WHEAT AND BARLEY

Speaking to the geese

Geese flew over the fields of wild wheat grass twice a year.  In the spring the geese would fly on north without stopping but in the fall when they flew south they would stop and eat the ripe grass seeds.  Each fall as the geese flew south the men would hide in trees while the women would stand in assigned spaces in gaps between the trees and speak to the birds in a silent voice.  And the children would be strung out in a great circle around the periphery and would wave their arms at each other as the geese approached.  The women would silently tell the birds to land and eat the ripe grass seeds and sure enough the birds would land in the field.  And the men would shoot the birds from the trees.

​​Celiac Disease

The regular cooking of food, along with the formation of tribes and other modern behaviors, has enabled Homo sapiens to occupy almost every ecosystem on the face of the Earth, and when nothing else could be found to eat, it seemed that grass seeds could be cooked and eaten.  Unfortunately, many people, especially infants, were unable to fully digest the seeds of some of the grasses of the Middle East.  Infants, especially, sometimes became sickly, and sometimes even died from eating cooked grass seeds.  This led to the gradual elimination of such people from the gene pool; but many people even today are not able to fully digest the cooked seeds of wheat, barley and rye, and become sick if they try to eat those cereals.

In spite of this many people started the practice gathering mature grass seeds during the dry season and saving them as emergency food.  This had the unintended side effect of beginning a gradual domestication of some of the Middle Eastern grasses.

Fluctuating climate in the Middle East

The Younger Dryas was the most recent (the youngest, in a geological sense) of three episodes of cooling that interrupted the warming trend that followed the Last Glacial Maximum.  (The Last Glacial Maximum occurred about 20,000 years ago.)  Volcanism might have played a major part in causing the Younger Dryas, but this episode had a dramatic start, about 12,975 years ago, when a comet shredded into tiny fragments in the Earth's atmosphere and pieces of it smashed into the Earth.

As the climate cooled during the Younger Dryas it also vacillated, because there was a great deal of volcanism at that time, particularly along the Rift Valley ran parallel to the Levantine coast and around the rim of the Mediterranean Sea.  Then a comet struck the Earth, causing a sharp cooling in the northern hemisphere, and this was followed by blockage of water circulation in the Atlantic Ocean, caused by a slide of ice into the North Atlantic Ocean.  All of these climatic fluctuations forced people at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea to again retreat to caves during cold periods, and depend on grass seeds for much of their sustenance.

Even during the Younger Dryas people were able to maintain their population because the cooked grass seeds had a high energy content.  Moreover, mush that mothers made from the grass seeds was often fed to infants in place of their mothers' milk, and this caused many mothers to stop nursing their babies early.  This. in turn, caused mothers to conceive more often.  Then, as the climate again warmed, the human population grew rapidly.

As the human population increased the herbivore population declined because of overhunting.  Moreover, the animals migrated into the mountains during the dry season.  The men wanted to follow the animals into the mountains but the women didn't wand to move with the seasons but preferred  to stay put and subsist by gathering grass stalks in the fall, removing the seeds from the husks and cooking the seeds -- even if the men could not bring in meat.  This left little for he men to do during the dry season besides carve cooking and serving vessels of various sizes out of rocks.  So, the men began to look around for something worthwhile to do during the long dry seasons.

Artificial caves

It occurred to the men that the animals moved into the mountains because a shaman would go up to a mountain peak and spoke to a deity who could control movements of the animals.  Moreover, people who lived in the mountains lived in caves, and it was believed that the deity came down and conversed with the people who lived there, and perhaps did favors for them in return for offerings.  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 ridge where some of the hunter-gatherers hunted, gathered and lived in temporary dwellings.  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 and dirt was compacted into the holes where they stood. The excavation was then 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 carving pictures and abstract designs into the T-shaped pillars and supplementary pillars that supported the roofs and into large stone tablets that were placed in some of the monuments. These decorations illustrated stories told by thee shaman, by storytellers and by others. New constructions were 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 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 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.

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

Some of the monuments were rebuilt as recently as 9,500 years ago, but when sheep and other herbivores were domesticated the relationship between people and the gods became personal rather than communal, and people in the region let the monuments tumble into ruins.

The ring of monumental constructions were clustered near the highest point on a hill or small mountain that is known to the Turks as Gobekli Tepe, or "Potbellied Hill".  As each temple was built, the previous one was filled in, possibly because the old temple was considered outdated or obsolete in some way.  The only way to completely get rid of old ideas (and old views of the sky) as embodied in the temple's construction and carvings was to get a fresh start.

Filling in and covering over the monuments created a mound where the old monument had been.  The total of the filled-in constructions formed a circular mound with a depression in its center which looked like a navel on top of the mountain, and that was the origin of the name, "Gobekli Tepe".

Near this circular mound, archaeologists found the remains of a large cistern and a water collection system for channeling rainwater into it.  This allowed priestly astronomers to cook meals of processed grass seeds and the sacrificial offerings of pilgrims who visited the temple that was currently in operation.     to permanently reside at the site, most likely in underground chambers would improve the ability of the priests to observe the stars at night.

