WHEAT AND BARLEY

The goose and the maiden

Further north there were other hunter-gatherers who migrated with the animals that they hunted, and like all people of the time they told various stories.  Both men and women told stories about the constellations in the sky and what they meant, but many of the stories told by men were about hunting, and these hunting stories served as entertainment, inspiration and education for boys, especially for those who were too young to chase after the animals whose meat served to sustain the tribal members.

But the women noticed something in the daytime sky that drew their interest:  As migrating geese flew over in their migrations, they noticed that the head and neck of each goose looked like an erect penis, and this led to a story about a goose that attacked and copulated with a girl.

This story titillated young girls, especially, and it resulted in the production of a tiny clay figurine, 37 millimeters in height, of a gander mounting a naked kneeling lady.  How this tiny figurine was used, if it had a use, is unknown.  It might have served as an adjunct to storytelling, as did drawings and paintings on cave walls.

Last gasp of the Ice Ages

The last gasp of the Ice Ages hit Europe and the Middle East about 12,900 years ago, causing the climate to become cooler and more seasonal.  People in the Levant, many of whom lived in small villages in spite of relying heavily on hunting for their sustenance, soon found that gazelles and aurochs had begun to migrate with the seasons, so that meat was hard to get during the dry season.  In order to sustain themselves they began gather grass seeds at the end of the dry season and cooking them, sometimes storing them throughout the year until another crop ripened.

Further north, in Anatolia, the climate had also become colder and dryer, but mountain building and weathering processes in the Haran Valley, 700 miles inland from the Mediterranean Sea, had left limestone rubble behind that people in that region used for massive constructions.

Many of the constructions served as communal living spaces while others were constructed like artificial caves -- sunken in the earth and covered by massive timbers.  The purpose or purposes of these artificial caves is a matter of conjecture, but the carvings (like the pictures on cave walls) were likely painted as well as carved, and probably served some of the same purposes.

The carvings differed from the pictures on cave walls in some respects:  rather than illustrating hunting scenes the carvings seem to be aimed more at pictures that seem to emerge from the configurations of stars in the heavens, so one of the functions of these artificial caves may have been to educate young people concerning the meanings of those pictures in the sky.  On the other hand, the artificial caves did not need to house many people because they were surrounded by other large constructions that could serve that purpose.  In addition there were smaller constructions that may have served as storage areas or as domiciles for women,

Battle of the sexes

The builders of these communal structures and artificial caves belonged to a highly organized society -- those who quarried the massive stone blocks and carved the pillars and did the other construction work would not have been able to hunt for meat, gather grass seeds etcetera at the same time.

Who planned the construction, supervised the work and so forth?  Up to this time men had always been in charge of making all major decisions such as when and where to move their camps.  Nothing had changed in that regard, and such elements of culture would change only slowly during the thousands of years to come.

Exactly who did the actual work we do not know, but it is a sure thing that women did a fair share of the work required for sustaining and expanding the society that did this construction, and that this culture was a very successful one that prevented roving bands of nomads from impinging on their territory on the Haran Plain.

What happened on the Haran Plaine was a harbinger of things that were to come throughout the Middle East, in the sense that nomadic societies everywhere, would squeeze nomadic hunter-gatherer societies out of existence.  Yet genetic evidence shows that only the male components of these societies ceased to exist as part of the human race; females apparently deserted their failing societies and joined the winners.

The slopes of Karaca Dag Volcano

However, when the Neolithic Revolution came to the Middle East its epicenter was not the Haran Valley.  The epicenter of the Neolithic Revolution in the Middle East was further to the east.  Einkorn wheat, lentils and bitter vetch grew wild in the rich volcanic soil on the gentle slopes of Karaca Dag Volcano, and that is most likely where these before these wild plant species were domesticated.

The ground there was watered by numerous springs.  Emmer wheat may have also originated there before it was carried south down the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and west through present-day Turkey and Syria to the Levant.

