NationStates Jolt Archive


Oldest European Civilisation Found - 7000 Years Old!

[NS]Ein Deutscher
12-06-2005, 09:23
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=645972


How 7,000-year-old temples reveal the elaborate culture of Europe

By Cahal Milmo
11 June 2005


The construction of the temples of Nickern, on the site that is now Dresden, puts the first civilisations of Europe at the forefront of early human endeavour to master nature.

Some two millennia before the first stones were laid for the pyramids of Egypt, humanity's preoccupation, from the forests of Germany to the plains of Pakistan, was * both literally and figuratively * to place roots in the soil.

Archaeological evidence suggests that by the fifth millennium BC, tribes in regions such as Baluchistan, on the site known as Mehrgarh, in the north-western corner of the Indian sub-continent, and the Samarrans in Mesopotamia were establishing farms and permanent communities.

In Egypt, crops such as flax, cotton and barley were being grown from about 5000BC in villages where herds of sheep and goats were also kept. The discovery of early traces of agriculture in New Guinea from about the same time indicate that across the globe humans were starting to sculpt their landscape.

Dr John Robertson, a Washington University-based anthropologist, said: "There is much of this period that we still don't understand, but humanity was beyond the stage of hunting down prey and smearing itself with the entrails.

"Across the world, man was beginning to see his surroundings as something that could be organised or curtailed * to be farmed. That is a profound change and it did not displace an innate sense of reverence for nature.

"The first civilisations therefore dedicated effort, more often than not huge, into reflecting that in monumental structures."

It is this impetus for a sacred space, such as the early temples dating from this time in Mesopotamia, that appears to be behind the vast structures uncovered in central Europe.

Archaeologists have struggled to pinpoint and outline the development of the first farming communities, because the evidence that they left behind is scanty at best. But the picture that is often drawn of the European context is that an increasingly sophisticated farming culture, with its base in Mesopotamia, roughly the area occupied by present-day Iraq and Syria, was radiating outwards across the Middle East towards the outer reaches of Europe.

On the Orkney islands, complex stone structures such as the Knap of Howar, the earliest standing dwellings to be found in north-west Europe, date from about 3500BC.

Stone, however, is durable and tends to stay in place. By contrast, it has been difficult for archaeologists to establish the degree of sophistication of the civilisation that built the Nickern temples * more than a millennium before the Orkney structures * using timber and earth.

Andrew Sherratt, professor of archaeology at the University of Oxford, said: "The problem has been that all that is often left of these structures are post-holes. It is only when we begin to reconstruct them that we understand the elaborate nature of the culture.

"What appears to have been discovered in Germany is something which might have astonished, for example, Britons, who were only just beginning to farm in this period. But to the Mesopotamians, it would have been the grounds for a rather patronising pat on the back."

While the precise nature of the Nickern round buildings remains a mystery, evidence suggests their owners were sophisticated.

In the early Egyptian village of al-Fayyum, dead domesticated animals were wrapped in linen and buried close to their community. Later evidence from Ancient Egypt offers in insight into the complexity of beliefs that accompanied this practice.

In Nickern, the people who were building their own grand places of worship manufactured ceramic statues of humans and animals * as did the inhabitants of Mehrgarh in Baluchistan * although there is as yet little evidence of the beliefs that drove this practice.

And another article here:

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=645976

Found: Europe's oldest civilisation

By David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent
11 June 2005


Archaeologists have discovered Europe's oldest civilisation, a network of dozens of temples, 2,000 years older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids.

More than 150 gigantic monuments have been located beneath the fields and cities of modern-day Germany, Austria and Slovakia. They were built 7,000 years ago, between 4800BC and 4600BC. Their discovery, revealed today by The Independent, will revolutionise the study of prehistoric Europe, where an appetite for monumental architecture was thought to have developed later than in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

In all, more than 150 temples have been identified. Constructed of earth and wood, they had ramparts and palisades that stretched for up to half a mile. They were built by a religious people who lived in communal longhouses up to 50 metres long, grouped around substantial villages. Evidence suggests their economy was based on cattle, sheep, goat and pig farming.

Their civilisation seems to have died out after about 200 years and the recent archaeological discoveries are so new that the temple building culture does not even have a name yet.

Excavations have been taking place over the past few years - and have triggered a re-evaluation of similar, though hitherto mostly undated, complexes identified from aerial photographs throughout central Europe.

