Mesolithic sturgeon fishermen

Objects made of stone, dated to 6300 – 5990 BC and excavated in houses of the Mesolithic Lepenski vir culture, 9500-5500BC, Danube Iron Gates gorge, eastern Serbia. All have carvings on the surface. Lengths: 35-45cm. Classified as "stone sceptres". But are they?

The other day I came across the article "Big Fish Hunting: interpretation of stone clubs from Lepenski Vir" by Ivana Živaljević.

In this paper, the author proposes that these objects were in fact stone clubs or mallets, which may have been used in fishing as stunners. Not any fish fishing...Sturgeon fishing...

These giant fishes were, until very recently abundant in Danube river. They are migratory fishes, which spend most of their life in the Black and Azov sea, but migrate every spring into rivers to spawn...

And they are easily caught using fish traps. 19th c. sturgeon traps in the Danube Iron Gates gorge were described as follows: The narrow branches of the Danube are disrupted [by] double post structures made from timber, arranged in a V-shape, opening downstream...

Once the sturgeons enter, it is not their habit to turn downstream. As they proceed in the ever-narrowing funnel, they wind up in the 'death chamber' at the end...” All you need to do then is kill it and drag it out of the water...

Danube Iron Gates gorge is exactly where Mesolithic Lepenski vir settlement was located. We know that people from Lepenski vir were fishermen, judging by the huge number of fish bones found in the settlement, particularly sturgeon bones...

There is no evidence how Lepenski vir people caught sturgeons, but we can assume that they used fish traps used by fishermen world over to catch migratory fish, either in rivers or in tidal seas.

Ivana Živaljević proposes that once sturgeons were stranded inside the "death chamber" at the end of the trap, that they were basically clubbed to death using stone mallets...

If you are wondering why they didn't use spears to finish the fish off, these are armored fish with thick bony plates protecting their heads and their bodies...

So basically the easiest way to kill these monsters was to smash their skulls with clubs, mallets. Like the above "stone scpetres"? What do you think? Plausible? Would a longer wooden club been better for this? I don't know...

Ivana Živaljević says that "The massive and often ornamented stone clubs were initially interpreted as 'magic' and 'ritual' devices; however, it should be noted that the 'ritual' and 'profane' uses of an object need not exclude one another"...

There is one reason why Ivana Živaljević might be right in thinking that maybe these stone objects were both stone mallets used for killing giant sturgeons and sacred sceptres...

One other thing found in many Lepenski vir houses is this: a  statue carved out of a large river pebble (boulder). It is believed by many archaeologists that it depicts a human-fish hybrid...And not any fish. A human-sturgeon hybrid...

The row of bumps on the statue's back resemble sturgeon spinal scutes.

But also human spinal vertebrae...

The large downturned statue mouth resembles mouths of large sturgeons once caught in the Danube river. 

But also human mouths...Sad human mouths...

So it is possible that Lepenski vir people didn't see sturgeons as just "giant fishes"...According to one of the Serbian archaeologists "sculpted boulders from Lepenski Vir could represent metamorphosis of the deceased into fish"...

Who knows...But there is definitely something fishy going on here...

By the way, did you know that the migration of giant sturgeons up Danube river started every year "as soon as the the snow started melting, and water level started to rise, in late February, early March". In pisces...I talked about pisces as an animal calendar marker for the migration of continental European salmon (now extinct) in my post "Fishes"...

If you have found this interesting, you might find this post interesting too: Sun over pyramid, sun worship in the Lepenski Vir culture... 

Sun on top of pyramid

In 2017, after the discovery of a strange trapezoid Natufian culture "shrine" (L) with paved floor and central hearth:

I wrote an article asking is there a link between it and and Lepenski Vir trapezoid houses (R) with paved floors and central hearths...

As a link I proposed Pre Potery Neolithic A and B cultures of levant, which were established by the descendants of the Natufians...

They, just like Lepenski Vir people buried their dead under the floors of their houses. And they plastered the heads of their ancestors, and displayed them in their settlements...

Well Lepenski Vir people made stone heads and displayed them in their settlements...

