland – a forensic analysis"...

The two smallest children's skulls were almost completely destroyed, indicating that the kids were held by their legs, and their heads were smashed against something hard, a stone or a tree...

Almost complete absence of upper limbs damage and injury character indicate that these people did not defend themselves. They were executed rather than killed in battle. But then they were buried with rich burial goods...

Placed into the grave with the bodies were many pottery vessels, flint axes and other flint artifacts, bone tools, boar tusks, amber ornaments, bone pendants and animal bones...

And close to the human grave, an animal burial was discovered, which contained skeletal remains of seven pigs...

This originally "completely threw" the archaeologists...They could not imagine the scenario that could explain such a "bizarre" burial...Except of course "a ritual"...

Apparently, according to Gimbutas: Globular Amphora culture classed social structure and the dominant position of men is demonstrated by richly equipped graves which contained astounding numbers of sacrificed human beings and animals...

...In such graves, the chief adult male occupied the central position in the stone cist and was accompanied into the afterlife by family members, servants, animals...

But of course, what we find in this grave in Koszyce is not such a ritual burial of a "dominant male" with "many sacrificed family members, servants and animals"...

Actually this burial makes me wonder if the "identification" of Globular Amphora culture burials as such, is just a loads of bollocks and none of them are in fact ritual burial of a "dominant male" with "many sacrificed family members, servants and animals"...

When genetic analysis of the remains was done, scientists identified four nuclear families in the grave, for the most part represented by mothers and their children...

Closely related kin were buried next to each other: a mother was buried cradling her child, and siblings were placed side by side...

These people were buried by someone who knew them well and who carefully placed them in the grave according to familial relationships...

For example, the oldest individual in the grave, was buried close to her two sons, whereas a 30–35-y-old woman, was buried with her teenage daughter and 5-year-old son...

Interestingly, the older males/fathers are mostly missing from the grave, suggesting that it might have been them who buried their kin. Only one father is present in the grave, and his partner and son are placed together opposite him in the grave...

In addition, there is a young boy, aged 2–2.5 years, whose parents are not in the grave, but he is placed next to other individuals to whom he is closely related through various second-degree relationships...

Finally, there is an adult female, who does not seem to be genetically related to anyone in the group. However, her position in the grave close to a young man, suggests that she may have been as close to him in life as she was in death...

This archaeological site tells a terrible story. While most men (and some women) were away from the settlement, working in a field, foraging, hunting, herding animals...A band of armed men (and most likely women) came into the settlement...

Considering that there were no signs of fighting injuries, these people could have even been welcomed by their victims who could have known them as neighbours. The villagers were then captured, held or tied, and executed, one by one...

The murderers then most likely plundered the settlement and left...Why do I think this is what probably happened here? Because the same things were still happening in Europe (Balkans) as late as the 20th century...

People from neighbouring villages killing their neighbours, men, women and children in most brutal ways, and then plundering their homes, and even moving into them...Like what happened in Serbian village of Prebilovci in Bosnia in 1941...

We don't know why this terrible crime was committed in Koszyce...Was it the hatred of "them" because they are different from us (look different, speak different language, pray to different gods)?

Or was it pure greed and material gain that motivated the murderers? One of those "capture the animals and beautiful women and kill the rest" raid, which could explain "some women missing from the pile of dead bodies". The fit ones...

We just don't know...But it is very likely that they were murdered by their neighbours coming from the villages of the Corded Ware culture...

What we know is that when the men (and women) who were away returned to the settlement and found their loved ones butchered, they decided to give them "proper burial"...Only the one who knew the victims intimately could have arranged the bodies in the way they were arranged...

And only the one who cared about the victims would have "equipped them for the journey to the otherworld", with jewellery, tools, weapons, food and water (contained in vessels placed next to the bodies) and animals (the pigs placed in the separate grave next to the human grave)...

This burying of animals with the dead, so they can have animals in the otherworld seem to have been a common practice in Central Europe during Copper and Bronze age...I talked about this in my post "Group portrait"...

