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...

Not so mobile riders

Yamnaya invasion never happened??? 

Summary of the new paper just released: "...findings imply that Caucasian communities were not highly mobile and did not undertake large-scale migrations...during 4th and 3rd millennium BCE..."!!!

The research team analysed the isotopic composition of carbon and nitrogen in bone collagen from the skeletal remains of 150 people, taken from eight sites. The finds date back to a period from about 5000 to about 500 BCE...

In addition, the scientists compared this data with the isotope ratios in the bone collagen of 50 animals, as well as with the local vegetation of that time. The isotope ratios in bone collagen reflect the isotope ratios in the main foodstuffs that a person eats...

As it turns out, the diets of these groups were mainly based on the foodstuffs within the landscapes where their remains were found...

"The communities apparently remained within their respective ecological areas and did not switch between the steppes, forest steppes or higher regions," explains Sandra Pichler from the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Basel, co-author of the study...

So, this means, that there was no "fast, mass migration", otherwise known as "the invasion of mounted steppe warriors" of Europe by Yamnaya (R1b) people during early Bronze Age...

Here is the paper: "Diet and subsistence in Bronze Age pastoral communities from the southern Russian steppes and the North Caucasus"

Now this directly contradicts things like "...Corded Ware people carried mostly Western Steppe Herder (WSH) ancestry and were closely related to the people of the Yamnaya culture, documenting a massive migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery, the Eurasian steppes..."

The above interpretation of the genetic links between Corded Ware and Yamnaya has already been questioned by archaeologists as being too simple, as it ignores the complex processes involved in archaeological explanations. Now the archaeologists have data to completely destroy the above interpretation. If there was an influx of Yamnaya into Corded ware culture, it was more of a slow diffusion through the steppe / forest boundary, rather than through massive fast migration...

I never really bought into this Yamnaya invasion theory. Because of some practical reasons. 

This is currently accepted map of the westward migration of R1b into Europe...From this great page about R1b on Eurpedia

 

This map seems logical. We are talking about horse riding, wagon pulling, herding warrior tribes from the steppe. It would indeed be the most logical for them to move over land, and if possible over grassland...

But moving into Europe that way on horse back and oxen pulled carts would have been very difficult if not impossible. Europe is predominantly mountainous country, so not suitable for large horse back - oxen cart migration...

If you are lagging your whole belonging on horse back - oxen cart, there are basically only two possible ways into Europe from the Yamna homeland:

But the northern route is blocked by giant forests which once covered most of what is today Poland, Northern Ukraine and East Germany.

This would have made the migration down the southern route the most likely. But if you follow that route you eventually get stuck in Hungarian, Slovakian planes, surrounded by high wooded mountains. Where you have to dismount if you want to go any further...

That I am not the first to notice this "one way street into Europe from the steppe" can be seen from this map from "The genetic and cultural barrier of the Pontic-Caspian steppe – forest-steppe ecotone":

The map description: Typical migration routes through European steppes and forest-steppes. Red line represents the persistent cultural and genetic barrier, with the latest evolution in steppe region represented by the shift from dashed line to the north. Arrows show the most common population movements. 

So again, right into the Danube catchment area of Central Europe. 

So the migration of the steppe R1b westward did happen. Just not as an invasion of the hordes of horse riding, Kurgan building warriors, which suddenly burst out of the steppe and wiped out the old Europe...The crossing of the steppe / forest barrier requires a change in lifestyle and adaptation to the new environment. Which takes time and is easiest to achieve through mixing with the local forest population, which already posses the necessary knowhow...

Anyway, this is a completely new study, just released, who knows...I am very curious to see what the archaeological community is going to say about it...