When civilization control-alt-deletes: prehistoric Europe’s false dawn and long reboot
Reflecting on Europe’s lost 5,000-year-old first draft
No matter our efforts at neutrality, the light of our day has a way of coloring our conception of past and future. Westerners, perhaps Americans most of all, have a strong bias towards viewing history through a “Whig” lens; the present is better than the past, and the future will be better still. See “OK Boomer.” Though a Whig conception of history was first articulated in the 20th century, its origins run deeper, starting with Britain’s 18th-century Enlightenment, the age of Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine and Isaac Newton’s mechanics, and culminating in Britain’s 19th-century industry-powered empire. The Whig sensibility that crystallized during these centuries filed the past away as darker, more primitive and poorer than the present, and looked eagerly towards a utopian future that would put the present to shame. Though this idea emerged in England, its spirit is best developed in the US, a nation that in 250 years has gone from a loose set of colonies with a few million citizens to the most powerful, wealthiest nation the world has ever known.
But in an age of scientifically-driven innovation, where famine is abolished so completely that in developed nations obesity has become a reliable marker of poverty, it’s easy to forget that far more common has been an alternate view of time’s march: a mindset where the past was a “Golden Age,” and the present a fallen one. The idea that the present is meaner than the past is not obscure; Homer’s Greek contemporaries looked back to a prior society of great heroes and powerful kings that had since degenerated into the petty clans of their day. Christianity too assumes a fall from an Edenic state, memorializing earlier epochs peopled by demi-gods and long-lived patriarchs. More recently, the ethos of the Renaissance arose from the sense that European civilization’s apex had been long prior, under the Greeks and Romans, with the intervening collapse into a Dark Age, a woeful state from which Western man now had to lift himself. These ideas can even be seen in the scientific age. The late anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argued that hunter-gatherers were the “original affluent society,” with subsistence requiring just some 3-5 hours of work per week. For Sahlins and his peers, agriculture ushered in a regime of ceaseless toil, one that has not been transcended by modern man’s 40-hour work week.
Viewing the trend-line on the scale of millennia, Steve Pinker’s argument in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined fairly captures a global pattern of increased complexity, wealth and individual liberty. But this is only on the whole, and obviously individual humans don’t have the consolation of living “on the whole.” Bryan Ward-Perkins in The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization illustrates how social, political and economic dynamism took a major hit in Western Europe with the Roman system’s collapse after 500 AD. In countless times and places, as in late Rome, we observe massive and persistent decline, even if the slope of the line over the longest time scales trends positive. Pinker and most Whig thinkers would emphasize the overall trend, but the further back in time you go, the deeper and longer these periods of decline and disarray drag on. The transition between the last two Chinese dynasties, the Ming and the Manchu Qing, took 40 years, from 1644 to 1683 AD. In contrast, after the fall of the Later Han in 220 AD, the Sui did not reunify China for another long 369 years.
But at least after the collapse of the Han and the ensuing centuries of chaos, the Sui and their successors resurrected a society and state offering recognizable continuity with the past. This contrasts with the Greeks after Bronze-Age Mycenaean civilization’s 12th-century BC collapse. The Mycenaeans were on the periphery of an international system centered on great powers like Egypt, the Hittites and Babylonia. A warlike people, they constructed imposing citadels from massive boulders, and were ruled by kings who relied on scribes to track trade and taxation in exquisite detail. Eric Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed outlines the global system of the late Bronze Age, with extensive trade ties reaching as far north as Scandinavia and Cornwall and eastward into Afghanistan. This network quickly unraveled in the decades after 1200 BC. In 1180 BC, the Hittite capital of Hattusa was burned to the ground, and save for Biblical mentions, history forgot the Hittites. To the west, the same century was a time of troubles for the Mycenaeans, whose citadels were sacked or abandoned, returning Greece to a humble realm of peasants, shepherds and petty tribal chieftains.
Historiography conventionally defines the period between 1200 BC and 800 BC as the Greek Dark Ages, because the peninsula was sucked back into the mute darkness of prehistory. The Linear B writing system Mycenaean scribes used was entirely forgotten after the 1180’s BC, and when Greeks began to write again, with the first attested script dating to 740 BC, it was in a modified Phoenician alphabet. Classical civilization was a reboot. Even if genetically and ethno-linguistically the Greeks maintained continuity with their Bronze-Age ancestors, no institutional or cultural memory of the earlier incarnation remained aside from vague glimmers in Homeric paeans to Mycenae’s bygone glory, with its lion gate and boar-tusk helmeted warriors. Hesiod’s Theogony, too, recalls a lost golden age from the vantage of the 8th century BC, attesting to the diminished world four centuries after its fall, still preserving a dim recollection of the Mycenaean age of great polises and international expeditions of conquest.
Truly, the further back you go into history, the more devastating collapses prove. Over the last decade, ancient DNA has made it clear Europe saw a massive demographic turnover starting 5,000 years ago, but this was already plain in the archaeological record. J. P. Mallory, author of In Search of the Indo-Europeans, dryly observed on the podcast that his vocation was to haunt burial mounds, because in most cases, they represent the sum total of material evidence the early Indo-Europeans he studies left us. They might have been conquerors of the continent, fearsome warriors who overturned civilizations, but archaeologically the Indo-Europeans are wan ghosts at most, the true sweep of their legacy only clear once we could read the record of the genes themselves.