The Koszyce archaeological site shows I was probably right when in this article entitled "One for the road" I suggested that if we want to understand ancient burial rituals in Central Europe, all we have to do is look at current burial folklore practices in the same area. Not much has actually changed...

This archaeological site also shows how genetics is cool, and how it is "improving" archaeology. Not just because by determining the relationship between the buried people, we can now much better understand what happened in Koszyce 5000 years ago...

But also because of this: All males carried the same Y chromosome haplotype: I2a. So did all the other male individuals found buried in the Globular amphora culture graves. They all carried I2a genes...How is this improving archaeology? Like this: It wrecks havoc in the field...

Marija Gimbutas in "The Indo-Europeanization of Europe: the intrusion of steppe pastoralists from south Russia and the transformation of Old Europe" hails the Globular Amphora as an "exemplary Indo-European steppe male dominated warrior culture"...

She says that: "It is apparent that the emergence of the Globular Amphora culture in the north European plain (around 3400BC) is crucial to an understanding of the Indo-Europeanization of this part of Europe"...

She also says that: "The fact that the Globular Amphora culture is so homogenous suggests that if these people were indeed IE speakers, they completely succeeded in subverting the indigenous population or in converting them to their own creeds, customs, and language"....

Ah I am so sorry that she is not around any more...It turns out that Gimbutas was soooo sooo wrong about the Globular Amphora culture. They have nothing to do with steppe "Indo-Europeans". They were a forest culture of the mountainous Central Europe...

The fact that their economy was based on raising mostly pigs in its earlier phase, is a dead giveaway that they didn't come from the steppe...Pigs live in forests...Steppe people were cattle and horse herders...

Gimbutas and co must have known this...Or should have known it anyway...

But what they didn't know, cause they couldn't have known it at the time, is that all the macho warrior patriarchal males of the Globular Amphora culture carried I2a genes. The earliest I2a genes in Central Europe were found in Mesolithic Lepenski Vir culture in Serbia, and predate the arrival of the Neolithic farmers...

So the I2a people watched the arrival to the Central Europe with Neolithic farmers. And they watched the arrival to the Central Europe of the Kurgan people. And these people are still in Central Europe...

Here is even cooler result of the latest genetic data. Gimbutas also says that: There is similarity between the burial rites of the Globular Amphora people and those of the "Kurgans of the Maikop culture" in the North Pontic region.

Both used mortuary houses built of stone slabs and practiced the ritual burial of horses, cattle, and dogs, as well as human sacrifice in connection with funeral rites honoring high-ranking males...

According to Gimbutas, Maikop people were "part of the Kurgan II invasion wave"...Guess what haplogroups were found inside the "Kurgans of the Mayop culture"? G2a, I2a, R1a, J2a1b...

G2a and I2a were two dominant haplogroups of the late Neolithic, Copper Age central Europe...

Remember the article I wrote about the origin and spread of the Megalithic culture through Europe, the one entitled "Childe was right"?

In the comments someone asked me "What about Russian dolmans?" These things:

Well Russian dolmens, which were built between the end of the 4th millennium and the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC. are concentrated around, guess??? Maykop culture territory...

As the new data shows that the Megalithic culture seem to have spread rapidly across Europe, most likely by the people of the same tribe, people linked to seafaring, mining...and Russian dolmens are also located on the coast. Of the area rich in ores...

And as we can read in the article entitled "Megalithic tombs in western and northern Neolithic Europe were linked to a kindred society": "males from megalith burials belong almost exclusively to YDNA haplogroup I2a"...Interesting...

So did Maykop people start building Megalithic "mortuary houses built of stone slabs" under the influence of I2a people from central or western Europe?

Did these I2a people arrive to Caucaus by land from Central Europe, more specifically Balkans, together with G2a people? After (or maybe before) the Balkan Neolithic collapse (4000 BC)?

Remember my article "Vinča warriors" in which I asked if we should look for the origin of the militaristic Copper and Bronze Age societies in Neolithic Central European cultures, like Vinča culture...Does this figurine group from Vinča settlement Stubline depict an army? Or at least and armed mob...

