Home | Category: Early Settlements and Signs of Civilization in Europe
FIRST MODERN HUMANS IN NORTHERN EUROPE
Ales Stenar, Sweden's Stonehedge
The earliest remains of modern man in Europe is a 40,000-year-old skull of a teenage boy found in a cave in Romania. In a January 2007 article in Science, scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences and the University of Colorado, reported that they found human teeth, tools, carved ivory and other artifacts , dated to 40,000 to 42,000 years ago, at an archaeological site on the Dom River 400 kilometers south of Moscow. This finding shows that early modern man migrated further north than previously thought.
The second earliest fossils remains of modern man in Europe are a jaw and part of skull found in 2002 (and announced in September 2003) in Pestera cu Oasem a cave in the southwestern Carpathian mountains in Romania. Dated to 34,000 to 36,000 years ago, the specimen has a somewhat primitive jaw bone and large developed molars, leading some scientists to speculate the fossils had come from a cross breed between modern man and Neanderthal man.
It is widely assumed that cold, inhospitable weather prevented modern humans from entering Europe earlier than they did. By 35,000 years they were well established and quickly dominated and replaced Neanderthals that began declining about the same time modern humans arrived. The population shrank a great deal during the Ice Age 20,000 years ago then rebounded. The Ice Age nearly wiped out humans.
Between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago, modern humans left evidence of their presence in cave art in Lascaux cave and Chauvet Cave and other caves in France and Spain. The first sculptures appear around the same time in Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria. Early people cleared forests and set up agricultural communities. In France, slow but steady colonization of the northeastern plains began in 6000 B.C. and the mountain massifs in 2000 B.C.
Good Websites Archaeology News Report archaeologynewsreport.blogspot.com ; Anthropology.net anthropology.net : archaeologica.org archaeologica.org ; Archaeology in Europe archeurope.com ; Archaeology magazine archaeology.org ; HeritageDaily heritagedaily.com; Livescience livescience.com/
Sources of Europeans
A Neolithic tomb in Sweden
Ann Gibbons wrote in Science: “Europeans are the descendants of at least three major migrations of prehistoric people. First, a group of hunter-gatherers arrived in Europe about 37,000 years ago. Then, farmers began migrating from Anatolia (a region including present-day Turkey) into Europe 9000 years ago, but they initially didn’t intermingle much with the local hunter-gatherers because they brought their own families with them. Finally, 5000 to 4800 years ago, nomadic herders known as the Yamnaya swept into Europe. They were an early Bronze Age culture that came from the grasslands, or steppes, of modern-day Russia and Ukraine, bringing with them metallurgy and animal herding skills and, possibly, Proto-Indo-European, the mysterious ancestral tongue from which all of today’s 400 Indo-European languages spring. They immediately interbred with local Europeans, who were descendants of both the farmers and hunter-gatherers. Within a few hundred years, the Yamnaya contributed to at least half of central Europeans’ genetic ancestry. [Source: Ann Gibbons, Science, February 21, 2017]
According to Popular Archaeology: “Research has shown that, beginning in the seventh millennium B.C., the Balkan Peninsula was a gateway or corridor through which Neolithic culture, including farming and animal husbandry, spread from Anatolia and the Near East. Beginning in the fifth millennium B.C., human populations in the central and eastern Balkans began developing metal-processing technologies, notably that of Copper, into a relatively large-scale industry for the first time in world history. The world’s oldest copper mines, for example, were found by archaeologists near Rudna glava, Serbia and Mechikladenets/Ai bunar near Stara Zagora, Bulgaria.” [Source: Popular Archaeology, December 12, 2012 /*/]
Genetic studies by Professor Joachim Burger of the Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany, and Mark Thomas, professor of evolutionary genetics at University College, London showed that agriculture was brought to Central Europe by immigrant farmers around 7,500 years ago. From that time on, little trace of hunter-gathering can be seen in the archaeological record, and it was widely assumed that the hunter-gatherers rapidly died out or were absorbed into the farming populations.