While men in burgeoning Middle Eastern societies continued to spend their time hunting, women began to grow these domesticated crops and to take care of domesticated goats and sheep as well, making it unnecessary for the men in many societies to do any hunting at all.  Indeed, the consumption of beer made from fermented grain became a favorite pastime for many of the men.

lasted for more than a thousand years, and then the climate warmed.  Still, hunters of the Levant were not satisfied, and they looked around for some way to keep animals like gazelles and equines from spending the dry season in the mountains.  In other words, the hunters were disgusted with having to hunt hare and quail, along with the women and children, and spend the dry season carving cooking and serving vessels out of stone.

Looking around for something more worthwhile to do during that season, it occurred to the men that the animals moved into the mountains because a shaman would go up to a mountain peak and speak to a deity who controlled movements of the animals.  Moreover, people who lived in the mountains lived in caves, and it was believed that the deity came down to mountain caves and conversed with the people who lived there, and perhaps did favors for them.  It might be a good idea to build an artificial cave high up on a nearby ridge and send representatives there to converse with the deity.

A site was selected at a high point along a nearby ridge.  This location was not as high as the mountains where cave dwellers lived, but it would have to do.  There, they dug a huge hole in the ground where the artificial cave was to be, and at the same time they carved huge T-shaped pillars out of rock.

After this work had been completed the pillars were dragged into place and stood upright in the center of the excavation.  Dirt was then compacted into the holes where the pillars had been placed and the excavation was enlarged by digging passageways around the periphery, leaving thick walls in place between the central enclosure and the passageways. Heavy timbers were then placed over the top to serve as a roof.

Several similar constructions were built in the course of several centuries, and they were all decorated by pictures and abstract designs. These were carved into the T-shaped pillars and into supplementary pillars that were sometimes added around the periphery.  Sometimes they were carved into large stone tablets.  These decorations illustrated stories told by the shaman, by storytellers and by others.  Repairs or new constructions were sometimes prompted by deterioration of older monuments or by destruction that resulted from earthquakes.

Communing with a deity

The builders of the artificial caves devoted a lot of thought toward communicating with a powerful deity.  This is why vultures were featured so prominently in the decorative carvings -- it was thought that the deity often took the form of vultures that ate the flesh of humans and various creatures in order to absorb their spirits.

It was thought that the deity might appreciate intercourse with a human virgin, so a human figure was carved into rock and deposited within a wall in one of the monuments. This male would supposedly enable the deity to come down and inhabit the statue.  A human virgin was then installed so that the deity could have intercourse with her.

One of the artificial caves was furnished with carving of a charging boar.  This might have been an attempt to communicate to the deity that the builders of the cave wished the deity to bring such animals to the region . (Unlike grazing animals, boars did not migrate to the mountains during the dry season.)

Environmental change, farming and animal husbandry

Very dry seasons alternated with very wet seasons.  This brought massive wildfires which were started accidentally or by lightning, and these wildfires  often swept through dry grass at harvest time or during the dry season.  (Sometimes the fields were intentionally set on fire in order to control weeds, enrich the soil and prevent dangerous wildfires.)

Wet seasons that followed such fires brought heavy rains that eroded the topsoil on hills and slopes, sweeping it into valleys where it was deposited in deep layers of topsoil.  Grass barely grew in the eroded hills but grasses grew abundantly in the fertile river valleys and crowded out other plants.

Women then began the practice of spiling some of the seeds that they had gathered in order to increase the yield of the grasses that produced the seeds.  This was effective especially after a fire had disposed of most of the weeds.  These practices eventually led to the evolution of domesticated grasses and this in turn was the genesis of farming.

Aurochs crowded into the rich pastures, and people hunted the animals that ate their crops.  But the population of these animals dwindled as a result of overhunting so people began to round up the animals and fence them in so the animals could be culled throughout the year.  Since the most dangerous of these animals were the first to be killed, this led to domestication of the animals.  Emmer wheat, eincorn wheat, barley and rye were the grasses that were first domesticated in Anatolia.  Peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chickpeas and flax were also domesticated there, while pigs, sheep and goats were imported from Mesopotamia and also herded about in the Levant.

Domesticated aurochs were dangerous animals, and women left their management to adult males, so this gave men plenty to do during the dry season.  At the same time, women became interested in worshiping at the artificial caves in order to ensure good harvests and other kinds of good fortune, so some of the artificial caves were rebuilt.  But then new modes of worship were invented and the artificial caves were allowed to tumble into ruins.