Well, I just found out today that it seems someone else pointed at possible link between Lepenski Vir culture and Pre Pottery Neolithic Levant cultures. In 2007...

Dusan Boric from Columbia University. In his article "The house between grand narratives and microhistories: a house society in the Balkans" he says that:

And then

And that's all 10 years before the discovery of the Natufian trapezoid "shrine"...You should read his article. It's an interesting one. The archaeologists who excavated Lepenski Vir, believed that the trapezoidal houses developed from shrines and were sacred "house-shrines"...

They believed that the people from Lepenski Vir built their houses to resemble the rocky outcrop, cliff, hill, called Treskavac, which is clearly visible from the settlement site...

The hill looks like a flat top pyramid. The houses look exactly like the hill. They are equilateral triangles with the cut off top...

But why would anyone bother building houses that look like a hill? Because every summer solstice, at sunrise, if you stand at the Lepenski Vir site, you see this. The sun on top of the pyramid...

I mean that will leave an impression, right? Now we are talking about 6300-6000 BC...And people in the Balkans being obsessed with sun on top of a pyramid. So much so that they built house-shines in its liking...

Do you think this is where the idea that "pyramids are cool" comes from?

Here is something interesting about these Mesolithic pyramid worshipers. The carried two very interesting haplogroups: I2 and R1b. The I2 are generally accepted as being Neolithic "Old Europeans". But R1b are generally thought to be Bronze Age "Invaders from Eurasian steppe"...

It seems reality is different from "generally accepted and believed" things...From the pyramid worship point of view, it is very very very interesting that these Lepenski Vir R1b people seem to have dispersed in all directions...Some time around 6000BC...

The earliest R1b R-V88 sample from Lepenski Vir is about 11,000 years old. From the Balkans, these individuals at some stage, in one or many waves, moved to Ukraine, where their eastern expansion ends. They also moved north, to Germany, and south, to the Mediterranean.

One theory is that at some point all R-V88 lived in Sardinia and that around 7,500 years ago some of them crossed from Sardinia into Africa. It is also possible that RV88 arrived to Africa through Levant. But to Africa they arrived, before any pyramid was built there...

Some of these R-V88 carriers moved from the coast towards, what was then, Lake Mega Chad, a much larger version of Lake Chad, that existed during the Green Sahara period, which lasted until 5,500 years ago...

As the area became dry, they moved further and further south. They lived in the oases, rivers, and lakes of Niger, Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria. Their genes are today found in west African populations...

But not all of the R1b R-V88 moved into African Interior. They show up today throughout the Mediterranean, including Spain, Malta, Lebanon, Egypt, and amongst Jewish populations...You can read more about R1b distribution on Eupedia R1b page...

Were some of them among the people who one day, all that time ago, stood on the Giza plateau looking at the vast emptiness before them and said: you know what would look great here? A pyramid. To remind us of the Old Country...

One thing that really puzzles me. Lepenski Vir culture was both territorially and numerically small, at least based on the archaeological data. Yet, they managed to cross half the world, spread all over Mediterranean and central Africa. How?

In Cameroon alone their descendants make up 90% of the male population...Something is wrong here...

I think we are missing something important...

Sickle

How did the Mesolithic hunter gatherers get the idea to start eating wild grains? Well my guess was that year after year they watched herds of deer and wild donkeys gorge themselves on ripe emmer wheat or einkorn wheat, both of which grow wild in huge quantities in Middle East. 

But it turns out these wild grains have developed sharp inedible husks and awns (long bristle) to protect their seeds from being eaten by grazing animals which basically avoided the ripe wild grasses. So the idea to start collecting and eating the wild grain seeds must have come to our ancestors in some other way. But once someone did get the idea to start collecting wild grain seeds they ended up with this:

Now luckily the Mesolithic people from Middle East already had all the tools and technique to convert the hard, basically inedible and indigestible seeds into food. This is because for a long time before they tried to eat grain, they have been collecting, processing, cooking and eating acorns. You can read more about human consumption of acorns in this series of posts on my blog. 