First Scandinavian Farmers Were Far More Advanced than We Thought
Farming started in Denmark and southern Sweden about 6,000 years ago. Research has revealed that these early farmers were far more advanced than had been previously thought. According to a study published in PLOS One in 2015, settlers from more developed regions of Central Europe moved to Denmark and Sweden, where they introduced advanced farming practices, sharing their knowledge with local hunter-gatherers over the next 300 years, transforming them into a well-developed agrarian society. [Source:Kristian Sjøgren, sciencenordic.com, August 17, 2015]
Kristian Sjøgren wrote in sciencenordic.com: In the study, “researchers from England studied cow teeth dated to 3,950 BC from southern Sweden. The teeth show that the early farmers had mastered the cumbersome task of calving at different times of the year, so that milk was available all year round. “It’s very interesting that the farmers of the period were able to manipulate the calving seasons, so all the calves did not come in the spring. This is very hard to do, and would not have taken place if the farmers had not intended to do it,” says Kurt Gron, a researcher from the Department of Archaeology at Durham University, UK, and lead-author on the study. “This means that the earliest farmers were highly skilled from the beginning of the Neolithic period, which suggests immigrants were instrumental in bringing pastoral agriculture to the region,” he says.
Neolithic tomb in Sweden
“Lasse Sørensen, a postdoc at the National Museum of Denmark, studies the transition of early Scandinavian society from hunter-gatherers to a culture dominated by farming. He was not involved in the new study, but he describes it as exciting work that is part of a larger discussion of the importance of agriculture for the first farmers. Until now, most researchers believed that early farming was primitive because the farmers held on to many of their hunter-gatherer traditions.
“We know that the first farmers had cows, but we do not know anything about how they managed them, and how much they still had to rely on their ancient hunter-gatherer traditions to hunt and fish,” says Sørensen. “This study points to a very advanced agriculture, and it gives us a whole new understanding of everyday life in a very interesting transition period in Scandinavian history,” he says.
“In the new study, researchers analysed the oxygen isotopes in the teeth of prehistoric cattle from Almhov, in south Sweden. The isotopes are incorporated into teeth when the young cattle drink water and the chemical signal is then preserved. Since the isotopes in their drinking water vary over the course of a year, analysing the isotopes in the cows’ teeth can tell the researchers which season the cow was born in. “This comparison allowed us to conclude that cattle were manipulated by farmers to give birth in multiple seasons,” says Gron.
“Calving in different seasons meant that farmers had access to milk all year round. According to Sørensen, this means that quite early in the Neolithic period farmers already had the techniques to make milk into yogurt or cheese. Otherwise, why would they produce milk all year round? They must also have been able to plan and collect food for the cattle to last the winter — a time when the young calves were especially vulnerable. All these things required buildings, tools, and skills that Danish hunter-gatherers were not able to either invent themselves or learn from others in such a short period. “It is a giant leap from hunter-gathering to farming, and it is so advanced that one cannot imagine that hunter-gatherers could have learned the necessary skills from newcomers or by themselves for that matter,” says Sørensen. “It takes many generations to master these techniques so these farmers must have been outsiders. Their presence has spread over the centuries and become integrated with the local populations of hunter-gatherers, who would have had to spend a lot of time learning about the agricultural techniques and the farming lifestyle,” he says.
“Søren Andersen is an archaeologist and senior scientist at Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, and studies early farming societies. Andersen does not agree that the transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers happened so suddenly. He suggests it developed gradually — and contrary to the new study — was not introduced by a sudden influx of large groups of immigrants from the south. He does not believe that the scientists behind the new research have proven adequately that the teeth are actually from 3950 B.C., and not, for example, 200 years later. If the teeth are 200 years younger, then this puts them in a period in which all researchers agree that the agricultural revolution was well established in southern Scandinavia. In which case, it would not be so strange for people to manipulate calving times.
““Before the results can be credible, there must be no doubt that the teeth come from the time that the researchers say they do. I believe, however, this has not been proven,” says Andersen. “In addition, researchers come up with evidence from several settlements to say that it was a widespread phenomenon. I remain sceptical until I see evidence that migrants brought agriculture to southern Scandinavia,” says Andersen. Andersen suggests that the agricultural settlements are located in exactly the same places as the hunter-gatherer settlements once lay. According to him, it is illogical that the new migrants should settle in the exact same places where people already lived. Andersen maintains that the transition from a hunter-gatherer society to a farming society happened more gradually.”