The Aegean Neolithic

In Anatolia elites that came into power were able to collect a portion of the harvest to support their own extravagant lifestyles.  In order to escape these confiscations many of the farmers took to the sea or traveled overland out of the region.  Consequently, farming spread along the Thracian coast and into islands in the Aegean Sea, and by around 8,000 years ago farming was common in the Aegean region.

Neolithic colonies had been established on the Balkan Peninsula, and subsequently, they spread throughout the Mediterranean region, both in northern Africa (which was lush and green at that time) and in southern Europe.

The people who founded the earliest colonies in those regions practiced farming, fishing and animal husbandry and looked very much like the earlier hunter-gatherer populations.  They they generally had blue or greenish eyes, dark curly hair and very dark skin.

​Power struggle in Spain

The first farmers to come to the Iberian peninsula, where Spain is now located, came by crossing the sea from the Italian Peninsula or from Sardinia after founding colonies in western North Africa, on the Balkan Peninsula (Greece), on the Italian Peninsula and on Sardinia.  These migrating farmers brought domesticated animals with them everywhere they went -- sheep, goats, cattle and pigs.  Meanwhile hunter gatherers retreated to mountainous areas and looked on in dismay.

As domesticated animals had come into the Iberian Peninsula the hunter gatherers must have learned early on that the rules had changed, and that any attempt to hunt the animals would trigger a deadly war with the new masters of the plains.  That was probably when the hunter gatherers had begun to retreat to mountainous areas.  But then the farmers began to bring their animals into the mountains, and the hunter gatherers had no choice but to engage the encroachers in a deadly war.

When an extended family of Neolithic farmers cum shepherds settled into a cave in the Atapuerca Mountains (in the north of what is now Spain) hunter gatherers ambushed them and killed every man, woman and child.  For good measure they also cooked and ate the unlucky farmers, perhaps in order to demonstrate their own power and also to acquire new power -- just as they would occasionally kill and eat such animals as wild cats, badgers and foxes in order to to acquire their qualities. The farmers who had been killed had not gone into the mountains simply to grow crops; they had brought domesticated animals with them.  So, why did the hunter gatherers not just steal the animals, rather than engaging the farmers in direct combat?  They did so because the settlers who came into the mountains had demonstrated their prowess by using deadly force, primarily bow-and-arrow technology, to prevent theft of their animals, and thus demonstrated their own prowess.  That was why the farmers and their families were slaughtered and eaten.

Power struggle in Carnac

A thousand years before farmers came to Brittany hunter-gatherers had built huge walls offshore of an island hundreds of miles to the west of there to trap fish.  These massive walls, built of megaliths, showed extraordinary building skills, and yet they were built by hunter-gatherers.

When the first farmers arrived in Brittany they were met by hunters who periodically traveled to the mainland to hunt for animals that could not be found on their offshore island.  The frequent clashes between the itinerant hunters and the farmers convinced both peoples that they should come to some accommodation, and the result of these negotiations was that the two peoples cooperated in moving massive stones into a miles-long alignment consisting of parallel strings of monoliths that marked a boundary between the coastal plain, which was good for farming. and the rugged inland territory.  The farmers would stay out of the inland areas so that hunting activity there would not be disturbed.

This boundary line kept the peace until the farming population increased greatly and became heedless of the agreement.  The hunter-gatherers then gave up their hunting territories on the mainland.

Otzi the Iceman

We come now to the best-preserved crime scene that any detective could hope for.  Otzi was shot in the back with an arrow, which was still embedded in his shoulder when his body was found, 7,300 years after his death.  His body and his possessions, including his shoes and the contents of his stomach were preserved because they were not only frozen but bone dry after being subjected by freeze-thaw cycles for thousands of years and then buried by dry snow until he wound up at the bottom ofof a glacier.

But was it murder or an execution?  He himself had grown up in the bottomland of the Tyrol, the rugged country of deep valleys and towering peaks at the eastern end of the Alps; he was hunted down and killed by almost the same people with whom he had grown up.