One thing that the Mesolithic people didn't have is the way to efficiently collect the wild wheat seeds. Basically they were yet to invent tools for harvesting: sickle. Sickle is a curved blade with a cutting (normally serrated) edge on the inside of the curve. 

So what did our Mesolithic grain gatherers do? Well the most logical thing. They looked at the deer and donkeys grazing on wild grasses and thought: "Their teeth are doing pretty good job cutting through the grass stems. If we kill a deer or a donkey and get its jaw bone (mandible) with all its teeth still in place, we can use it to cut through grain stems as well as deer and donkeys can..."

And they did just that. They started using deer and donkey mandibles to harvest grain. 

Now, just to clarify that I didn't just dream up the possibility that deer mandibles were used as the first sickles myself. Have a look at this. 

This is a deer jaw sickle from USA. Bone sickles for cutting grass, made from the lower jaw of deer, are found most commonly in central and western Oklahoma. Only one side of the jaw was used and this was lashed onto a wooden handle for service as a grass cutting tool. Actual examples of mounted specimens have been recovered intact from dry caves or rock shelters in the Ozarks area of Arkansas. 

Here is one mounted on a handle:

Article that talks about these jaw sickles can be found here: "The Identification of a Prehistoric Bone Tool from the Midwest: The Deer-Jaw Sickle" by James A. Brown 

Wild grains are kind of grass, right?

Deer mandibles were found in the oldest grain farmer's temple in Europe located in Starčevo culture Blagotin settlement, Serbia and dated to the 7th millennium BC. 

In Blagotin we find several overlapping phases of the settlement development. The earliest feature of the site is a 2,5 meter deep sacrificial pit, around which the temple was later built. At the bottom of the pit archaeologists have found a ritually broken deer scull with separated mandibles positioned at a certain angle. 

Why deer mandibles?

Official theory is that "this seems to connect the Starčevo culture to the much older Paleolithic deer cultures of Europe from the time before the last Ice Age. This makes Starčevo culture a link between the Paleolithic Mesolithic Hunter gatherer cultures and Neolithic agrarian cultures". 

But is it possible that the reason why deer mandibles were placed at the bottom of the sacrificial pit was because it was deer which lead hunter gatherers to the wild grain in the first place. And because it was deer mandibles which were used as the first sickles for harvesting first wild and later domesticated grain. 

So deer mandibles at the bottom of the sacrificial pit at the centre of the grain farmer's temple suddenly makes a lot of sense. 

This also explains why deer is found as a symbol in many agrarian cultures. 

Now people using deer mandibles as sickles quickly realised that they are in fact not very good cutting implements. Teeth are not very sharp to start with compared with flint blades and they can't be sharpened. Once they get blunt you have to throw the whole mandible away and go kill another deer or donkey to get a new jaw. So one day someone smart looked at his flint blade and his mandible sickle and thought: "if only I could stick this flint blade into the jaw bone instead of the stupid teeth". Well whoever that person was he did exactly that, and the next incarnation of a sickle was born: deer or donkey mandible with real teeth being replaced with sharp stone "teeth" micro blades.

This type of sickle quickly proved to be much much better than the original "o'naturel" one. Stone teeth were much sharper and when they got blunt, all you needed to do was replace them with newly chipped sharp ones. No need to go hunting for deer or donkeys every time you need to sharpen your sickle. 

But soon more and more people wanted sickles and for each new sickle (actually for each two new sickles) someone had to go and find and kill a deer or a donkey, get the mandibles....Boring...

So someone smart (again) thought: "If I get a piece of wood which is roughly shaped like a deer or donkey mandible and I stick stone micro blades into it I get a sickle. No need to go hunting for deer or donkeys. I can make ten of these a day." And this is exactly what he did and the next incarnation of a sickle was born: wooden "mandible" with stone "teeth" micro blades. 