Or did they arrive by sea, from Mediterranean, where we find I2a and G2a people spreading together along the coast. Here is a study entitled "Ancient DNA reveals male diffusion through the Neolithic Mediterranean route" which shows that these guys were spreading together along Mediterranean coast around 3000 BC... 

By boat? By boat. Did they also bother checking the Black Sea coast too? I mean this is right around the time when Russian dolmens are beginning to be built...In the Mykop territory...

I talked about Neolithic seafarers in Mediterranean and Atlantic, who were linked to Neolithic miners in my posts "Neolithic seafarers" and "Giant's ring"...

Were they the "prospectors, missionaries" that Childe talked about who spread the Megalithic culture wherever they went looking for stones and then metal from which to make tools and weapons?

The "Kurgan" Maykop culture (3700 BC–3000 BC) guys were mad about making metal weapons and were very good at it (the most ancient bronze sword on record, was made by Maykop people), were also a male dominated society...How did they learn their craft?

You know how copper and bronze metallurgy was invented in the Balkans? Mining and metallurgy are difficult things to figure out yourself and are much easier learned from someone who already knows how to do it...

Like emigrant metallurgists from the Balkans (G2a and possibly I2a) who left during the Balkan Neolithic collapse??? Or earlier??? 

And did these I2a and G2a people, produce Mykop Kurgan culture, after mixing with other people from the Steppe and Caucasus?

So who invaded whom? Did Caucasus people get Europeanised? What influence did these G2a and I2a people have on local cultures? Just technological? Religious? Cultural? Linguistic? Genetic definitely...

So, were Globular Amphora people product of "Kurgan" Maykop "invasion"? Or if there was a population movement from east to west (I talked about this in my post "Not so mobile riders"), was this in fact more like a "going back home to visit the relatives" kind of trip?

Because, there is a big problem with Maykop guys undertaking any mass long distance invasions...

Just like Balkan Neolithic people and Cucuteni-Tripillia people, Maykop people lived sedentary lives...

They were farmers who built terraces for growing their crops...People who build terraces don't go invading countries thousands of miles away...

But Maykop guys sold loads of its metal stuff to their Yamna neighbours. The Maykop guys also taught their Yamna mates a thing or two about how to mine, smelt and cast metal. Into weapons...Some of the Mykop guys possibly even joined the Yamna gangs...For a laugh...And profit...

Well not possibly. Definitely...Did you know that apart from dominant R1b genes (southern Yamna) and R1a genes (Northern Yamna), Yamna men also carried I2a genes? And so did some of the men of pretty much all the cultures surrounding Maykop and Yamna cultures...

How did these I2a guys (from Europe) end up there? And what influence, technological, cultural, linguistic, did these I2a guys (from Europe) have on all these "Indo-European" cultures? Which then "Indo-Europienised" Europe when they wandered (back) into Europe the 4th millennium BC???

So where does this leave Gimbutas theories? And the whole Indo-European thingy? It's a mess...And fun to watch...

Burned house horizon

While reading about the sudden collapse of the Balkan Neolithic cultures, like Vinča culture (pic) at the end of the 5th mill BC, I came across a proposition that maybe it was an epidemic of some sort which could have caused it...

This is a distinct possibility...New, previously not encountered diseases could have wiped out the population with no immunity. 

But we don't have data that proves that something like that happened in the Balkans at the end of the 5th millennium BC.

We however do have proof that epidemics and even pandemics occurred during Neolithic, but not that they were the cause of the collapse of the Neolithic cultures in which they occurred...

Between 1999 and 2001, archaeologists excavated the Frälsegården passage grave in Gökhem parish, Falbygden, western Sweden, which was built between 3300 and 3000 cal. BC. 

In it they discovered remains of up to 78 individuals. Which caught attention of the authors of this study: "Emergence and Spread of Basal Lineages of Yersinia pestis during the Neolithic Decline". 