One is reminded of the story of Romeo and Juliet, who found themselves embroiled in the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets:  Otzi was a Capulet and the people who hunted him down and killed him were Montagues.

If this was true, why didn't Otzi run to the bastion of his own people, the Capulets, rather than climb high into the mountains?  The answer is that the Capulets, as a family, were no more, done in by the Montagues.

By Otzi's time, the hunter-gatherers of the Tyrolean Alps were also no more, having been done in by the farming communities who had taken over the hunting grounds of the hunter-gatherers, depriving them of their livelihoods.  But there were still rival farming communities, jockeying among themselves for space -- space in which to farm and space in which to hunt.  Otzi's community had been deprived of their farms by their neighbors, the Montagues, and Otzi's female relatives had thus been forced to live on the fringes of Montague society.

But only females could do that, so Otzi had been forced into the wilderness.  But the wilderness is a lonely place, so Otzi had descended to the valley, where he had grown up, to visit a female relative.  He had brought his female relative some meat from a red deer, and his female relative, perhaps a sister or a wife, had that morning fed him a meal of einkorn flavored with fiddlehead ferns, together with smoked fatty tissue from an Ibex.  And then he had set out.

Unfortunately, as he tried to slip back into the trees he was recognized as a stranger and attacked.  He had warded off the knife attack with his hand and at the same time slashed the man's throat, and then fled.  When the body of his attacker was found a posse set out after him.  They tracked him down and shot him in the back.

Cattle herding on muddy ground

After hop-scotching across the Mediterranean Sea and then moving into the Iberian Peninsula the farmers of the Neolithic Revolution moved through what is now France and reacched the wetlands of what is now Belgium, the Netherlands and western Germany.  Farmers found the soggy ground there difficult to farm, but hunter-gatherers after initially raiding raiding the colonists to steal their cattle, decided that herding cattle about was easier than hunting wild aurochs, and these lowlands became cattle country.

The ex-hunter-gatherers did so well at this new enterprise that women from the farming population began marrying men from the new cattle-herding culture.  Indeed the women preferred to marry these cattle herders, because men from the farming communities expected their women to take care of the animals, as well as harvest, process and plant the crops.  Soon, a mixed race of cattle drovers emerged.

Farming and silver mining on Sardinia

About a thousand years after the first agricultural colonies were established on Sardinia, an island near the Italian Peninsula, a raised platform, built like a step pyramid, was constructed at the northern end of the island.  This structure does not seem to belong in Europe -- it is basically a ziggurat, and it seems as if it had somehow been mysteriously transported from far-off Mesopotamia.  (Mud bricks were used for construction in Mesopotamia because rock was not available on the Mesopotamian plain.)

This ziggurat, whose base measured 27 meters by 27 meters, was probably surmounted by a temple where ritual sacrifices of sheep, cattle and swine were performed.  The temple was needed in order to provide a place where the animals could be butchered and cooked by priests who ate some of the meat and sold the rest to the pilgrims.  (As elsewhere, consumption by priests was symbolic of consumption by the deity or deities to whom the animals were sacrificed.)

Near one corner of the ziggurat was a dolmen -- two upright standing stones, or megaliths, that supported a flat megalith that served as a roof.  This construction was covered over with dirt and rubble so as to simulate a cave, and this cave was symbolic of the cave dwellings of ancestors who had lived in caves during ice ages and the Younger Dryas.  Nearby was a standing stone which perhaps represented an ancestor who guarded the cave and the ziggurat.

Pilgrims traveled from all over Sardinia to sacrifice at the ziggurat, and this gives us a clue as to why people came from the Middle East and built a ziggurat in western Europe.  The ziggurat could not have been profitable if not for the silver which was mined on the Island, because it would be impractical for pilgrims to bring animals to be sacrificed from far-off places.  Instead, they brought silver, and purchased the animals from merchants who lived in nearby dwelling places and also kept live animals nearby.

These merchants had come all the way from Mesopotamia to do this business, and the nearby dolmen may have served as a sacrificial site prior to construction of the ziggurat.