Indo-European Europe was a massive regression from what came before, Neolithic cultures that left copious and often spectacular material remains. Those earlier Neolithic cultures, called “Old Europe” by the Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, descended directly from the continent’s first farmers. They created the first European civilizations, long predating Sumer and Egypt. At the Neolithic’s end, Europe boasted some of the most complex and sophisticated societies in the world, where inhabitants routinely produced everything from intricate gold finery to colossal stone monuments. All this disappeared after 3000 BC, and would be forgotten in the millennium it took Europeans to pull themselves up from the depths of the collapse.
Gold and stone
The European Neolithic ushered in farming as the continent’s dominant way of life. This shift’s chronological and geographical scope is straightforward: the earliest farming communities were in the southeast, and over thousands of years these villages spread west and north. In the late 20th century, archaeologists debated whether the farming lifestyle’s new ubiquity was driven by the farmers’ migration (by genes), or via the diffusion of ideas (by memes). By 2010, allied with advances in archaeology, the new science of paleogenomics had settled the question. Researchers established relationships between populations, and using isotope analysis of bone composition, inferred that upon the arrival of a new people, diets shifted to typical farmer fare. Farming mostly spread as farmers themselves migrated, first from Anatolia to the southern Balkans 9,000 years ago. From there, the lifestyle leapt across the Mediterranean, establishing bridgeheads along pockets of the Italian coast, before vaulting west to Spain’s eastern seaboard 7,700 years ago. Meanwhile, other groups of farmers pushed upstream along the Danube, reaching modern Germany by 7,500 years ago.
The earliest reconstruction of relationships between migrant farmers and indigenous foragers showed they were quite distinct populations, with genetic distances on roughly the scale separating modern Germans and Chinese (some 10%, where the value between two modern European populations runs about 1%). Several factors drove this. First, forager populations were dispersed, with frequent bottlenecks driving rapid accumulation of genetic differences between geographically separated populations. And while both foragers and farmers seem to have derived predominantly from different hunter-gatherer societies that occupied the Balkans, Anatolia and the Caucasus, each mixed with other very different populations. Anatolian farmers had ancestry from a population geneticists term “Basal Eurasian,” so called because it split off from other Eurasian populations first after the “out of Africa” bottleneck 60,000 years ago. In contrast, Western Europe’s indigenous foragers assimilated the descendents of earlier hunter-gatherer societies whose ancestors had arrived on the continent more than 30,000 years ago.
Finally, reconstructing the appearance of early Holocene European farmers and foragers with forensic genomic methods makes it clear they would have regarded each other as different races. The farmers had paler skin and dark eyes, while the foragers had brown skin and blue eyes.
These biological differences likely go part way toward explaining widespread cultural segregation that seems to have persisted between the two populations in Europe for millennia. The Linear Pottery Culture (LBK) pioneered farming in Northern Europe. According to ancient DNA results, after arriving to these northern latitudes, for nearly 2,000 years farmer and foragers remained genetically segregated in western Germany, only to merge after 3500 BC. The only remotely comparable analogs would be the Indian caste system’s millennia-long track record of inviolable endogamy strictures, or the total genetic separation between foragers and expansionist Bantu farmers across East Africa 3,000 years ago. Both cases reflect strict genetic segregation, indicating the relationship between old and new populations may sometimes have entailed a peaceful toleration, but genuinely no deeper engagement.
DNA and archaeology also resolve long-running anthropological debates about the societies of Neolithic Europeans. When Gimbutas theorized in the 1950’s that Indo-Europeanization occurred via the in-migration of a patriarchal and pastoralist population from Ukraine’s Pontic steppe, which overwhelmed a peaceful, egalitarian mother-goddess worshipping culture of farmers, she was half right. Her “Kurgan hypothesis,” that steppe nomads who buried their elites in kurgan mounds also distributed their language and genes across Europe, has been proven broadly correct. And her inferences about that people’s patriarchal nature seem pretty spot-on, too, judging both from Indo-European mythology and the clearly patrilocal DNA patterns in steppe burials.
But Gimbutas’ ideas about the indigenous Neolithic European farmers of Old Europe they replaced, turn out to have been wide of the mark. Germany’s LBK people lived in collective longhouses dominated by single paternal lineages. This is known from the clustering of the same Y-chromosomal haplogroups in villages’ burial grounds, while females seem to be unrelated and consistently represent disparate lineages. Tribal conflict seems to have been abundant, with high numbers of remains exhibiting evidence of skeletal trauma. The LBK are also responsible for the first clear massacre site in Europe dating to 7,000 years ago, where half the victims slaughtered were children, refuting any idea that Indo-Europeans besmirched an idyllic Neolithic world unfamiliar with their war and violence. LBK propensity for war is familiar to us, and illustrates deep human commonalities extending back to the Neolithic. Lawrence Keeley in The War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage reports that as farmers swept across Northern Europe, where they impinged upon the territories of marine foragers, who had much higher population densities than inland hunter-gatherer societies, the competing groups’ wars roiled Europe's coastal plain for centuries.
Europe’s final Neolithic societies also exhibit evidence of extreme inequality that would prefigure what was to follow. Five years ago, geneticists discovered the remains of a young man buried in Newgrange, a megalithic passage tomb, who was the product of first-degree incest. The strange genetic fact that this youth's parents were close relatives, combined with his burial in such a majestic location, suggests he was viewed as part of a special lineage, above the common people (and thus allowed to violate the taboo against near-kin matings). In addition, he carried a Y-chromosomal lineage connecting him to others buried in similar tombs across Neolithic Ireland, indicating that one elite lineage dominated much of the isle more than 5,000 years ago.