DNA Study of Otzi, the Iceman, Provide Insights in European Migration Patterns
.JPG "20120207-Bozen_1_(177).JPG")
Otzi
The genome of Otzi, the iceman found in the Alps near the Italian-Austrian border in 1991,, produced a surprising result: he was more closely related to present-day Sardinians than he was to present-day Central Europeans that live close to where he was found.. Angela Graefen, a human genetics researcher at the Eurac Institute for the Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy, told Reuters. “He is more closely related to modern Sardinian or Corsican populations than, for instance, mainland Italy further to the south.But that doesn’t mean he comes from Sardinia or Corsica. His ancestors were more plausibly from the first wave of migrants from the Near East. The genome group stuck in the isolated regions which were less affected by human migrations, Mediterranean islands but also remote Alpine valleys.” [Source: Michel Rose, Reuters, March 2, 2012]
Tia Ghose wrote in Live Science: “The researchers sequenced only part of the genome, and the results didn’t resolve an underlying question: Did most of the Neolithic people in Central Europe have genetic profiles more characteristic of Sardinia, or had Ötzi’s family recently emigrated from Southern Europe? “Maybe Ötzi was just a tourist, maybe his parents were Sardinian and he decided to move to the Alps,” Sikora said. That would have required Ötzi’s family to travel hundreds of miles, an unlikely prospect, Sikora said. “Five thousand years ago, it’s not really expected that our populations were so mobile,” Sikora told LiveScience. [Source: Tia Ghose, Live Science, November 9, 2012 ||*||]
“To answer that question, Sikora’s team sequenced Ötzi’s entire genome and compared it with those from hundreds of modern-day Europeans, as well as the genomes of a Stone Age hunter-gatherer found in Sweden, a farmer from Sweden, a 7,000-year-old hunter-gatherer iceman found in Iberia, and an Iron Age man found in Bulgaria. The team confirmed that, of modern people, Sardinians are Ötzi’s closest relatives. But among the prehistoric quartet, Ötzi most closely resembled the farmers found in Bulgaria and Sweden, while the Swedish and Iberian hunter-gatherers looked more like present-day Northern Europeans.” ||*||
The findings, reported at the American Society of Human Genetics conference in 2012, “support the theory that farmers, and not just the technology of farming, spread during prehistoric times from the Middle East all the way to Finland. “The idea is that the spread of farming and agriculture, right now we have good evidence that it was also associated with a movement of people and not only technology,” said study co-author Martin Sikora, a geneticist at Stanford University.
“The findings support the notion that people migrating from the Middle East all the way to Northern Europe brought agriculture with them and mixed with the native hunter-gatherers, enabling the population to explode, Sikora said. While the traces of these ancient migrations are largely lost in most of Europe, Sardinian islanders remained more isolated and therefore retain larger genetic traces of those first Neolithic farmers, Sikora said. ||*||
“The findings add to a growing body of evidence showing that farming played a major role in shaping the people of Europe, said Chris Gignoux, a geneticist at the University of California San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. I think it’s really intriguing,” Gignoux said. “The more that people are sequencing these ancient genomes from Europe, that we’re really starting to see the impact of farmers moving into Europe.”“||*||
DNA of Stone-Age Scandinavian Foragers and Farmers Different
Haplogroup I (Y-DNA)
In 2014, Uppsala University reported: “An international team led by researchers at Uppsala University and Stockholm University reports a breakthrough on understanding the demographic history of Stone-Age humans. A genomic analysis of eleven Stone-Age human remains from Scandinavia revealed that expanding Stone-age farmers assimilated local hunter-gatherers and that the hunter-gatherers were historically in lower numbers than the farmers. The study is published today, ahead of print, in the journal Science. [Source: Uppsala University, April 24, 2014 -]
“The transition between a hunting-gathering lifestyle and a farming lifestyle has been debated for a century. As scientists learned to work with DNA from ancient human material, a complete new way to learn about the people in that period opened up. But even so, prehistoric population structure associated with the transition to an agricultural lifestyle in Europe remains poorly understood. "For many of the most interesting questions, DNA-information from people today just doesn't cut it, the best way to learn about ancient history is to analyze direct data — despite the challenges", says Dr. Pontus Skoglund of Uppsala University, now at Harvard University, and one of the lead authors of the study. "We have generated genomic data from the largest number of ancient individuals" says Dr. Helena Malmström of Uppsala University and one of the lead authors. "The eleven Stone-Age human remains were between 5,000 and 7,000 years old and associated with hunter-gatherer or farmer life-styles" says Helena Malmström. -
“Anders Götherström, who led the Stockholm University team, is satisfied with the amount of DNA that they could retrieve. "Not only were we able to generate DNA from several individuals, but we did get a lot of it. In some cases we got the equivalent of draft genomes. A population genomic study on this level with a material of this age has never been done before as far as I know." The material used in the study is from mainland Scandinavia as well as from the Baltic island Gotland, and it comprises of hunter-gatherers from various time periods as well as early farmers. -
“Professor Mattias Jakobsson, who led the Uppsala University team, is intrigued by the results. "Stone-Age hunter-gatherers had much lower genetic diversity than farmers. This suggests that Stone-Age foraging groups were in low numbers compared to farmers", says Mattias Jakobsson. Jan Storå at Stockholm University shares Mattias' fascination. "The low variation in the hunter gatherers may be related to oscillating living conditions likely affecting the population sizes of hunter-gatherers. One of the additional exciting results is the association of the Mesolithic individual to both the roughly contemporaneous individual from Spain but also the association to the Neolithic hunter-gatherers."
