The Minoan merchant fleet and a violent revolution
The Minoans were the first to establish a dedicated fleet of merchant ships to carry valuable cargoes in the eastern and central parts of the Mediterranean Sea. By means of this trade, a wealthy elite on Crete obtained a wide variety of luxury goods such as food and manufactured goods, as well as gold, silver, copper, tin and other metals. This profitable trade was temporarily interrupted after the first two hundred years of its existence by a violent revolt on Crete against the wealthy elite who owned the ships.
This revolt was led by a wealthy a subset of the population whose wealth was based on land, rather than trade, and the victors celebrated their victory by digging up and despoiling the graves of the elite families that had owned the ships. After the graves had been despoiled, the graveyard was covered up with a fresh layer of dirt, and then the new elite celebrated by holding a great feast nearby.
Interestingly, both the old elite and the new elite consisted of wealthy families that were headed by women, and women had commanded the rebel army that had defeated the owners of the ships and those who had supported them.
The wealthy women who led the revolt had good reason for deeply hating the elite who had owned the merchant fleet. Wealthy men. more than men of the lower classes, had been conscripted to serve on board the ships, and this had robbed wealthy women of the landowning class of their husbands. The land on Crete that was owned by these wealthy men and women served as assurance that the captains and other officers on board the ships would carefully look after the ships and the cargoes that they carried.
Henceforth, the Minoan merchant fleet had new owners. But it must have been very difficult for the new owners to crew the ships, because Cretan men could no longer serve on the crews, aside from the Captain and a couple of lieutenants who served on a voluntary basis and probably had a financial interest in the ship and its cargo. The seaborne trade must have been briefly interrupted by the disruptions caused by the revolt, but the new political order increased opportunities for men to gain employment -- the new elite hired Cretan men to build castles, and a building boom followed the revolution.
Sardinia
Sardinia was an important stop for Minoan ships long before formation of the dedicated Minoan merchant fleet. Indeed, Minoans may have found and exploited silver deposits on Sardinia 6,000 years ago or even earlier, and they continued to extract silver from rich mines on Sardinia at least until 3,800 years ago, when the revolt occurred on Crete, and Sardinians began to build their own ships. By that time Sardinians had been under the tutelage of the Minoans for more than 2,000 years; and at that point the Sardinians struck out on their own.
Despite their long association of Sardinians with Minoan seafarers, the Sardinians, whose culture at that time is known as the Nuragic Culture, did not have a written language of their own. This was because the Sardinians continued to speak their own language, and the Minoan writing system was based on some kind of alphabet, so it could only be used by speakers of the Minoan language.
In any event, the Nuragic Culture seems to have owed as much or more to the Beaker Culture as to the Minoan seafaring culture. The Beaker Culture had established a string of Beaker communities that stretched from North Africa, through the Iberian Peninsula, and into central Europe and Britain, and had established trading posts on Sardinia which traded in various commodities, including silver. When the Minoan merchant fleet suddenly stopped coming to Sardinia, Beaker communities that had formed around the trading posts (they had helped to catalyze formation of the Nuragic Culture) began to frantically build their own ships to replace the Minoan fleet. This new fleet of ships eventually plied trade routes that stretched from Scandinavia to the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea.
This Nuragic Culture was extremely wealthy, and this was partially due to profits that accrued from shipping copper and tin from the Isle of Britain to the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. Tin, in particular, is generally found in only small amounts, in isolated deposits, but substantial deposits were found in Britain. It must have been extremely valuable by the time it reached the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea.
Like the later Etruscans, people of the Nuragic Culture were quite interested in movements of the stars, particularly as those movements pertained to divination. In order to better observe the movements of stars they built massive stone towers known as Nuraghi. Ten thousand or more of these towers were built on Sardinia, and the Nuragic Culture was named after them.