And in it, the authors state that: 

"Because of a large number of bodies which were buried in the same grave during very short period, 3100–2900 BP, based on carbon dating of 34 individuals...a possible explanation for the magnitude and short duration of this grave was an epidemic event"...

Completely wrong conclusion. We know, based on Early Neolithic data, the the total life expectancy at 15 would have been 28–33 years.

So even if we assume that these guys lived until 40, and that they had children when they were 20, that would mean 5 generations per 100 years, which would mean 15 generations in 300 years...

78 individuals buried in this grave could have been 5 members of a tribe, clan, extended family, which were buried every generation...Not too many...Nothing really to indicate that anything weird went on...

Thankfully the authors of the "Emergence and Spread of Basal Lineages of Yersinia pestis during the Neolithic Decline" paper did think (wrongly) something weird was going on, so:

They analyzed the ancient DNA datasets from individuals of this grave and screened for the presence of known human pathogens. 

Unexpectedly, they found the unambiguous presence of Yersinia pestis, the etiological agent of plague, in two different individuals, dated to 2,900 BP

So again a confirmation that all these people weren't buried in a mass grave because they all died from some disease. Only the people buried last were in fact infected by the plague...

The discovery of Neolithic farmers in Scandinavia infected by plague, not only pre-dates all known cases of plague. The people were infected by the the strain from which all known modern and ancient strains of Y. pestis are derived...

Wow this is amazing...It turns out that plague didn't come from "Dirty" Asians...It came from "Dirty" Europeans...The authors of the study continue to say that:

There is a remarkable overlap between the estimated radiation times of early lineages of Y. pestis, toward Europe and the Eurasian Steppe, and the collapse of Cucuteni/Trypillia (Tripolye) mega-settlements in the Balkans/Eastern Europe.

Now Cucuteni/Trypillia (Tripolye) culture, was a Neolithic–Eneolithic archaeological culture (c. 5500 to 2750 BCE) of Eastern Europe which covered huge territory (350,000 km2) in today's Romania, Moldova and Ukraine..

This culture is famous for its amazing pottery and figurines

But what it should be famous for are their settlements. Not the small villages, like this reconstructed one, which indeed constituted the majority of Cucuteni–Trypillia settlements...

But their "mega cities". During the Middle Trypillia phase (c. 4000 to 3500 BCE), Cucuteni/Trypillia culture built the largest settlements in the Neolithic, some of which had as many as 3000 structures and were possibly inhabited by 20,000 to 46,000 people!!!

The plan of the magnetic survey of the settlement Maidanetske 1. From the article "Governing Tripolye: Integrative architecture in Tripolye settlements"...

Here are reconstruction drawings of the two Cucuteni/Trypillia settlements: 

Talianki, Ukraine – up to 21,000 inhabitants, up to 2,700 houses

Maydanets, Ukraine – up to 29,000 inhabitants, up to 3,000 houses

So far 3000 settlements have been discovered, ranging from small villages to "vast fortified settlements consisting of hundreds and thousands of dwellings surrounded by multiple ditches".

The typical Trypillia hierarchy was one dominant "capital" of more than 100 hectares, surrounded by satellite towns typically in the size range 10–40 hectares and villages in the range of 2–7 hectares. The Capital controlled territories in about 20 km radius

These were basically city states...And these city states of the Cucuteni/Trypillia culture predate Mesopotamian city states, by half a millennium at least...

But very few people know about this...

Anyway, Cucuteni/Trypillia civilisation, because that's what it was really, was a society of subsistence farmers. Cultivating the soil (using an ard or scratch plough), harvesting crops and tending livestock was probably the main occupation for most people.

Typically for a Neolithic culture, the vast majority of their diet consisted of cereal grains. They cultivated club wheat, oats, rye, proso millet, barley and hemp, which were probably ground and baked as unleavened bread in clay ovens or on heated stones in the home...

Now. The article about the origin of the plague, identifies Trypillia Culture mega settlements, built towards the end of the 5th millennium BC, as the initial source of the Y. pestis infection...

Why? Well have you ever thought where did 30,000 people who lived in one of these mega cities go to the toilet? Huge number of people lived in these cities in cramped conditions with degrading sanitation...At least this is what the authors of the plague paper are hinting at...

