ANCIENT EUROPE : IMAGES OF THE NEOLITHIC

Stone circles, strange alignments, temples and passage tombs...

45,000 years ago...

From around 45,000 years ago modern humans ('Homo sapiens') gradually replaced Neanderthals as the dominant population in Europe, arriving from the south and east along the valley of the River Danube from the Black Sea region, Anatolia and the 'fertile crescent' of the Levant beyond.

The Europeans of the Upper Paleolithic era left behind some the most famous cave art in the world, for example at Lascaux, Chauvet and Alta Mira.

antler spear thrower stylised as a mammoth, from 11-13000BCE, Midi-Pyrenees / France [British Museum, London / UK (2002)]

cave wall animal carving from 11-13000BCE, Abri de Cap Blanc, Dordogne / France (2004)

the Neolithic Revolution

Whatever continuity of livelihood and cultural transfer was possible for Europe's population of maybe 300,000 people through the last Ice Age, their world would eventually be changed forever, once again by innovations arriving from the South and the East, as retreating glaciers would soon transform the environment, leading to higher temperatures and rising sea levels, and eventually an extensive anthology of ancient flood myths and legends of 'lost civilisations' too.

The concept of 'human civilisation' is typically rooted in the birth around 10,000BCE of collective agriculture (as opposed to foraging for food), seen as an essential precursor to all that would follow.

At some point as the ice receded, nomadic cave-dwelling hunter-gatherers began to socialise in what we would recognise as villages or settlements, building houses and other functional structures out of earth, mud, stone, brick, earth, wood and straw, planting crops for food and rearing domesticated animals.

However at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey (where much still remains to be explored), the astonishing buildings excavated from the 1990s onwards (and dating from as long ago as c9500-8000BCE) were clearly a focal point for people who left no evidence of farming or settlement.

In archaeology new discoveries can dramatically change theories.

Nowadays we can track the movements of ancient migrations with DNA technology to some extent, from Turkey and the Levant through Greece and the Balkans, but it remains very hard to know with certainty how people lived, and (more significantly) how the things that they knew, thought, dreamed or believed were transferred, and would evolve alongside new cultural practices they either developed or adopted.

Still we speculate about the speed and direction of cultural innovation and change, how and why we got to where the written records begin, the story of our human evolution.

Perhaps more advanced skills were brought to Gobekli Tepe by other people, survivors from an older society now lost beneath the seas, with knowledge of how to build structures which could track the moving skies?

Maybe astronomical knowledge and skills for aligning buildings to predict seasonal change were the key requirements for agriculture to succeed enough for towns and 'civilisation' to evolve, especially in more temperate climate zones?

In any case, around 7000 years ago (5000BCE) people began to build some of Europe's finest monumental stone structures as the Neolithic Revolution moved northwards and westwards, and the old hunter-gatherers either joined the community farming project or retreated to the wilderness and died.

Notwithstanding the many uncertainties we should still have regarding archaeologists' theories about the ancient world, given the huge time scales involved and the relative paucity of surviving evidence, it seems fair to see these sites as having played a key role in a new way of life which took a few thousand years to spread across Europe from the Near East, and which would itself prevail until well into modern times.

see also [external links]

• Prehistoric Europe [Wikipedia]
• Megalithic Portal
• Carnac Office de Tourisme
• Locmariaquer megaliths [Wikipedia]
• Cairn de Gavrinis
• Megalithic temples of Malta [UNESCO World Heritage]
• Newgrange [UNESCO World Heritage]
• Prehistory of England [English Heritage]
• Castlerigg [English Heritage]
• Stonehenge & Avebury [UNESCO World Heritage]
• Silbury Hill [English Heritage]
• West Kennet long barrow [English Heritage]
• Stanton Drew [English Heritage]
• Campa Torres Parque Arqueologico Natural (Asturias)
• Maiden Castle [English Heritage]
• Uffington White Horse [Wikipedia]
• Cerne Abbas Giant [National Trust]