Incantations, ceremonies and religious prohibitions
Archaeologists have had a hard time explaining how Sardinians managed to be so expert in so many things, even though they used no written language. In this regard we should note that they invented virtually nothing of practical value. For instance, they learned about shipbuilding and stone construction both from Beaker communities and Minoan seafarers, both of whom had been building up their fund of knowledge about such constructions for thousands of years. Likewise, they learned seafaring and mercantile practices from both the Beakers and the Minoans. This would explain how they could so quickly jump into the lead in Maritime activities and were able to equal or surpass the Minoans and Greeks in construction.
Moreover. they were extremely superstitious people. This might be viewed by modern people as a handicap, because their superstitions made them avoid changes in procedure or use of new methods. For them, everything was magic, and the slightest deviation could interfere with the magic, but there was another side to the coin. Accompanying every action with an incantation and considering every action to be a ceremony would ensure that no detail is amiss. Moreover, such an approach also encouraged the practitioner to rehearse his procedures to ensure that he makes no mistakes when it comes to actual performance. Thus, serendipity played no part in performance, and this prevented new inventions and discoveries from occurring. But attention to detail ensured perfect preservation of knowledge and skills. and perfect performance.
Based on the example of the Nuragic Culture, we can see how belief in magic has been key to the success of hominins from the start. Belief in magic is not just a biproduct of an overactive imagination, but a strategy for survival, and it was probably a factor in the survival of hominins from the very beginning, when teaching and learning behaviors became our specialty.
Contrary to what we may think, the specialty of our genus and species is not inventiveness. For instance, chimpanzees rival us and may surpass us in inventiveness. If you doubt that, take a look at a chimpanzee's nest in a tree -- they build a new one every night, and each nest is a new invention because no two trees are alike. (This is not an inborne behavior, like a spider building a web.)
The problem is that chimpanzees are often unable to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next -- a chimpanzee will not copy another chimp's actions, or a human being's actions, unless he can see a reason for doing so, whereas a human being often will, regardless of whether he can perceive an advantage in doing so. This is what I call a learning behavior.
Other things that prevent chimpanzees from creating a body of knowledge are that their memories are too poor and their lives are too short. And of course they lack a capability for language, which, along with teaching and learning behaviors, can transmit knowledge from one individual to another and from one generation to the next.
White skin in Europe
While the Nuragic Culture was at its height, Neolithic civilization in Europe was undergoing a dramatic change as a result of the introduction of millet, which grew fast and was rich in energy, At the same time, there was an increasing population in Europe of rootless people who wandered about, stealing crops from the fields. These rootless people had been crowded out by rising populations in other places where millet had been introduced, causing the human populations to burgeon.
These rootless people began to not only steal crops from the fields, but to squat on land owned by the elite that was being farmed by tenant farmers. The elite, who lived in large villages nearby, whose land was being stolen from them, were unable to stem the tide, and often became rootless people themselves.
The new farmers tended to have very small plots of land which they had to defend fiercely. Men were forced to do much of the farm work, and they were afraid to leave their land even for short periods in order to go hunting. Nor did they have extra land on which to raise domesticated animals.
The result was that these farmers with small plots of land were poorly nourished. In particular, they had little Vitamin D in a diet that consisted almost entirely of cooked millet seeds, and many of the farmers had weak bones, and their children had weak bones and often were unable to acquire and defend even small plots of land. The survivors often had whiter skin, with less pigment, that could absorb more sunlight to manufacture Vitamin D. The European population gradually became whiter, and they became better able to endure poor diets.
Invaders from southern Corsica
It appears that about 3,200 years ago Sardinia, the home of the Nuragic Culture, was invaded by warriors from southern Corsica who wore horned helmets (posibly inspired by the myth of the Minotaur), Ironically, the warlike culture in southern Corsica incorporated many of the same attributes as the culture of the Sardinians, but did not include the Beaker communities.
The Corsican warriors quickly learned the rudiments of seafaring, commandeered ships from their Sardinian owners, and went on a rampage of plunder in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.
