Seefin passage tomb

This is Seefin passage tomb located atop Seefin Hill, County Wicklow, Ireland. The tomb was built circa 3,300 BC. It was excavated by R. A. Stewart Macalister in 1931, but no artefacts or human remains were found inside...

Several theories have been put forward to explain the empty tomb:

Maybe the remains were removed by the decedents of the people who were originally buried in the tomb, when they moved away...

Maybe the grave was, at some unknown time in the past, desecrated, looted, with all traces of the those interred removed and destroyed...

Or maybe, no-one was actually ever buried in the Seefin passage tomb, because this is not actually a tomb...So what was this structure then?

Here is the last theory I heard that tries to explain what the Seefin tumulus was actually built and used for:

Well, you know how all these passage tombs look like bellies of pregnant women? And how entrances of the passage tombs look like vaginas? 

Well whoever built Seefin passage tomb made sure that nothing was left to the imagination...

A very narrow entrance with labia like door pillars and clitoral lintel...Behind this vulva like entrance, just like in all the other passage tombs, is a long narrow passage (a birth canal), ending in a large chamber (womb)...

Anyone entering this "passage tomb" would have been, symbolically, entering the womb of the mother earth...

In there in complete darkness, in complete sensory isolation, they would (symbolically) die...

To be (symbolically) reborn after leaving the inner chamber (womb), crawling through the narrow passage (birth canal) and squeezing through the narrow entrance (vulva) into the sunshine...

Well this is just a theory that no one can prove (or disprove)...It's a good one though...

Vinča bread

One of several similar cult models of a loaf of bread, from the Neolithic Vinča culture. This one was found at Banjica-Usek archaeological site in Belgrade, capital of Serbia, and was dated to 4500 BC. Length 18 cm, width 6 cm. Collection of Belgrade City Museum...

Here is another one...

Another Vinča culture votive bread...This one could have found its way to Ireland...

From this post ritual hiding behind giant breads and about Neolithic Newgrange temple from Ireland and a very strange similarity between its entrance stone and this votive bread...

Einkorn and emmer wheat were an important part of the diet of ancient Vinča-culture. Cereals were ground using small quern-stones and the flour was made into dough which was then baked in ovens found in every Vinča house...

Photograph of the excavation of the Vinča Belo Brdo site, showing archaeologist Miloje Vasić standing next to a clay oven "in situ" and local villagers employed as excavators standing in the background. Early 20th c.  

Are you an experimental archaeology fan? Do you want to know how to make Neolithic Vinča culture style bread oven? And Bake bread in it? If you are any of the above, then this paper entitled "Late Neolithic ovens in central Balkans region" is a must... 

This is Pločnik archaeological site in Toplica District, Serbia. The 120 hectare settlement was built by people of the Neolithic Vinča culture around 5500 BCE and was used for 800 years, until it was destroyed by fire in 4700 BC... 

Local archaeologists reconstructed several houses and created a small replica neolithic village... 

The houses are equipped with the replicas of furniture, figurines and bread ovens found during the excavation... 

Local archaeologists use the archaeo village to run educational programs for kids. During one of these programs kids were thought how to make bread "neolithic style"...

 

Kids absolutely love kneading dough and making flat bread patties...

These are then placed in clay ovens, baked and then eaten by children themselves...

BTW, Vinča culture guys inherited their obsession with bread from the ancestral Starčevo culture. These where the guys who adopted grain agriculture, originally developed in the climate of the fertile crescent, for the European climate...

I wrote and article about one of their sites, Blagotin, where a temple dedicated to grain was found with many votive clay grain seeds...

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... 

Childe was right

 

This is Dolmen of Pierre-Alot, France...I would here like to talk about three interesting articles I read this week, which together, might shed some new light on the origin, spread and reason for megalithic culture...Or not...

There are over 35,000 currently accounted megaliths in Europe, including megalithic tombs, standing stones, stone circles, alignments, and megalithic buildings or temples...

Most of these were constructed during the Neolithic and the Copper Ages (5th - 3rd millennium BC) and are located in coastal areas...

Their distribution is along the so-called Atlantic façade, including Sweden, Denmark, North Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland, northwest France, northern Spain, and Portugal...

And in the Mediterranean region, including southern and southeastern Spain, southern France, the Islands of Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta and the Balearics, Apulia, northern Italy. And Montenegro, which is not widely known. Like this one. 