“The study confirms that Stone-Age hunter-gatherers and farmers were genetically distinct and that migration spread farming practices across Europe, but the team was able to go even further by demonstrating that the Neolithic farmers had substantial admixture from hunter-gatherers. Surprisingly, the hunter-gatherers from the Baltic Sea displayed no evidence of introgression from farmers. "We see clear evidence that people from hunter-gatherer groups were incorporated into farming groups as they expanded across Europe", says Pontus Skoglund. "This might be clues towards something that happened also when agriculture spread in other parts of the world." "The asymmetric gene-flow shows that the farming groups assimilated hunter-gatherer groups, at least partly", says Mattias Jakobsson. "When we compare Scandinavian to central European farming groups that lived at about the same time, we see greater levels of hunter-gatherer gene-flow into the Scandinavian farming groups."
“This study is part of the recently initiated "Atlas project" - a large-scale genomic investigation of ancient human remains in Scandinavia led by Stockholm and Uppsala Universities and funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences and the Swedish Research Council. The present study brings the first results from the project. "We have only begun to scratch the surface of the knowledge that this project may bring us in the future" says Anders Götherström.” -
Hunter-Gatherers and Immigrant Farmers Lived Together More than 2,000 Years in Germany
Hunter-gatherers and immigrant farmers lived side-by-side for more than 2,000 years in Central Europe, before the hunter-gatherer communities died out or were absorbed into the farming population. In a paper published in Science in 2013, researchers described their analysis of DNA and isotopes from human bones found in the ‘Blätterhöhle’ cave near Hagen in Germany, where both hunter-gatherers and farmers were buried. [Source: eurekalert.org, October10, 2013 ==]
According to eurekalert.org: “The team, led by anthropologist Professor Joachim Burger of the Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany, used stable isotopes to determine their diet, DNA to investigate how they were related, and radiocarbon to establish how old the bones were. “It is commonly assumed that the European hunter-gatherers disappeared soon after the arrival of farmers”, said Dr Ruth Bollongino, lead author of the study. “But our study shows that the descendants of the first European humans maintained their hunter-gatherer way of life, and lived in parallel with the immigrant farmers, for at least 2,000 years. The hunter-gathering way of life only died out in Central Europe around 5,000 years ago, much later than previously thought.”
““Until around 7,500 years ago all central Europeans were hunter-gatherers,” said Professor Mark Thomas, professor of evolutionary genetics at UCL, and a co-author of the study. “They were the descendants of the first wave of our species to arrive in Europe, around 45,000 years ago. They survived the last Ice Age and the warming that started around 10,000 years ago. And now it seems they also survived the initial wave of farmers spreading across Europe from the southeast of the continent.”
“Previous genetic studies by Professors Burger and Thomas showed that agriculture was brought to Central Europe by immigrant farmers around 7,500 years ago. From that time on, little trace of hunter-gathering can be seen in the archaeological record, and it was widely assumed that the hunter-gatherers rapidly died out or were absorbed into the farming populations. “Although there is some archaeological evidence of interactions between immigrant agriculturalists and local hunter-gatherers, its extent and duration has remained something of a mystery,” said Professor Thomas. “But our study now shows that the hunter-gatherers stayed in close proximity to farmers, had contact with them for thousands of years, and buried their dead in the same cave. “This contact was not without consequences, because hunter-gatherer women sometimes married into the farming communities, while no genetic lines of farmer women have been found in hunter-gatherers”, explained Burger. “This pattern of marriage is known from many studies of human populations in the modern world. Farmer women regarded marrying into hunter-gatherer groups as social demotion.”