The Sea Peoples
The success of the marauding Corsican-Sardinian warriors stimulated others throughout the Eastern Mediterranean Sea to also seize ships and go on raiding expeditions. These were the Sea Peoples who plundered along Greek, Levantine and even Egyptian shores. Empires fell, and much of the eastern Mediterranean region, including the Mycenaean Greek Civilization, entered into a "dark age" of decentralized power. This dark age was brought on by the extinction of literate elites in those societies as their power evaporated. The Phoenicians, however, escaped this fate, and invented an alphabet which became the basis for later Greek, Etruscan and Roman alphabets.
At the same time, the invasion of Sardinia caused people fled to the mainland as fast as they could board ships, and the refugees created a Nuragic colony on the Mainland. But the knowledge and skills that the newcomers carried with them to the mainland were very valuable -- they knew about metallurgy, about shipbuilding and every kind of construction and they knew how to create fine clothing out of plant fibers, and many of them were skilled craftsmen, They gradually came to dominate a large region on the mainland.
A new beginning
The Nuragic Civilization on Sardinia eventually survived the Corsican invasion and assimilat5ed the invaders, and again became wealthy, but several centuries later they were invaded by Carthage and then Rome, and they were themselves were assimilated. The Nuragic community on the mainland, however, endured for some time after that, albeit under another name.
The refugees who fled to the mainland continued to speak their own language, and belatedly invented a written version of it, based on a version of the Greek alphabet. Samples of this written version of their language, which are now found mainly on tombstones and the fragmentary remains of monuments, are often repetitious, like incantations.
The linguist's job of deciphering the grammar of their language from such bits and pieces is made infinitely more difficult by the Etruscan penchant for repetition, because Etruscans were not above altering the grammar of their language in order to assemble a string of similar word endings. Repetition is an element in the poetry and art of many cultures, but Etruscans needed repetition in language and art in order to enable magic, as well as to create beautiful language and art.
The Etruscan penchant for repetition can also be seen in the repetitious use of certain themes, such as scenes of banquets in connection with the afterlife. Such repetitive use of themes points to the perceived magical powers of the themes, as if placement of such an image in a tomb could ensure a perpetual banquet for the deceased.
Another popular theme connected with the afterlife was a pair of figures, lying side by side, carved on the top of a sarcophagus. Yet the sarcophagus contained the remains off only one body. The probable meaning of this was that the woman whose body was placed in the tomb would be rejoined with her husband after death.
Whereas tombs with carvings of representing two people, lying side by side, probably indicated that a woman was buried in the tomb, tombs featuring a banquet scene most likely contained the remains of a man. A woman's interest in the afterlife would tend to be entered on her husband and children, not on banqueting.
Bits and pieces of the language are found mainly in the Tuscan Region, the homeland of the Nuragic culture on the mainland, but as the ensuing Etruscan civilization itself grew in importance, these bits and pieces came to be scattered over large areas, on the Italian Peninsula and beyond.
The Nuragic/Etruscan Culture on the mainland was a seafaring culture, as the Nuragic Culture had been, and its fast cargo vessels (which sometimes engaged if opportunistic piracy) plied the Mediterranean from one end to the other and also sailed along the Atlantic coast of Europe.
Beginning of the end
The Etruscans, perhaps attracted by salt mines near the mouth of the Tiber River, made the mistake of subjugating Romans to their rule and teaching them the arts of war and shipbuilding. Subsequently, the Romans shook off their Etruscan king and set to work at conquering Etruscan city states that were so busy fighting each other that they neglected to deal with the upstart Romans. The Romans conquered and sacked Etruscan city states until all of Etruria came to accept the superiority of Rome.
The Romans obviously despised the Etruscans, whose women ruled their households and whose men often spent their nights observing the stars and spent days and nights looking for omens of every kind. Etruscan men were excellent seafarers, but Romans made better husbands, so Etruscan women were probably happy when Romans came marching into their cities and took over.
Tombstones are virtually the only place where the Etruscan language can be found today, so linguists are reduced to reading tombstones, and know very little about the language -- in spite of the fact that Etruscans had taught the Romans to read and write.