Merchants from Crete and North Africa

Merchant ships from Crete occasionally visited Sardinia in order to trade luxury products for silver, but they gradually realized that they were paying much higher prices than necessary because the Middle Eastern merchants had such a throttlehold on the supply of silver, so about 500 years after the ziggurat had been built , Minoan merchants mounted a military expedition to Sardinia and seized control of the ziggurat.

The ziggurat had been allowed to more-or-less fall into ruin, so the consortium of Minoan merchants rebuilt it, bigger and better than it had been to start with.  The Minoan merchants knew about Middle Eastern ziggurats, so the result was a high-quality ziggurat that matched Middle-Eastern ziggurats to a "T", except that stone was used in its construction.

The Minoans were very happy with the result, and they operated the enterprise for another 500 years.  But merchants from northern Africa were unhappy because they found it difficult to obtain silver from Sardinians, who spent so much of the precious metal for animals to sacrifice.  The merchants from northern Africa are known to archaeologists as Bell Beaker people because of the shape of some of their pottery.

Eventually, the Bell Beaker people from northern Africa mounted a military expedition to Sardinia to seize control of the ziggurat from the Minoans.

The Nuragic civilization

The mercantile Bell Beaker people from North Africa maintained control of the the ziggurat for several centuries.  Then the culture of animal sacrifice at the ziggurat came to an end when the Nuragic civilization arose on the island.  Perhaps as many as 30,000 nuraghe towers were built on the island -- they are now tumbled into ruins.  The Nuragic civilization and their culture were named after the towers of rock that they built because archaeologists had found no other name for the people who built them.

The construction of these towers was accompanied by the emergence of local militias which were based at the towers.  The original purpose of the towers had been to enforce collection of tolls from pilgrims as they moved through local territories, lightening their loads of silver and controlling their movements, but the towers came to have many purposes.

The existence of these local militias quickly choked off the movement of pilgrims through the countryside, so the militias then had to find other sources of revenue.  Still, in the course of between 2,000 years or so about 30,000 nuraghe were built.

The nuraghe were constructed of very large boulders that had been minimally dressed, and they had to be continually repaired in places where they threatened to tumble down, due to poor engineering.  If not, they tumbled into ruins, and the ruins were then processed into new construction.

Nuragic engineers surely knew that their constructions would be more solid if the boulders were more extensively dressed, but they refused to do so in the course of 2,000 years or so -- perhaps for religious reasons.

During the 2,000-year period of nuraghe construction many of the militias along the coast specialized in seaborne mercantile trade, trading silver and other products for luxury goods, and they quickly became involved in the lucrative trade in copper and tin, carrying copper and tin from mines in Europe and from the Isle of Britain to the eastern Mediterranean region where there was an insatiable demand for bronze  Thus, the Sardinian mercantile fleet was an early competitor of the Minoan mercantile fleet.

Mercantile shipping, like all enterprises on the island, were community enterprises, and the crews were drawn from the local militia.  Moreover, since the profits that accrued from mercantile trading belonged to the local community, crew members had an incentive to make each voyage a successful one.

The cargoes of silver, copper and tin that were carried by Nuragic ships were immensely valuable, and the crewmen chafed at delivering the proceeds to their militia, only to find that they had to start their lives over, having lost most of their social connections while they had been on their voyage.  In response, the seamen began to turn their backs on their own militias, and join together with other seamen in building their own ships on which to set sail, this time bringing their wives and children with them so that they would not have to return.  Since these voyages seldom benefited their home communities, Sardinia gradually declined as a mercantile power.

Other local militias had other specialties, depending on their resources and their enterprise.  Those that controlled silver mines specialized in mining silver and trading it to coastal communities.  Other militias specialized in various kinds of agriculture or in processing wool into fabrics and rugs.  There were lively negotiations among the militias over the transport of these goods to markets.

We can see that Sardinia was militarily and economically like a microcosm of Europe.  But there is no sign of early kingship on Sardinia, so social organization must have involved control by elite families.  Animal sacrifices at the ziggurat had been superseded by simple requests that were made to divine spirits at temples.  Since the Sardinians had no written language, these requests were amplified by votive offerings that graphically described the desired outcome.