Here is a neolithic example:

And here is an Ancient Egyptian example:

Some smart people then thought: "Why do we have to bother with this wooden bit? Why don't we just make the whole bloody thing out of one single piece of stone"? And so they did. And the third incarnation of a sickle was born, a "mandible with teeth" made of single piece of sharpened stone. Like this Bronze Age Sumerian one:

In Iran they even made them from fired clay. This is a clay sickle (A33006) from the site of Chogha Mish in Iran, ca. 3400–3100 BC, currently kept in the Oriental Institute in Chicago. Such clay sickles were widespread in use at the site and have a sharp cutting edge. The edge of this sickle is actually still quite sharp!

As metallurgy developed, sickles started being made of bronze. The "stone mandible with teeth" was replaced with "bronze mandible with (or without) teeth". 

Like this Middle Bronze Age sickle dated to 15th-12th century BC from Europe.

Or this Early Iron Age sickle dated to 7th-6th century BC from Europe. No this sickle is not shaped like a bird. It is shaped like a mandible...

Finally we arrive to the sickles made from iron, like this Roman sickle.

Which is basically the same familiar sickle we all know

Now the word "sickle" comes from Middle English "sikel", from Old English "sicol, siċel", from Proto-Germanic "*sikilō" (ploughshare), of uncertain origin. Possibly a borrowing from Latin "sēcula" (sickle) or, alternatively derived as a diminutive of Proto-Germanic "*seką" (ploughshare), from Proto-Indo-European "*seg-", a variant of Proto-Indo-European "*sek-" (to cut). 

The root "s(e)k" is I believe onomatopoeic. This is the sound which a blade makes when pulled across something in order to cut it. The sound you hear is: “sssssssk”. 

Here you can hear sounds of flesh being cut with a blade. When you cut something off with a sudden hit of blade sound shortens to "tsk" or "tsak". Here you can hear sounds of chopping with a blade. 

What is really interesting is that in Celtic and South Slavic languages the words which are derived from the "s(e)k" basically describe making of a stone blade from a stone and then using of this stone blade. You get a shingly stone, slate, or some other stone that can be split and chipped, like flint, you chip it, split it until you get a sharp blade. Husks and chips fall off in the process. Then you can use it to cut, split and sever…

Here is the Irish example cluster:

Scaineamh– shingly
Sclata– slate
Scaineadh-crack, split

Scoilt – split, crack, cleavage, fissure, parting
Sceallog – chip, thin slice
Scealla – shale, flake
Scablail – chisel work
Scaid – husks
Scaineach – thin, cracked
Scean,scian (pronounced shkian) – knife
Scean – crack, split, sever
Scailp – chasm or a cleft 

Here is the corresponding south Slavic word cluster. You will notice that it is a lot bigger and wider than the Irish one, but it covers the same word range needed to describe making of a stone blade from as tone as well as all the metal blades and their usage. 

Školjka – shell. Shells are sharp and could have been what gave people idea to create first blades
Skriljac – slate. This stone can be easily chipped and was used for weapon blades. 
Skalja – small thin chips of stone or wood
Sek(sometimes pronounced as sik or sk)– root word meaning to cut but also a blade. Word "seći" (to cut) comes from sekti.
Sečivo (pronounced sechivo) – blade which probably comes from sekivo.
Sekira (sikira, skira) – axe
Sekare (škare pronounces shkare) – scissors
Sekia (sekian) – knife. This word is now preserved in Bosnian slang word for knife “ćakija” (sekia). This word can also be deduced from a word škia (pronounced shkia) which is a dinaric dialect word which means a thin hand sliced tobacco. 
Sekač – a one sided blade
Škiljiti – to squint, to make your eyes look like as if they were two cuts.
Skija – a blade on a sled, and later a ski. 
Sekutić – front tooth
Usek,zasek – cut, groove
Sek – log house where logs, which are also called sek, are connected by interlocking cuts made at their ends.
Seknuti – to strike or hit suddenly
Škljocati - to make a noise by closing something sharp like teeth or scissors.
Škrgutati – to grind teeth
Škopiti – to castrate, to cut balls off.
Skulj – a castrated ram
Škrip – a cut, a narrow space

I wonder if other Indoeuropean languages have the same or similar clusters?

How old is this word root? I believe that it comes at least from Neolithic if not from Mesolithic. And I think that we have a proof for this. 