One peculiarity about the study of the Etruscan language is that the word for "father" does not appear on tombstones, and linguists do not know what it was. This avoidance of the word may have had its roots in the time when Minoan ships suddenly vanished from Sardinian waters. Trade was the lifeblood of the Beaker communities, so Beaker communities along the coast frantically built ships to replace the Minoan fleet, and enticed men to desert their families to man the vessels. Sardinian women were terrified of losing their husbands in this way, and Sardinian people being extremely superstitious, a rumor circulated that excessive use of the word the word "father" (not the word by which fathers were addressed, but the word which identified a biological father) could result in such an unfortunate event. Thus, use of the word became taboo, and if the word was used at all, it would be only in whispers.
When Romans came marching into Etruria, the Etruscan language quickly disappeared, no doubt because the Romans made Etruscans ashamed of their own language. Since it was shameful to use the Etruscan language in the presence of Romans, and Romans were everywhere, women no doubt avoided teaching any fragment of the language to their children, and punished them for speaking it.
When the Etruscans had first come to Rome, the local "barbarians" had accepted the superiority of their Etruscan masters, and had learned many things from them, including the engineering skills needed for the construction of arches and other structures and about military tactics, weaponry and military organization. Even after the Roman conquest of Etruria the Romans continued to consult with Etruscans, on occasion, particularly with regard to divination and the interpretation of omens -- Etruscan priests were quite knowledgeable about such things.
The Bantu expansion
Very early fleets of merchant ships were based in Taiwan and the Philippines -- specializing in carrying raw jade that was mined in Taiwan and mostly processed in the Philippines. Later merchant fleets were based in Island Southeast Asia, and specialized in a spice trade with Sri Lanka and southern India. Austronesian merchant ships also began sailing clear across to Africa. This is how Africans obtained Austronesian, Southeast Asian and South Asian crops that grew well in parts of Africa. The growing of these crops spread across Africa, and eventually to the Bantus.
The Bantus originally occupied only the southwestern corner of present-day Cameroon, near the present-day Nigerian border, but today about half of the people in sub-Saharan Africa speak Bantu languages, all descended from the language spoken by these ancestral people. How this came to be is the story of the Bantu expansion.
The original Bantus came into possession of three very important food plants (African yams, bananas and millet) about 3,500 years ago and quickly transitioned from a hunter-gatherer way of life to a settled life of cultivating those crops and others.
By a stroke of luck, they came into contact with early pioneers of the African Iron Age. which seems to have been concurrent with the Iron Age in Anatolia, and they quickly learned to smelt iron and pound wrought iron into tools and weapons. These skills were important, because iron tools were useful in loosening the soil so crops could be planted, in digging out weeds that robbed the crops of moisture, and in harvesting yams and other crops, as well as in clearing trees from land to make way for crops.
Fed by the high-energy crops that they grew, the Bantu population grew rapidly and spread first to the west, into present-day Nigeria and then northward along the course of the Niger River. As they moved north they came into savanna country where yams and bananas did not grow well, but millet grew very well, and their population kept expanding.in that otherwise inhospitable region.
But other Bantus spread south, into the jungles of Equatorial Africa, where yams and bananas grew well if land was first cleared. After crossing the jungles some of the Bantus continued south, and reached the Upper Zambezi Valley about 2,200 years ago, while others moved westward and arrived in eastern Africa about 2,000 years ago, where yams and bananas did not grow well but millet grew very well.
Bantu populations continued to expand in these various areas for another 500 years, during which time they came into contact with animal herders who had migrated from further north sand come into contact with the indigenous Khoisan people of the region, who were hunter-gatherers. These Khoisan people had controlled all of southern Africa at the time, but the animal herders had pushed them off their land, and forced them to move further south.
But the Bantus got along fine with the animal herders, and traded with them, exchanging root crops, iron tools, salt and other things that they obtained from their extensive trade network for meat, hides and other animal products. Perhaps the Bantus avoided selling them their their best weaponry -- blades of hardened steel that were stiff and would hold a keen edge.