Other customs of cave-dwelling ancestors were also observed, such as ritual cannibalism and drinking liquids out of the skulls of priests who had died.  With the coming of the comet, study of the nighttime sky had become quite serious, so the priests were all male, while gatherers of seeds were probably females and children.  The workers who gathered seeds or did other chores may have resided in rectangular structurers that were external to the underground temple.

All of these workers, including the astronomer/priests had to be paid in some way, so visitors to the temple most likely brought gifts of food and expected to receive in return some favor from the gods who resided in the sky -- or perhaps within the earth.

By the time the last temple observatory was built it was well realized that large-scale movements of the stars had inevitably caused the successive temples to become obsolete, and astronomers had worked their way backward in time to when the comet had struck.  Possibly in commemoration of this achievement a statue was erected to represent the astronomer or astronomers who had made this discovery.  This statue was hidden in a wall cavity and in a reclining position as if observing the heavens through the overhead roof.  Or perhaps he was simply contemplating movements of the stars.  He had an enormous head, to emphasize his immense intellect, and was shown scratching his scrotum or pulling his scrotum out from between his legs, which emphasizes that he was a living individual, resting, contemplating and perhaps observing the heavens.  Otherwise, there would be no point in his residing within a wall, where he wasn't visible to any human observer.

Hiding him inside a wall perhaps reflected an ancient belief that spirits reside within the earth that are brought to the surface by drawings on cave walls.  The ancestors of the people who lived in the region or made pilgrimages to visit the temple had, during the Younger Dryas and during the earlier ice age, resided in caves and perhaps drawn pictures on the cave walls.  Now, their visits to the temple were reminders of this lifestyle of their ancestors.

The "Vulture Stone" was also found in this last temple to be built.  It displayed the zodiac as it had appeared when the comet had struck the Earth.

At some distance from Gobekli Tepe archaeologists have found another temple, contemporary with Gobekli Tepe, that contained a statue of a charging boar.  Perhaps this represented the fireball that had struck from the sky.

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Grass-seed consumption

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Climate change also played a part in both the scarcity of grass-eating herbivores and a switch to a sedentary, seed-gathering lifestyle in which people started to domesticate grazing animals

Further climate change, farming and animal husbandry

Further climate change included extreme seasonality in which dry seasons alternated with wet seasons.  Massive wildfires, started accidentally or by lightning, often swept through dry grass at harvest time or during the dry season.  Then when the wet season came heavy rains 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 fertile conditions in the valleys encouraged people to start farming in the valleys of Anatolia, where they grew emmer wheat, eincorn wheat, barley, peas, lentils, biter vetch and chickpeas. Flax was cultivated and cloth was made from its fibers.

Human populations, fed by these early agricultural products, expanded rapidly but animal populations dwindled rapidly as a result of overhunting. The severe shortage of meat prompted communities to fence in wild aurochs and cull the animals carefully throughout the year. The animals that were hardest to manage were the first to be slaughtered, and this quickly led to the domestication of cattle, in South Asia as well as in the Middle East.  Meanwhile, sheep and goats were domesticated in Mesopotamia and pigs were domesticated in southern China as well as in the Middle East.

Chickens descended from the Jungle Fowl of South Asia as was suggested by Charles Darwin. They originally self-domesticated and were kept as exotic and beautiful pets.

All of this resulted in eroded hills where grasses barely grew and moist valleys where grasses grew abundantly.  Human populations crowded into these valleys and so did grass-eating herbivores, and the juxtaposition encouraged people to round up the animals instead of killing them.  Grasses grew abundantly in these river valleys, and crowded out other plants.  In order to conserve the precious herbivores and this led to domestication of the animals, and this was the origin of animal husbandry.

At the same time, some of the grasses were domesticated.  Gathering of the best seeds and seasonal spillage of seeds on the ground subsequently led to the evolution of domesticated grasses, so this was the genesis of farming.

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Since the gathering of plant foods was women's work, men spent their time chipping stone vessels out of solid stone for storing, cooking and serving grass seeds.  We tend to think that the Neolithic, or "New Stone Age", was a time when people made new kinds of tools (such as composite tools) in order to make or construct new kinds of things (such as structures), but  I think the period is better characterized as one in which time hung heavy on men's hands; their primary function had been taken away from them, first by a massive die-off of the animals that they hunted and then by the domestication of animals.  Even after wild animal populations recovered, men were often more useful for guarding domesticated animals and stores of grass seeds than for hunting wild animals and bringing back the carcasses.  Moreover women, rather than men, often cared for the domesticated animals.

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Even as the Younger Dryas waned, human populations burgeoned because grass seeds were so rich in energy; shortage of energy foods had always been the limiting factor in the growth of human populations

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The chipping of storage and cooking vessels out of stone was not enough to keep men busy, nor did they like to do it, so they often spent their time trying to solve the riddle of what had befallen them.  Men with time on their hands sat in groups at night to watch the sky and report what they saw; those who were very good at this then became professional astronomers, and were paid to watch the sky every night and analyze what they saw; other men were paid by the community to build observatories, based on various designs, to help the astronomers do their work.  Their work was to discover the cause of what had happened.