Sumerian language is said to be language isolate, not related to any living language of today. 

In Sumerian dictionary we find these words:


"sag̃a, sag̃, sig̃" - to cut, break, harvest, to make harvesting motion

Now in the dictionary you can read that the sign "g̃" was pronounced as "ng"? But is it possible that in the case of this word the sound was "g" and not "ng"? After all we don't really know how the Sumerian language sounded like. Everything we have is a reconstruction...

And if this word was pronounced ad "sag", "sig" this sounds very very similar to "seg, sek" the Indoeuropean root meaning "to cut". 

Is it possible that here we have pure Indoeuropean word borrowed into the Sumerian language? Or was this a Sumerian word borrowed in Indoeuropean languages? Or is this word even older and comes from the time when the first Mesolithic people in Middle East started using deer and donkey mandibles to harvest grains? And was the word therefore borrowed from that old language into both Sumerian and PIE? I am not sure. 

What is even more interesting is that in Sumerian dictionary we also find these words:

"zú, zu" - tooth, teeth; prong; thorn; blade; ivory; flint, chert; obsidian; natural glass.

"zubu, zubi" - sickle (zú, 'flint; tooth', + bu[r], 'to pull, draw, cut off') 

Remember that the first sickle was basically a deer or donkey mandible (jaw bone with teeth)? And that ever since sickles were basically more and more efficient imitations of jaw bones with teeth?

This Sumerian word literally describes a sickle as "teeth used for cutting". Mad or what?

But it gets even better. In Slavic languages the word for tooth is "zub" and for teeth is "zubi". These words have the same root as the Sumerian word for tooth "zu". And even better Slavic plural teeth "zubi" is the same as Sumerian "zubi" sickle. Sickle literally, as we can see from the above picture, being "teeth" used for cutting wheat...

Now of course the Slavic "zub" (tooth) comes from Proto-Slavic "zǫbъ" (tooth) apparently from Proto-Balto-Slavic "*źambas", from Proto-Indo-European "*ǵómbʰos" (tooth, teeth, peg).

Baltic cognates include Lithuanian "žam̃bas" (sharp edge) and Latvian "zobs" (tooth).

Indo-European cognates include Ancient Greek γόμφος gómphos (peg) and γομφίος gomfíos (tooth), Sanskrit जम्भ jámbha (tooth, tusk, swallowing) and Proto-Germanic *kambaz (comb).

Here I need to ask a question: How is it possible that Slavic (and Baltic) word for tooth has the same root as Sumerian word for tooth starting with "z", while all the other Indoeuropean words for tooth have the root starting with "k,g,j" and the root of the whole cluster starts with "g"? 
Is it the case that this was originally PIE root starting with "k,g,j". And that it was somehow later changed by both Slavic and Sumerian languages, to start with "z"? 
Or is it that the original root, which was much older than both Sumerian and PIE originally started with "z". And that this root was preserved in Slavic and Sumerian languages, while it got corrupted in other Indoeuropean languages where it was changed to start with "k,g,j"? 
I believe that the second explanation is probably closer to the truth. After all the sound you make when you vocalise while showing your teeth is "zzzzz" from which the words for tooth "zu" (Sumerian) and "zub" (Slavic) come from.  Logical right? What are we gonna call that thing you are showing? I suggest something that starts with "ZZZZ", the sound I can make while showing that thing...

Now this is not the only example of such common old word, whose root "z", is found in Sumerian and Slavic languages but was corrupted into "g,k,j" in other Indoeuropean languages. And believe or not these other words are the words for "grain", "life", "breath" all logically related to teeth. 

In Sumerian language we find this word:

"zi" (ži?) - breathing, breath (of life), life, throat, soul...
"zi(d)" "še" - flour, meal
"zíz" - emmer (wheat)
"še" - barley, grain

In Slavic languages the word for "life" is "život". This word comes from the root "živ" which means "alive".