But I don't think that was the reason...Cucuteni/Trypillia people grew grain in, for that time, huge amounts. And had to store it inside their homes, or communal storage building inside their settlements...And where there is lots of grain, there are mice and rats...

And it is mice and rats that can devastate grain stores and cause famine...Which is probably why Cucuteni/Trypillia people kept cats...Black cats depicted on a ceramic vessel from Cucuteni/Trypillian culture. 4500-4000BC...

This is also the reason why another civilisation which depended heavily on grain, Egyptian civilisation, deified cats...And held cat goddess festival around the time of the grain harvest. 

I talked about it in my post "Bastet"....

But rats also spread plague. The infected rat that carries the disease will infect fleas that live on it. These fleas then transmit the disease on humans... 

The authors of the plague study, say that the ever increasing Cucuteni/Trypillian population living under highly dense conglomerations was "likely under nutritional stress and weakened due to resource overexploitation". Ideal conditions favored epidemics and pandemics...

But the population didn't have to be weakened to catch plague. All you need is one infected rat, which enters the settlement and then dies...In a flea infested cramped neolithic settlement, by the time you know what hit you, you have dead bodies piling up...

Anyway, the paper on Y. pestis concludes that: it is most likely that it was the Trypillia mega-settlements where the ancestor(s) of the plague emerged...

They then says that it then rapidly branched and migrated in all directions, including into the steppe...spreading mainly through early trade networks, rather than massive human migrations. This allowed for a rapid and large-scale expansion of the pathogen...

The authors blame the emergence of the animal traction complex, involving cattle traction, wagons, and ard ploughs, on creating the favorable and unprecedented conditions for a rapid expansion of infectious diseases over large geographic regions...

This same pathogen lineages persisted through the Bronze Age but got eventually extinct. The authors of the plague paper propose that plague may have contributed to the Neolithic decline, which paved the way for the later steppe migrations into Europe...

I agree that this is from where the plague spread east into Asian steppe...But I would like here to propose that paper authors are wrong, and that plague didn't originate in 4th millennium BC Trypillia mega-settlements...

I believe it probably originated in the 7th c. BC in "The First Temperate Neolithic" cultures of the Balkans, the first cultures to practice agriculture in temperate Europe...

This required significant innovations in farming technology previously adapted to a mediterranean climate. Leading temperate agriculture revolution was the Starčevo culture which built Blagotin settlement in Serbia around a temple dedicated to grain. 

I talked about this in my post "Blagotin"...

Why do I think this is where plague emerged? Because of something called "The burned house horizon", which is the geographical extent of the Neolithic phenomenon of people presumably intentionally burning their settlements. 

This was a widespread and long-lasting tradition in what is now Neolithic (grain farming) Southeastern and Eastern Europe, which ended when Neolithic ended...With the end of the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture, the last culture to practice the house burning...

Cucuteni-Trypillian culture brought it to its extreme...There is evidence that every single settlement in the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture practiced house burning. And that not just single houses, but whole settlements were burned regularly... 

Why? No one knows actually 🙂

Proposed explanations so far:

Accidental fire and deliberate burning of houses by invaders:

Some of the burned sites contained large quantities of stored food that was partially destroyed by the fires that burned the houses. Some burned houses also contained human remains...

This "supports the theory that the buildings were burned accidentally or due to enemy attack, as it could be argued that nobody would intentionally burn their food supplies along with their homes and their families"

However...Experiments have shown that unaided, both accidental or deliberate fires, can't produce temperatures that can cause vitrification of the clay from the walls (turn it into ceramic)...Which is found in these burned houses...

This can only happen if you deliberately pile huge amount of combustable material around the house and then light it up. Experimental house burning. Note the amount of extra fuel added to the outside of the clay walls to increase the temperature needed for ceramic vitrification

Additionally, the experimental burning with unaided fires, left the walls almost entirely intact. It would have been relatively easy for the roof to have been repaired quickly, the ash cleared away, and the house reoccupied. Which is not what archaeologists found...