But then tragedy struck the Bantus.
Parallel events around the Mediterranean Sea
While the Bantus were expanding demographically in parts of Africa, several Mediterranean civilizations, including Egypt and the Mycenean Greek city states came under siege by a "Sea Peoples" that consisted of various people from around the Mediterranean Sea who themselves come under seaborne assaults. Out of the "dark age" that followed emerged the Mediterranean civilizations with which we are more familiar, including Athens, Sparta and other city states of Greece. The Nuragic Civilization also was much changed when it re-emerged, and in its place was the Etruscan Civilization on the mainland and a remnant of the Nuragic Civilization on Sardinia. Phoenicia emerged in the Levant, and established a series of trading stations along the North African coast out of which Carthage rose to dominance while Rome deposed its Etruscan king and challenged Etruria and then Carthage. The First Punic War set up the conditions that enabled Rome to take Sardinia away from Carthage, and then the Romans sacked Carthage itself in the Second Punic War and replaced it with a Roman city.
Augustus Caesar established Rome as an Empire that controlled nearly all shores of the Mediterranean Sea, but then the western Roman Empire suffered a series of reverses while Constantine consolidated control of the eastern part of the Empire. Then, during the reign of Justinian, the Bubonic Plague, which originated further east, struck Byzantium, just as Justinian prepared to reclaim territory that had been lost in the west to barbarians who had overrun Rome itself, as well as North Africa.
Justinian started off with North Africa, which had been overrun by the Vandals. Ships were dispatched to North Africa loaded with soldiers, military equipment and grain; but unfortunately rats came along with the grain, the rats were infested with fleas, and the fleas were carriers of the deadly bubonic plague. This was the Justinian Plague, which had its source in parts of South Asia. Subsequently, the plague spread throughout the Roman Empire and into Africa. In Africa, the Bantus were particularly hard-hit.
Trouble in Africa and recovery
When grain shipments to feed Roman soldiers at African ports, the grain was accompanied by rats, fleas and bubonic plague. The plague was then passed on to flees that infested rats that were native to Africa, and spread throughout Africa, and especially to Bantu villages; the hunter-gatherers of Africa were less affected, because they were less inclined to store food in their homes.
Like the population of the Roman Empire at that time, The Bantus were hard hit, because this was the first time they had been exposed to bubonic plague, and many villages were abandoned after the plague wiped out most of the people. However, the Bantus eventually recovered, and as their populations again started expanding they increasingly came into contact with the Khoisan hunter-gatherers of southern Africa whose linguistic and genetic roots are deeper than those of any other people anywhere. This is because of the long period of relative stability in southern Africa, going back hundreds of thousands of years. These ancient people have click consonants in their speech which might have originated as imitations of the percussive signals that once enabled Homo sapiens hunting groups to communicate with each other.
By the way, modern Americans sometimes use simple signals reminiscent of the earliest percussive signals. For instance, two short groans with the mouth closed and beginning with stops can signal dismay, but if the second groan begins with an aspiration, it signals confirmation. "Oh, oh" signals that something has gone awry but "Oh ho!" signals discovery. "Ah ha!" signals enlightenment and "Oh!" signals surprise. Warnings and emergencies are signaled in a variety of ways.
The Bantus traded iron products for ivory, meat, hides and other resources that could be obtained by the Khoisan, intermarried with the Khoisan, and in some cases integrated some click consonants into their own languages. But as Bantu populations kept growing some Khoisan were forced to abandon their hunting grounds and retreat to hilly or drier areas that were less suitable for agriculture.
The Khoisan sometimes responded by raiding Bantu villages, and the Bantus responded in kind, and sometimes, as hostilities escalated, the Khoisan would join together in alliances to force the Bantus to abandon their villages. In response to these escalations, Bantu blacksmiths began to fashion more effective weapons to counter the long spears of the Khoisan warriors.