Archaeologists are now beginning to suspect that hundreds of these very early monumental religious centres, each up to 150 metres across, were constructed across a 400-mile swath of land in what is now Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and eastern Germany.

The most complex excavated so far - located inside the city of Dresden - consisted of an apparently sacred internal space surrounded by two palisades, three earthen banks and four ditches.

The monuments seem to be a phenomenon associated exclusively with a period of consolidation and growth that followed the initial establishment of farming cultures in the centre of the continent.

It is possible that the newly revealed early Neolithic monument phenomenon was the consequence of an increase in the size of - and competition between - emerging Neolithic tribal or pan-tribal groups, arguably Europe's earliest mini-states.

After a relatively brief period - perhaps just one or two hundred years - either the need or the socio-political ability to build them disappeared, and monuments of this scale were not built again until the Middle Bronze Age, 3,000 years later. Why this monumental culture collapsed is a mystery.

The archaeological investigation into these vast Stone Age temples over the past three years has also revealed several other mysteries. First, each complex was only used for a few generations - perhaps 100 years maximum. Second, the central sacred area was nearly always the same size, about a third of a hectare. Third, each circular enclosure ditch - irrespective of diameter - involved the removal of the same volume of earth. In other words, the builders reduced the depth and/or width of each ditch in inverse proportion to its diameter, so as to always keep volume (and thus time spent) constant .

Archaeologists are speculating that this may have been in order to allow each earthwork to be dug by a set number of special status workers in a set number of days - perhaps to satisfy the ritual requirements of some sort of religious calendar.

The multiple bank, ditch and palisade systems "protecting" the inner space seem not to have been built for defensive purposes - and were instead probably designed to prevent ordinary tribespeople from seeing the sacred and presumably secret rituals which were performed in the "inner sanctum" .

The investigation so far suggests that each religious complex was ritually decommissioned at the end of its life, with the ditches, each of which had been dug successively, being deliberately filled in.

"Our excavations have revealed the degree of monumental vision and sophistication used by these early farming communities to create Europe's first truly large scale earthwork complexes," said the senior archaeologist, Harald Staeuble of the Saxony state government's heritage department, who has been directing the archaeological investigations. Scientific investigations into the recently excavated material are taking place in Dresden.

The people who built the huge circular temples were the descendants of migrants who arrived many centuries earlier from the Danube plain in what is now northern Serbia and Hungary. The temple-builders were pastoralists, controlling large herds of cattle, sheep and goats as well as pigs. They made tools of stone, bone and wood, and small ceramic statues of humans and animals. They manufactured substantial amounts of geometrically decorated pottery, and they lived in large longhouses in substantial villages.

One village complex and temple at Aythra, near Leipzig, covers an area of 25 hectares. Two hundred longhouses have been found there. The population would have been up to 300 people living in a highly organised settlement of 15 to 20 very large communal buildings.
Ariddia
12-06-2005, 09:29
Impressive... Thanks for sharing.
[NS]Ein Deutscher
12-06-2005, 09:30
You're welcome. It does make me... proud a bit :)
Parduna
12-06-2005, 10:09
Ein Deutscher']You're welcome. It does make me... proud a bit :)

Watch out, for anybody except Americans it's a capital crime to be proud of your cultur, birthplace or nation and deserves capital punishment. You're in grave danger of being nuked. ;)
The Mindset
12-06-2005, 10:40
Sucks for Young Earth Creationists who think the Earth is only 6000 years old.
Sino
12-06-2005, 10:59
The Chinese has a total of 10,000 years of history, with the last 5,000 years of written history. Let's welcome this new civilization to the club.
Sino
12-06-2005, 11:00
Sucks for Young Earth Creationists who think the Earth is only 6000 years old.