"živ" - alive
"život" - life, stomach
"zev" - yawn (possibly related as yawning is breathing so it could be a remnant of the old meaning zi - breath)
"žir" - acorn (the original first starch food which predates grain. You can read more about human consumption of acorns through history in these posts). In the Balkans the word žir in the past actually meant all plant food. In Eastern Slavic languages, the word for acorn is "želud" which is interesting because in Serbian the word for stomach is "želudac". This word also has the same root as žir.
"žito" - grain

In all the other Indoeuropean languages these words, if they even exist, start with "g,k,j"...

You can read about this in more detail in my post "Breath". 

So in Sumerian and Slavic languages, the word for breath of life, life force, life, grain and acorns (two main staple foods of our ancestors which sustain life), the teeth which are used to eat food, but also to cut wheat all have the same root: "z". 

How is this possible? And why is this not recognised, talked about?

O and one more thing, while we are talking about common wheat related words in Sumerian and Slavic languages. 

In my post "Crop devouring insect" A weevil, a type of beetle which can damage and kill crops, particularly grains and devastate granaries causing famine, has the same name in South Slavic languages and Sumerian...

What do you think about all this?

Natufian house

According to a report in Seeker, published in August 2017, researchers led by Tobias Richter of the University of Copenhagen have excavated a Natufian culture site in Jordan known as Shubayqa 1, which was occupied between 12,600 and 10,000 BC. The early radiocarbon date for the site, obtained through accelerator mass spectrometry, suggests that Natufians lived across the region of the Levant earlier than had been previously thought, and adapted to a wide range of habitats. The site could also offer scientists information on the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. Richter said the people living at Shubayqa 1 domesticated dogs as early as 12,000 BC. They produced art in the form of carved bone and stone figures. They also buried their dead. “Some have argued that this is evidence for the presence of ritual specialists—shamans—or some kind of group leaders,” Richter said. “What seems clear is that the Natufians had developed a complex symbolic cosmology and treated their dead with respect.”

They also built one of the world’s earliest stone buildings, complete with a stone-paved floor. A stone-lined fire pit, and food remains from birds, gazelle, and tubers, vegetables, and wild cereals and legumes were also uncovered.

This is the building the article is talking about:

In the article "High Resolution AMS Dates from Shubayqa 1, northeast Jordan Reveal Complex Origins of Late Epipalaeolithic Natufian in the Levant" by Tobias Richter, Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, Lisa Yeomans & Elisabetta Boaretto, we can see the aerial view of Shubayqa 1 showing the main excavation area A/B and location of Shubayqa 1 (insert bottom left). And in the centre we can see the above house with the paved floor and the stone lined hearth, which is clearly trapezoid in its shape.

This is very very interesting. Because there is another site, in Serbia, full of trapezoid houses with paved floors and central lined hearth.

Lepenski Vir, located in Serbia, is an important archaeological site of the Mesolithic Iron Gates culture of the Balkans. The latest radiocarbon and AMS data suggests that the chronology of Lepenski Vir is compressed between 9500/7200-6000 BC. The late Lepenski Vir (6300-6000 BC) architectural development was the development of the Trapezoidal buildings and monumental sculpture...

The houses are completely standardized in design, and have a very distinct shape, built according to a complicated geometric pattern.  

They however greatly vary in size. The smallest of the houses have an area of 1.5 m2 (16 sq ft) while the largest one covers 30 m2 (320 sq ft). Here are these trapezoidal buildings in situ.

In Lepenski Vir, it appears that there was a process of gradual desacralization, which means that the shrines turned into the houses in time.

The basis of each of the houses is a circle segment of exactly 60 degrees, constructed in the manner of an equilateral triangle. The tip of the trapezoid base, a shape previously unknown in human settlements, is pointed into the direction of the prevailing wind (košava).  The material used for the floors is the local limestone clay, which, when mixed with the animal dung and ash, hardens like a concrete. Because of that, the floors are almost in perfect condition. On the edges of the floors there are remnants of the stone reinforcements which served as the carriers of the upper constructions, which means the houses were covered. The covering material was some easily degradable material or was similar to the surrounding loess, so it couldn't be distinguished from it during the excavations.