The opposite opinion is that people deliberately burned their own homes. Proposed reasons :

1. weatherproofing (🙂  laughable sorry)

2. recycling of building materials (some of the burned clay from the house walls was reused, but this is an exception not a rule)

3. demolition to create space (no new space created. houses built on top of burned remains)

4. fumigation (!!! discarded as an overkill (!!!) as the damage to the settlement was almost total)

None of this really works as an explanation either...

So what's left is ritual 🙂 Symbolic end of house: the buildings were burned ritually, regularly and deliberately in order to mark the end of the "life" of the house which was seen as a living being...

Weeeeell...Here is what I think happened...

French scientist Paul-Louis Simond (who came to China to battle the Third Pandemic of plague in the late 19th c. and who there discovered how plague spreads through rats and fleas) had noted that:

In Yunnan, China, inhabitants would flee from their homes as soon as they saw dead rats, and on the island of Formosa (Taiwan), residents considered the handling of dead rats heightened the risks of developing plague...

And in "The Epidemic of Pneumonic Plague in Manchuria 1910-1911" we read that "In Harbin itself a large-scale burning took place: of houses which had lodged plague victims or whose inhabitants had been removed"!!!!!

Is this how it all started? An infected rodent would come into the village looking for grains. And die. Someone in the village would get bitten by an infected flea...And would get infected by the plague...

Now people from all early the Neolithic Balkan farming cultures lived in separate single family households which were self sufficient...They didn't have to mix a lot with other people from the settlement...

So in most cases, the infection would first spread to the other members of the household and would most likely be initially localised.  But then people would start getting really sick and dying...

In the beginning it is possible that whole settlements were wiped out...Their bodies discovered by their kin from another settlement. Who then burned the whole place down to kill the evil disease (spirits, ghosts...whatever)...

But maybe the disease was spotted early and the other people from the village did run away from the "accursed sick possessed by the evil spirits" and came back when they were dead to burn them and their house and everything in it...

And burn it properly, making sure everything is completely destroyed and burned to cinder...Or burn the whole village properly, cause "the evil spirits of the disease could be lurking in any of the houses waiting to kill the rest of us"...

It is interesting that "Early Neolithic houses have more artifacts deposited in them, and it is in these early Neolithic phases that burned human remains are most likely to occur"

Something crazy just occurred to me. Why were Vinča culture figurines depicted with masks? What kind of "ritual" were they involved in? http://oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2017/12/mask-from-belo-brdo.html

By the way the Vinča culture majorly culturally and genetically influenced Cucuteni/Trypillia culture

Did people eventually start paying attention to rats entering their settlement and fleeing as soon as they saw a dead rat? Just like the Chinese and Indian peasants still did in the 20th century...

Coming back after a while to burn their houses in giant pyres to incinerate all the rodents and all the fleas?

Once the agriculture developed, and population increased, and settlements became larger and more crowded, and number of rats increased and trade increased, the chances   of plague appearing and spreading became bigger...

Are regular burnings of the Cucuteni-Trypillian settlements really "regular ritual killings of houses" or "frequent killing of rats and fleas in plague infested houses"?

It is actually possible that in the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture this eventually became a ritual. Ritual cleansing of the place. A preventative burning of rats and fleas.

What do you think? I think that this actually explains pretty much every piece of archaeological evidence we have about Neolithic house burning.

It gives us a real reason why someone would resort to such ultimate destruction of his home and everything in it, why sometimes there are bodies burned with the house, why this is done often and why people then just rebuild their houses in the same place...

So is it possible that the Neolithic farmers in the South Eastern Europe would have survived and multiplied, if I was right? Well yes. People do survive epidemics of plague...And continue on...Well, after burning their houses and their dead...

So was the plague the reason for the collapse of the Cucuteni/Trypillia culture? I don't think so...Was the plague the reason for the Neolithic collapse in the 5th millennium BC Balkans? I don't think so...Something  else was. And I will talk about this soon...Sorry...