Indeed!
Ryanania
12-06-2005, 11:01
Watch out, for anybody except Americans it's a capital crime to be proud of your cultur, birthplace or nation and deserves capital punishment. You're in grave danger of being nuked. ;)
Well that's funny, I always found it to be the opposite. Every time I've ever said anything nice about the USA, the thread gets flamed to death.
Harlesburg
12-06-2005, 12:47
Pretty cool seeing as you will struggle to find any Human existence before then!-Well much before.
Mythotic Kelkia
12-06-2005, 12:52
*yawn* Old Neolithic Europe is dull - things don't really start to get interesting til the Indo-Europeans invade/settle. They where all of t3h roxxorz. Or not, seeing as they where bronze users and the people of Old Europe where the ones still using stone :p
Kellarly
12-06-2005, 12:52
Cool, haven't seen the stories, but this is really really interesting.
Crimson Sith
12-06-2005, 13:06
Ein Deutscher']You're welcome. It does make me... proud a bit :)

Its a cool article, thank you. :)

Do please keep in mind though that the Germanic tribes had not yet arrived in Europe at this time.
Global Liberators
12-06-2005, 13:09
That's pretty cool. It should be noted that the pyramids in Egypt and ziggurats in Mesopotamia were huge and made out of stone. Also, stonehenge, while probably looking less advanced that the temple near Dresden, was made out of huge megaliths and must have taken quite some effort to erect. Then again, a building made of clay and wood requires some more engineering skills.
Global Liberators
12-06-2005, 13:11
Its a cool article, thank you. :)

Do please keep in mind though that the Germanic tribes had not yet arrived in Europe at this time.

Yeah but Germanic tribes probably mixed with the indigenous (celtic? slavic?) tribes rather than wiping them all out or forcing them all to flee.
Crimson Sith
12-06-2005, 13:14
Yeah but Germanic tribes probably mixed with the indigenous (celtic? slavic?) tribes rather than wiping them all out or forcing them all to flee.

No Celts, Slavs, or any Indo-European (read Aryan) tribes were in the area at this time.
Cabra West
12-06-2005, 13:23
They did. You can pick any European and you'll find that they are a mixture of a great many different original people... almost everbody came through here one time or another. Especially Germany, as it is right in the middle.
Celts, Romans, Huns, Vikings, Germanic tribes, Slavic people...
Crimson Sith
12-06-2005, 13:24
They did. You can pick any European and you'll find that they are a mixture of a great many different original people... almost everbody came through here one time or another. Especially Germany, as it is right in the middle.
Celts, Romans, Huns, Vikings, Germanic tribes, Slavic people...

None of which were anywhere close to Europe seven thousand years ago.
Bodies Without Organs
12-06-2005, 13:56
That's pretty cool. It should be noted that the pyramids in Egypt and ziggurats in Mesopotamia were huge and made out of stone. Also, stonehenge, while probably looking less advanced that the temple near Dresden, was made out of huge megaliths and must have taken quite some effort to erect. Then again, a building made of clay and wood requires some more engineering skills.

Newgrange (built circa 3200BC) gets written out of history again?
Accrued Constituencies
12-06-2005, 16:02
None of which were anywhere close to Europe seven thousand years ago.

Possibly the Huns, as they weren't a IE people, Magyars / Hungarians etc.

But who is to really say, these discoveries right now could change all of that, its whats uncovered about the past that writes it after all, and not our previous preconceptions.
Iztatepopotla
12-06-2005, 17:40
This is cool! I'm sure we are only starting to scratch at the history of humanity.
Lacadaemon
12-06-2005, 17:49
Newgrange (built circa 3200BC) gets written out of history again?


Yes, because it is Irish. No-one cares about Skara Brae either.
Lusitaniah
12-06-2005, 17:59
Possibly the Huns, as they weren't a IE people, Magyars / Hungarians etc.

There is no possibility of them being Huns or Magyars as those people only arrive in Europe much later from Central Asia.

The best possibility is they are just the descendents of primitive cultures such as the Cro-Magnon one. Its almost impossible to account for the origin of different indo-european tribes and invasions (they are not native from Europe) in the mists of time let alone try to name the ones that lived before them. In the Iberian Peninsule the pre-Indo European people were the Ibers which originated in North Africa but I dont know about other pre Indo European people in Europe. I would be grateful if someone who knew would step forward...
Von Witzleben
13-06-2005, 13:57
Possibly the Huns, as they weren't a IE people, Magyars / Hungarians etc.

Yeah......sure.... :D
Whispering Legs
13-06-2005, 14:00
Watch out, for anybody except Americans it's a capital crime to be proud of your cultur, birthplace or nation and deserves capital punishment. You're in grave danger of being nuked. ;)

And where did you get that notion?

We Americans (with the exception of the First People) know that our ancestors were thrown out of every decent country on earth.

And that's why YOU hate us. Because we did well in spite of that.