You can read more about Montenegrin Tumuli and how they fit into the wider European Megalithic - Metal working culture in these articles...

Interestingly, all these megaliths share similar or even identical architectonic features. Which is why in the later 19th and the first two-thirds of the 20th centuries, archaeologists, like Childe, supported a single origin of megaliths and their spread by a process of diffusion

Childe also, supported the idea of a diffusion by maritime exchange. According to him, the expansion was supported by a megalithic religion of migrant priestly elites who settled down long enough among local societies for the new ideas to take root...

Later, Childe expanded his theory about the spreading of a megalithic religion along the coastlines of western Europe by way of missionaries or prospectors...

With the introduction of radiocarbon dates and processual approaches, the idea of an independent emergence of the same kind of stone architecture in several regions arose in the late 20th century, because early C14 results did not support the diffusion model...

Renfrew was the first to exploit the new chronological results and proposed five independent nucleus centers, including Portugal, Andalusia, Brittany, southwest England, Denmark, and possibly Ireland for the emergence of megaliths in Europe...

The model of an independent emergence of megaliths in several regions and sedentary, immobile farming communities has remained dominant in the research literature since then...

However, since the 1970s, the number of C14 dates of megaliths has expanded enormously. And it turned out Childe was right...

The radiocarbon results suggest that megalithic graves emerged within a time interval of 200 to 300 years in the second half of the fifth millennium cal BC in northwest France, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula...

Northwest France is, so far, the only megalithic region in Europe which exhibits a pre-megalithic monumental sequence and transitional structures to the megaliths, suggesting northern France as the region of origin for the megalithic phenomenon...

For the remaining regions with an early megalithic proliferation in the fifth millennium cal BC (Catalonia, southern France, Corsica, Sardinia, Portugal and Italy), megaliths are found in small clusters as exceptional grave forms for this period in their respective regions...

A fresh expansion occurred during the first half of the fourth millennium cal BC when thousands of passage graves were built along the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula, Ireland, England, Scotland, and France...

In the second half of the fourth millennium cal BC, the passage grave tradition finally reaches Scandinavia and the Funnel Beaker areas. Again, there is evidence for the spread of megalithic architecture along the seaway...

In the second half of the fourth millennium cal BC, the passage grave tradition finally reaches Scandinavia and the Funnel Beaker areas. Again, there is evidence for the spread of megalithic architecture along the seaway...

Here is what this looks like visually

The fast coastal distribution emphasizes the maritime linkage of these societies and a diffusion of the passage grave tradition along the seaway...

So, the older generation of archaeologists (like Childe) were correct concerning a single origin and maritime diffusion of the megalithic concept and accompanying radical economic and social changes. Ha!

This is the gist from the paper: "Radiocarbon dates and Bayesian modeling support maritime diffusion model for megaliths in Europe"

Now at the end of the paper the author says: 

"The megalithic movements must have been powerful to spread with such rapidity...and the maritime skills, knowledge, and technology of these societies must have been much more developed than hitherto presumed"

In my article "Neolithic seafarers" I talked about the neolithic mining and seafaring societies whose trading routes seem to have spanned the whole of Mediterranean  sea. 

In my article "Giant's ring" I talked about the possibility that these seafarers probably reached Ireland in the early 4th millennium BC and brought with them Megalithic culture and genes...

So we know that there was a mining/seafaring culture, caste, elite...in Neolithic Mediterranean...

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

Interesting...Kind of like a mining/seafaring culture, caste, elite...

According to the author of the article I am talking about here Childe was wrong in one thing: he believed that the source of the Megalithic culture was in Mediterranean...

But was he? I am not contradicting the data that points at Northern France as the first place where we find Megaliths...But were the people who built these first megaliths originally from Northern France? Or from Mediterranean? The seafarers/miners/prospectors/missionaries...

And even if the Megalithic idea originated in the Northeastern France, were the people who spread it the same Mediterranean seafarers/miners/prospectors/missionaries who scoured European coast looking for best obsidian, flint, amber and later copper, zinc...

Mining, metalworking, ship building and seafaring are all extremely specialised activities, which require long training which can be only obtained from people who already know how to do it. Which in Neolithic was your own kin...

So it is very likely that these Neolithic seafarers/miners...and megalithic builders, were all related...Which is what the genetic data obtained from the early megalithic graves is confirming...

This is very interesting, right?

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...