I’ve long been interested in learning more about my wild
ancestors, the indigenous hunter-gatherers of Europe, in order to better
understand who I am. Descriptions of
them recorded by the ancient Greeks and Romans were too meager to satisfy my
curiosity. Recently, I came across Barry
Cunliffe’s book, Europe
Between the Oceans: 9000 BC – AD 1000. Cunliffe is an archaeologist, and ongoing
research is discovering many new pieces for the puzzle. His book serves readers a staggering amount
of information.
Cave paintings have preserved beautiful memories of the wild
paradise of ice age Europe, and the lucky people who enjoyed the continent in
the days of its undiminished vitality.
The party began breaking up around 9600 B.C., when a warmer climate
returned. Glaciers melted and forests
expanded northward into tundra country.
Tundra critters like the reindeer and elk were forced to migrate further
north. Others, like the mammoth and
wooly rhino, walked off the stage.
The recovering forests provided habitat for smaller animals,
like deer, elk, boars, and aurochs. Here’s
a surprising notion: “This forest fauna amounted to only about 20-30 percent of
the total biomass of herbivores that had roamed the tundra before them.” In a land of trees, there was far less meat
nibbling on the foliage. Folks were
forced to live in smaller and fewer settlements. Their population “drastically declined.” They preferred locations close to coastlines,
lakes, rivers, and wetlands, where a year round supply of food could be
gathered with little effort.
Meanwhile, over the border in Asia, dark juju was swirling in
the Fertile Crescent. Between 12,000 and
9600 B.C., the number of permanent settlements was growing, based on hunting
and foraging the (temporarily) abundant wild foods. Then came the ominous Aceramic Neolithic
period (9600 – 6900 B.C.). By its end,
people were growing fully domesticated cereals, and dining on domesticated
sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle. Cunliffe
blames population issues for this shift, which has yet to stop clobbering the
planet via seven billion unintended consequences.
The laborious new way of life worked for a while in Asia, but
turned into a nightmare when supersized — large-scale irrigation-based
agriculture, reckless forest mining, explosive population growth, bloody
warfare, and full-blown civilizations run by power-crazy tyrants awash in
testosterone. Few civilizations, if any,
have ever managed to reverse their mistake and deliberately return to low
impact living. Most self-destruct. It’s easier.
Geography has played a starring role in European
history. The continent is a lumpy
peninsula protruding from the posterior of Asia. It is largely surrounded by navigable seas,
and interlaced with navigable rivers.
Even in the days before roads, it was fairly easy to journey back and
forth across it. The continent had
immense forests, fertile soils, a nurturing climate, plenty of water, thriving
wildlife and marine life, and large deposits of industrial minerals and
precious minerals.
The Fertile Crescent, on the other hand, was an arid region that
was poorly suited for supporting large complex societies. But to the west was a vast unmolested paradise,
and there were few guards at the border crossings to Europe. Consequently, the wild hunter-gatherers of
Europe were among the unluckiest people in the world, similar to the Native
Americans in 1492. Their valuable assets
were irresistible to the growing mobs of hungry farmers.
Cunliffe euthanized the myth of the Neolithic Revolution,
which purported that the Asian farmers swept across Europe in a blitzkrieg,
nearly exterminating the indigenous folk, as the white folks did in
America. New evidence suggests that
diffusion played a significant role in the spread of agriculture, similar to
the spread of maize in the eastern U.S.
Whenever the folks down the river start growing lots of calories, and
feeding swarms of bambinos, your options are: (1) exterminate them, (2) take up
the dirty habit, (3) flee, or (4) be overrun.
Since farmers outbreed hunters, agriculture tends to spread like a
steamroller.
Recent studies of mitochondrial DNA conclude that about 80
percent of European females are genetically indigenous, not related to Asian
immigrants. In France, Germany, and
northeast Spain, only 15 to 30 percent of males have immigrant genes.
In a nutshell, Europe was essentially a continent of
hunter-gatherers in 7000 B.C., and by 4000 B.C. it was reduced to a sad gulag
of farmers and herders. “The rapidity of
the spread of the Neolithic way of life was remarkable.” According to Cunliffe, wild Europe
disintegrated in the face of increased mobility, connectivity, innovation, and
imbalance.
Mobility was stimulated by factors such as growing
population, depleted soils, overgrazing, and bloodthirsty invaders. Connectivity was increased as trading
networks expanded, often leading to tribal alliances led by cocky warlords. Innovation was the clever process of devising
new ways for living farther out of balance with nature, a tireless war on the
future. The Neolithic path was a
devastating hurricane of countless forms of imbalance — population, hierarchy, warfare,
technology, ecology, pathology.
Friendly traders who made it through the gauntlet of pirates
and highwaymen delivered wine, weapons, jewelry, furs, smallpox, and the
bubonic plague. Diseases delighted in
paying regular visits to the filthy, malnourished communities, and providing
much needed assistance in resolving family planning imbalances. Slave trading was a major industry.
In central Asia and southern Russia, ancestors of the Aryans
hunted the fierce wild horses of the grassy steppes and ate them. Over time, they succeeded in reducing them to
submissive beasts, and used them for hunting, herding, trading, and raiding —
another brilliant innovation! Before
long, Europeans on the plains were periodically being raped, pillaged, and
slaughtered by scruffy hordes of horse-mounted Cimmerians, Scythians,
Sarmatians, Alans, Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, and Turks.
Equally catastrophic was the dark art of metalworking,
another diabolical gift from the Middle East.
The Bronze Age began around 3300 BC, and the Iron Age arrived around
1200 BC. The awesome new technology resulted
in the deaths of millions of trees and people, and the permanent destruction of
many mining regions.
Conflict was the core of the story. Every page I turned unleashed a thousand
screams, as jets of hot blood squirted out of the book, forming a sticky puddle
around my desk, page after page. They
never tired of killing each other. This
psychic epidemic — “grow or die” — has now driven us deep into the valley of
the shadow of extinction. It’s a game we
can neither win nor deliberately abandon.
Everyone loses.
Native Americans have always been appalled by the immense
craziness of the Europeans who washed up on their shores. Ward Churchill says that we suffer from a
profound sense of identity confusion, having lost all connection to our tribal
roots. John Trudell says we have become
disconnected from spiritual reality. We
have lost our identity and need to remember who we are. The cave paintings are the strongest medicine
we have, along with our dreams.
Cunliffe’s 10,000-year tour tells us almost nothing about
tribal Europeans living in relative harmony with the ecosystem, but it
exhaustively describes the birth of disharmony, which is useful to understand. Many of the important lessons in life are
learned from goofy unclever teachers, who demonstrate the wrong way to do
something, and the Neolithic Europeans excelled at this, as did their
descendants around the world.
They weren’t stupid or evil.
It’s nearly impossible to intentionally stop or turn a complex society
in motion. They were born in the wrong
place at the wrong time, and had little choice but to be swept away by the roaring
currents of their era, as we have been.
But calmer waters lie downstream, and some folks may survive the
journey. May they learn well from our
mistakes, let the planet heal, and remember who they are.
Cunliffe, Barry, Europe
Between the Oceans: 9000 BC – AD 1000, Yale University Press, New
Haven, 2008.