We're the descendants of wretched refuse from Europe and other places.
Hyperslackovicznia
13-06-2005, 14:08
And where did you get that notion?

We Americans (with the exception of the First People) know that our ancestors were thrown out of every decent country on earth.

And that's why YOU hate us. Because we did well in spite of that.

We're the descendants of wretched refuse from Europe and other places.

Yep yep yep... We're a pretty eclectic bunch...
Ph33rdom
13-06-2005, 14:16
Without reading further into the finding yet, as silly as the movie was historically, for this discussion The 13rth Warrior, the Bear people/tribe would be about right. With the weapon styles and the clothing (minus horses) wouldn't be too far off to imagine the right culture. Especially with the Venus statue idols and no metallurgy to speak of, possibly even pre-bow culture, etc.
Marioslavia
13-06-2005, 14:20
http://www.mythicalireland.com/ancientsites/newgrange/

http://www.mythicalireland.com/ancientsites/newgrange-facts/


Newgrange boasts the fact that it is older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Egypt, having survived over five thousand years.
Kellarly
13-06-2005, 14:21
Without reading further into the finding yet, as silly as the movie was historically, for this discussion The 13rth Warrior, the Bear people/tribe would be about right. With the weapon styles and the clothing (minus horses) wouldn't be too far off to imagine the right culture. Especially with the Venus statue idols and no metallurgy to speak of, possibly even pre-bow culture, etc.

There are a few bits in that I would pick up on, but the general premise of isolated villages, each forging their own future off the land, with some contact with other local areas would seem right.

The weapons and things I am not so sure, but the general idea of a warrior culture I suspect would be pretty close to the truth.
Kellarly
13-06-2005, 14:23
http://www.mythicalireland.com/ancientsites/newgrange/

http://www.mythicalireland.com/ancientsites/newgrange-facts/


Newgrange boasts the fact that it is older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Egypt, having survived over five thousand years.

Having been there, the place is simply amazing. I was also on a trip to the west coast too and there are some great warrior mounds there, as well as some little ones buried down farm tracks :D Great for a summer tour.
Novaya Zemlaya
13-06-2005, 14:44
theres a huge tomb in the Boyne Valley,Meath,Ireland that gets very little attention.Its called Newgrange,its older than the pyramids and stonehenge.Stonehenge gets loads of recogition but Newgrange is far more advanced alltogether.The tomb is aligned so that the sun illuminates the burial chamber every year at the winter solstice and every last stone in the place has astronomical meaning.It looks cool as well.
Kellarly
13-06-2005, 14:50
And where did you get that notion?

We Americans (with the exception of the First People) know that our ancestors were thrown out of every decent country on earth.

And that's why YOU hate us. Because we did well in spite of that.

We're the descendants of wretched refuse from Europe and other places.

Yeah you big bunch of mongrels you! ;) :p :D
Nadkor
13-06-2005, 15:11
theres a huge tomb in the Boyne Valley,Meath,Ireland that gets very little attention.Its called Newgrange,its older than the pyramids and stonehenge.Stonehenge gets loads of recogition but Newgrange is far more advanced alltogether.The tomb is aligned so that the sun illuminates the burial chamber every year at the winter solstice and every last stone in the place has astronomical meaning.It looks cool as well.
theres also a tomb and ring fort of about the same age just outside Belfast. doesnt have any of the meanings of Newgrange, and its missing the mound over the tomb.

linkage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giants_Ring%2C_Belfast)
Ekland
13-06-2005, 16:00
I love this stuff! Thanks for posting it.

There is just something about tracking down the history of human culture, bloodlines, and conquest. Tis great!
Free Soviets
13-06-2005, 19:55
"Dr John Robertson, a Washington University-based anthropologist, said: 'There is much of this period that we still don't understand, but humanity was beyond the stage of hunting down prey and smearing itself with the entrails.'"

except for all those hunter-gatherer cultures covering the other 99% of the world. i mean, come on dude, didn't you get the memo?
Whispering Legs
13-06-2005, 20:02
"Dr John Robertson, a Washington University-based anthropologist, said: 'There is much of this period that we still don't understand, but humanity was beyond the stage of hunting down prey and smearing itself with the entrails.'"

except for all those hunter-gatherer cultures covering the other 99% of the world. i mean, come on dude, didn't you get the memo?

And what about this video? http://www.visit4info.com/details.cfm?adid=22624