“For a long time the team were unable to make sense of the findings. “It was only through the analysis of isotopes in the human remains, performed by our Canadian colleagues, that the pieces of the puzzle began to fit,” states Bollongino. She added: “The results showed that the hunter-gatherers sustained themselves in Central and Northern Europe on a very specialized diet that included fish, among other things, until 5,000 years ago. And what is more, the hunter-gatherers living at the same time as the farmers were genetically more similar to the pre-farming hunter-gatherers than to the contemporaneous farmers.”
“The team also pursued the question of what impact both groups had on the gene pool of modern Europeans. Adam Powell, mathematician and specialist in demographic modeling at the JGU Institute of Anthropology, who obtained his PhD with Professor Thomas at UCL, explained: “While neither hunter-gatherers nor farmers are to be regarded as the sole ancestors of today’s Europeans, it is the mixing of both populations that potentially represents the ancestry of modern-day Europeans.” It seems that the hunter-gatherers’ lifestyle lasted at least until around 5000 years ago in Central Europe. However, some of the prehistoric farmers had hunter-gatherers as ancestors, and their genes are still found in Central Europeans today.
Ale's Stones
5,500-Year-Old Tomb Found near Sweden’s ‘Stonehenge’
In 2012, Swedish archaeologists announced that they had found remains of a 5,500-year-old tomb near Ale’s Stones, a megalithic monument, sometimes described as Scandinavia’s Stonehenge, where, according to myth, the legendary King Ale was buried. The discovery resulted from a geophysical investigation of the area carried out in 2006. [Source: Rossella Lorenzi, new.discovery.com, October 2012]
Rossella Lorenzi wrote in new.discovery.com: “Intrigued by a circular structure measuring about 165 feet in diameter with a rectangular feature in its center, archaeologists of the Swedish National Heritage Board decided to dig a trial trench. “The outer circle was difficult to prove, but we did find vague traces at the spot, possibly imprints of smaller stones,” archaeologist Bengt Söderberg told Discovery News. In the middle, the researchers found “several components” that are evidence of a dolmen, a megalithic portal tomb usually made of two vertical stones supporting a large flat horizonta “The components consisted of imprints of large stones belonging to a central grave chamber, which was surrounded by large stones and a brim of smaller stones,” Söderberg said.
Oriented north-south, the 65- by 26-foot dolmen dated to the Swedish early Neolithic period, about 5,500 years ago. “We also found a blade, a scraper and some flakes of flint. This is not unusual when it comes to this type of graves,” Söderberg said. According to archaeologist Annika Knarrström of the Swedish National Heritage Board, the dolmen was likely “the grave of some local magnate.” “However, we have little data to really tell who was buried there,” Knarrström said.
“The newly discovered dolmen lay just 130 feet from the spectacular Ales Stenar (“Ale’s Stones”), also known as “Sweden’s Stonehenge.” Located near the fishing village of Kåseberga, the structure consists of 59 stones, each weighing up to 4,000 pounds, that appear to form a 220-foot-long ship overlooking the Baltic Sea. Although some researchers argue that the stone formation was assembled 2,500 years ago, during the Scandinavian Bronze Age, most scholars agree that it dates back some 1,400 years, toward the end of the Nordic Iron Age.
“Like Stonehenge, the enigmatic stone ship has raised many theories about its purpose. According to local folklore, it was the final resting place of a legendary leader known as King Ale. Other theories suggest it was an ancient astronomical calendar, a cemetery, or a monument to the Vikings. The newly discovered dolmen might provide new clues on the pre-history of the monument. “Our findings confirm what we have long suspected: Some stone-built monuments might have stood on the ridge long before the Ale’s Stones,” Knarrström said. The older stones, as well as those making the dolmen, were most likely reused to build the stone ship. “This discovery also confirms our belief that the site must have attracted people in all times,” Knarrström said.
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons, except last picture, from The Guardian
Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Ancient Foods ancientfoods.wordpress.com ; Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
Last updated May 2024