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Women were no longer dependent on men.  Indeed, men were dependent on women, because men refused to do the women's work of gathering, processing and cooking grass seeds.  Moreover, men lost their main remaining usefulness when women started to make pottery.  Women ruled their households, and women in the village communities often ruled the men, rather than the reverse.  This role reversal, as compared with most modern societies, is reflected in the idealized art of the earliest farming communities which often featured women with one arm draped across the back of a man, as if she owned him.  The men simply folded his hands, as if he had nothing to do, aside from looking after his wife's wealth.

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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 or into islands in the Aegean Sea, and by around 8,000 years ago farming was common in the Aegean region, and Neolithic colonies had been established on the Balkan Peninsula.  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

At the same time that farmers from Anatolia were hop-scotching across the Mediterranean Sea, others were moving overland, many of them traveling through Europe until they reached the Atlantic coast.  Some of them found themselves on the coast of what is now the Carnac region in Britany, and there they found themselves on a well-watered coastal plain that was much wider than it is today because of lower sea levels, and there they settled.

Their population increased rapidly, and in order to supplement their diets many of them went inland to hunt -- while hunter gatherers looked on in dismay.  The hunter gatherers were dismayed because the farmers, who were very numerous, were excellent hunters with excellent hunting equipment, and they monopolized the best game in the region.  I will call these hunter gatherers the Hill People.

These Hill People began the practice of sometimes ambushing and killing hunters who were taking part in hunting expeditions into the hills.  This seemed to deter, for a time, the forays into the hill country, but then after a time the intrusions would resume, so the Hill People stripped the flesh off of human skulls and hung the skulls at intervals along a line between the hill county and the coastal plain.  This worked for a time, but then the farmers began to tear down the poles and dispose of the skulls, so the Hill People looked for some way to permanently demark the line.

The answer came to them when they saw the farmers using captured hunter-gatherer slaves to transport huge stones weighing several tons from rock outcroppings where they were quarried to the site of a tomb that they were building.  These stones were transported by pulling them with ropes along a prepared path and placing logs under them as they moved along the path.

The Hill People similarly quarried huge stones and used captured farmers to lug the stones into place along a path that was to mark the boundary between territory that was owned by farmers and territory that was owned by the Hill People.  This boundary line eventually reached a length of four kilometers.

Some portions of this boundary line, consisting of several parallel strings of huge standing stones, or menhirs, have been torn down as a result of modern constructions, but some portions are still standing and can be seen running along the countryside, as far as the eye can see.

The gigantic scale of the megalithic project stands as evidence of an extended power struggle between the farmers  and the hunter gatherers.

Otzi the Ice Man

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The Italian Tyrol, where Otzi died. is unique in Europe.  It is a time capsule where little has changed since farmers from Anatolia first arrived there about 7,000 years ago.

Since the farmers first arrived in the Tyrol, which is rugged country just east of Switzerland, farmers have continued to farm in the bottomland while herding their cattle to higher elevations for the summer months.  And few strangers have passed through the region, perhaps because they were not welcome there, and the locals quite effectively kept them out.

Otzi was a hunter, and he was suspected of poaching on cattle that were allowed to graze in the highlands during the summer months.  Thus he was run down by a younger man and shot in the back.  Otzi was innocent, as indicated by his last meal, which included meat from a red deer and fat from, an Ibex but no meat from domesticated animals.

That morning, before leaving home, Otzi had eaten a breakfast that had consisted of fire roasted red deer meat and fat from an ibex that had been smoked in order to preserve it, plus einkorn cakes flavored with fresh young fiddlehead ferns.  The fat from an ibex was an important part of his diet because this was spring, and the Alpine mountains were bitterly cold.

Otzi was getting old for a hunter, and his health was poor, but he was still an important member of his community; rather than keeping domesticated animals his community depended on meat that was brought in by hunters like Otzi.  But his community was headed for a collision with a neighboring community, and his personal encounter with cattle herders was an early sign of that collision.

When he saw that he was being chased down he headed for a higher elevation, hoping to outrun his pursuers but his heart was not in a good condition, due to a lifetime of consuming a high-fat diet so that he could withstand the cold while hunting in the mountains.  Moreover, he had parasites growing in his gut, due to a lifetime of consuming fatty tissue around the internal organs of freshly killed animals as emergency high-energy food.  Members of his community found his body on a glacier, and buried him right there where his body was found.

A ziggurat on Sardinia

Between the Iberian Peninsula, where some of the early farmers were cannibalized by hunter gatherers and the Tyrol, where Otzi was shot in the back during a power struggle between farmers and cattle herders lay the Isle of Sardinia, whose mysteries are compounded by the Illiteracy of the people who lived there in antiquity.

About a thousand years after the first agricultural colonies were established on Sardinia 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 probably 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 on 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.

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.