According to the archaeologists who worked on the site, the planned design of the settlement, its functionality and proportional forms, shows the almost modern sense of architecture. Despite a major age distance between then and now, the architectural plan of the settlement seems so contemporary and recognizable today.

The shape of the house base was, until I saw the above Natufian house, thought to be completely authentic and not recorded in any other locality.

Now what? Are these two cultures connected? 

Let's see what we have:

Natufian single trapezoid house (temple???) with stone paved floor and stone lined hearth. 

Lepenski vir trapezoid houses with stone paved floors and stone lined hearths, which Serbian archaeologists say developed from temples...

Natufians founded Jericho which may be the oldest city in the world. People of the PPNA culture which succeeds the Natufian culture in Jericho, buried their dead under the floors of their houses. There are 279 burials, below floors, under household foundations, and in between walls found in the PPNA period layer in Jericho. During PPNB period, Skulls were often dug up and reburied, or mottled with clay and (presumably) displayed. 

Lepenski vir people also buried their dead under the floors of their houses, sometimes with the head cut off. They also made many stone heads which were displayed in the settlements.

Is this all just a coincidence? The cultural traits I have just described are so unique, and dates of the late Natufian culture and the early Lepenski vir culture are so close, that I believe that there is a distinct possibility that there is a link between these two cultures.

And so did Dusan Boric from Columbia University. In his article "The house between grand narratives and microhistories: a house society in the Balkans" he says that:

And:

And that's all 10 years before the discovery of the Natufian trapezoid "shrine"...You should read his article. It's an interesting one. 

The archaeologists who excavated Lepenski Vir, believed that the trapezoidal houses developed from shrines and were sacred "house-shrines". 

They believed that the people from Lepenski Vir built their houses to resemble the rocky outcrop, cliff, hill, called Treskavac, which is clearly visible from the settlement site.

The hill looks like a flat top pyramid. As you can see above, the Lepenski Vir houses look exactly like the hill. They are equilateral triangles with the cut off top.

But why would anyone bother building houses that look like a hill? Because every summer solstice, at sunrise, if you stand at the Lepenski Vir site, you see this. The sun on top of the pyramid...

I mean that will leave an impression, right? Now we are talking about 6300-6000 BC...And people in the Balkans being obsessed with sun on top of a pyramid. So much so that they built house-shines in its liking...

Do you think this is where the idea that "pyramids are cool" comes from? I don't know but I think it could have...

Here is something interesting about these Mesolithic pyramid worshipers. The carried two very interesting haplogroups: I2 and R1b. The I2 are generally accepted as being Neolithic "Old Europeans". But R1b are generally thought to be Bronze Age "Invaders from Eurasian steppe"...

It seems reality is different from "generally accepted and believed" things...From the pyramid worship point of view, it is very very very interesting that these Lepenski Vir R1b people seem to have dispersed in all directions...Some time around 6000BC...

The earliest R1b R-V88 sample from Lepenski Vir is about 11,000 years old. From the Balkans, these individuals moved to Ukraine, where their eastern expansion ends. They also moved south, to the Mediterranean. 

One theory is that at some point all R-V88 lived in Sardinia and that around 7,500 years ago some of them crossed from Sardinia into Africa. It is also possible that RV88 arrived to Africa through Levant. Or from several directions at different times. But to Africa they arrived, and before any pyramid was built there... 

Some of these R-V88 carriers moved from the coast towards, what was then, Lake Mega Chad, a much larger version of Lake Chad, that existed during the Green Sahara period, which lasted until 5,500 years ago. 

As the area became dry, these people moved further and further south. They lived in the oases, rivers, and lakes of Niger, Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria. Their genes are still present in the population of that area.

But not all. They show up today throughout the Mediterranean, including Spain, Malta, Lebanon, Egypt, and amongst Jewish populations. 

Were some of them among the people who built first pyramids in Egypt?

Were some of theses R1b guys among the people, who one day, all that time ago, stood on the Giza plateau looking at the vast emptiness before them and said: you know what would look great here? A pyramid. To remind us of the Old Country...

What do you think?