Family wealth and family structure

As in most early agricultural societies, women were the property owners and the carriers of communal rights.  Moreover, Sardinian women needed to carry daggers tied to their necks, so that they could protect themselves from assassination.  Some women might have carried the dagger simply to guard against theft of something valuable that she carried; but virtually all women carried the daggers, so assassination must have been the danger that they faced.  This was probably because assassination was one way of obtaining a woman's wealth or community rights.

Men also carried weapons, but their weapons were their badge of membership in a local militia.

Especially in shoreline communities that specialized in the mercantile trade there was probably a taboo against using the word that signified the genetic father of a woman's child or children -- so many men went to sea, and their wives would find new boyfriends.  If a stepfather heard the word it would be a reminder to him that he was not the father, so if the word were used at all it would be spoken only in whispers.  Moreover, if there was a word for "stepfather" it would also be avoided; if a stepfather herd the word he would know that it meant that he was not the father of his wife's child or children.

A rich prize for later Mediterranean powers

The rich deposits of silver on the island and its abundance of good agricultural land, as well as its strategic location along trade routs that joined the Italian and Iberian peninsulas and the mainland of southern Europe of northern Africa -- all of this made Sardinia a bone of contention.  Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Romans fought over the island, and eventually the prize was won by Rome.  Sardinians who wanted to continue to run their own affairs were then forced to retreat to western mountainous areas.  Many emigrated to Nuragic communities on the mainland of the Italian Peninsula, but they did not build nuraghe there.

Eventually, Rome became Christian, but even as Rome establish Christianity in most of Sardinia, Sardinians continued to practice their pagan religion in the western mountains.  Only gradually were holdouts in mountainous areas forced to relinquish their pagan rites and rituals.

Genocide

The farming culture of Anatolia spread to the east, into the alluvial plain of Mesopotamia, as well as to the west, into northern Africa and southern Europe, and archaeologists are not sure exactly how long ago the first farmers arrived there -- the alluvial plain is much too big and deep to excavate the whole thing.  But grasses most likely were domesticated as early on the alluvial plain as anywhere.

The sowing, reaping, processing and cooking of grass seeds was women's work -- the work of men was hunting, as it had been in earlier times.  Moreover, as well-fed human populations increased, and it became necessary to travel long distances to find animals to hunt, domesticated sheep and goats (mostly cared for by women) made it unnecessary for men to do anything at all besides the tedious chore of making cooking and serving vessels out of stone.

​Consequently, men began to look for other things to do, such as hunting down and slaughtering the archaic Homo sapiens who lived in that region and had formed a habit of stealing crops and domesticated animals from the farming communities.

The hunters, who used bow-and-arrow killing systems, far outnumbered the women and children who had been stealing the crops and animals.  After the thieves had been wiped out the hunters went after those who tried to hide in the swampland.

Incidentally, a man living in the United States has been found to be a direct descendant, in the male line of descent, of the archaic Homo sapiens who continued to live in or near the swamplands of southern Mesopotamia.  His unique lineage indicates that the population of his ancestors must have remained separate from the rest of humanity for about 300,000 years -- this conclusion follows inevitably from an examination of his Y-Chromosome.

We are forced to this conclusion by the fact that all other Homo sapiens Y-Chromosomes are descended from the Y-Chromosome that was caried by a man who lived only about 150,000 years ago, most likely in a refugium in western Arica.  The laws of chance dictate that this unique Y-Chromosome type could not have survived for twice that long in competition with othe male lines of descent.

In other words his ancestors may have been among those who survived ​by abandoning the swampland and escaping along the shoreline.

Mixed-race animal herders

At the same time that farming was spreading to the east, it was also spreading further west, through present-day France and across the sea into Britain.  There, the farmers overwhelmed the local hunter-gatherer population demographically, but it took centuries for the complete submersion of the indigenous population to be completely replaced by the farming population.

In the meantime, the hunter-gatherer population, which tended to have very dark skin and blue eyes, hung on in places which were largely unsuitable for farming, such as barren hillsides and chalky plains, such as Salisbury Plain, where the soil did not retain moisture, but allowed it to quickly  be lost into layers of chalk that were hundreds of feet thick.  There a mixed race largely gave up hunting gor animal herddig, and herded about domesticated aurochs, sheep and pigs in the sparce vegetation.