The Bantus no longer used wrought iron to produce knives for their own use -- wrought iron blades would not hold a sharp edge, and could easily bend and break. Instead, they used blades of carbonized steel that were stiff and would hold an edge. After some experimentation the blacksmiths came up with a weapon design based on such a blade, by attaching the blade to the end of a stick of hardwood. This weapon was known as an assegai. named after the hardwood that was used in its construction.
The long spears of the Khoisan warriors were no match for the assegai, except on hilly grround (which was usually unsuitable for agriculture), and the Khoisan were forced to retire to dry and hilly lands to the north and west of their favorite hunting grounds.
Ongoing evolution?
For the most part, Bantu-speaking peoples have triumphed, in general, among the other indigenous peoples of Africa. They have triumphed militarily. economically and demographically. For instance. about half of all Africans now learn a Bantu-based language in infanthood, presumably from their mothers, before they learn any other language.
The many Bantu languages have evolved, in the course of time, from a language that was spoken by only a few people who lived in a small area near the "armpit" of Africa, three or four thousand years ago. Although not all Bantu-speaking people are direct descendants of the small original Bantu population, the popularity of Bantu languages today indicates that evolution is still ongoing among Homo sapiens.
The Bantus have always been quick to adopt new ideas. For instance, they didn't invent the smelting of iron, nor did they invent blacksmithing, but somehow they came into early contact with early pioneers of smelting and working with iron, and took up those arts with alacrity. Moreover, yams (African yams), bananas and millet, all native to Africa, were domesticated by others before the Bantus began growing them. Bantus took up the herding of cattle as they moved into areas which were too dry for farming, and then came to dominate cattle herding in southern Africa, and they were (and are) the merchants and shopkeepers of Africa. Bantus have been at the leading edge of new things in Africa for more than three thousand years, and that is how they came to dominate the most productive parts of Africa south of the Sahara Desert.
The Bantu expansion illustrates how competition among different ancestral groups drove hominin evolution for at least two million years, and it still is driving our evolution.
A change in direction?
On the other hand, during the last fifty thousand years or so, evolution seems to be taking us toward diversity, rather than versatility, in at least some respects.
For instance, the constantly increasing brain sizes of the last two million years, which enabled our ancestors to become more and more versatile, no longer characterizes our evolution. Instead, current brain-size evolution has turned into random drift. This is probably because of a combination of features of modern life:
1. New birthing procedures enable mothers to successfully give birth even when the infant has an extra-large head.
2. Good nutrition has been a fact of life for most human populations in recent times so that large brains no longer compete for scarce resources that are needed by other tissues, such as muscles.
3. Human societies have become so large and interconnected that people no longer have to be versatile in order to pass on their genes.
Not only do big brains not necessarily contribute to survival, but in the last fifty thousand years they have increasingly become a handicap, and average brain sizes have tended to decline. This decline of average brain size would most likely be most pronounced in the most modern societies if nutrition had not improved overall. In other words, modern life seems to support an evolutionary trend toward smaller brain sizes, and we may be following in the footsteps of Homo naledi.
What about taking charge?
It has been suggested that we should take steps to stop evolution altogether. This might be safer than letting blind chance rule our future course of evolution, but it calls to mind Adolph Hitler's quest to eliminate genetic characteristics that he thought were inferior (or, in fact, if he thought they might be superior in some ways to his planned Master Race.
The future
So, what surprises lay hidden in future time? Chances are that Florida will disappear, and major metropolises around the world will sink beneath the waves. Most of the animals and plants that we find on Earth today will be squeezed out of existence by Homo sapiens. In short, another existential crisis is staring us in the face, as our population, technology and habits squeeze the life out of our planet. Again, we find ourselves unable to come to a consensus as to what to do to save ourselves. But now, the group that needs to agree about the problem and take concerted action consists of all of humanity. What is clear is that present trends are unsustainable, so I will end my story with this question: Are we ultimately winners or losers?
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