7,000-year-old temples press Europe’s claim to the oldest civilisation

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 14 June 2005 16:04.

At the weekend two extraordinary reports of the discovery of very ancient timber and earth temples in the heart of continental Europe appeared in the Independent. One set the scene thus:-

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.

... 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.

These discoveries call into question the accepted, Victorian version of Man’s journey to the present. The second Indy article explained:-

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.

There is, of course, a political take on just about anything, this included. Andrew Sherratt, professor of archaeology at the University of Oxford, has let it be known that, “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.”

Meanwhile, the BNP’s website runs the story under the headline, “‘Oldest civilisation’ finds deal massive blow to the multi-culti propaganda.”

... these new discoveries have buried forever the old story that our ancestors were running around in skins and grunting until those clever Middle Easterners showed us how to do things properly.

... The reality is that our direct ancestors built the oldest true culture yet discovered in the world, by their own genius and sweat, right in the heart of our Europe. This is a fact that demolishes not just old archaeological theories but also all sorts of contemporary multi-culti fantasies and propaganda.

This is our land, time out of mind.

Well ... yes, er ... quite. Mesopotamians? Put ‘em on the next Channel ferry.

Tags: No particular place to go

Comments:

Posted by Svigor on Tue, 14 Jun 2005 19:11 | #

I see fewer “when your ancestors were in caves my ancestors were…” in the future. Wait, what am I saying, when has reality ever guided such folks?

This is very interesting thanks GW.

Posted by Braveheart on Tue, 14 Jun 2005 20:33 | #

Put ‘em on the next Channel ferry.

Please on the one to Calais and not the one to Ostend or Zeebruges. Thank you.

Altough I must admit that Calais was up to the 13th century a Dutch speaking city… in fact they spoke a Frisian like dialect…so in fact more English than Dutch …

Flanders,

Posted by John S Bolton on Wed, 15 Jun 2005 01:13 | #

This isn not so surprising considering that the oldest clearly identifiable art is from Europe. The key development is not agriculture or even some sort of writing; but a phonetic written language, which allowed for the greek naissance of civilization with a capacity for progress. Genetically places like Egypt and mesopotamia would have gone through dysgenesis such that the their present populations are malaria adapted, and of lower potential to further the progress of culture, than were their ancestors, at least in relative terms.

Posted by J Richards on Fri, 17 Jun 2005 21:56 | #

Guessedworker,
Ancient civilizations in the Middle East were the product of whites, too. A few years ago, a notable study revealed major gene flow from the Levant to Europe within the past 10,000 years, and this study was based on multiple autosomal DNA markers. Undoubtedly, this was a migration of white people to Europe or else many Europeans would not be as white-looking as they are today.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 18 Jun 2005 12:16 | #

“Undoubtedly, this was a migration of white people to Europe or else many Europeans would not be as white-looking as they are today.” (—J Richards)

Either that, or conditions in Europe changed them from Middle-Eastern-looking to more Euro-white looking over the ten thousand years. Another possibility is that Europeans looked more white then (> 10,000 years ago) than now, mixture with Middle-Eastern-looking people having taken place since. Finally, how major is “major gene flow”? Maybe it was major in some relative sense but not so major in absolute terms.

Fair people can’t evolve where there’s too much sun—they need cloudiness to evolve—so the fairness, at least, of European whites could not have evolved in the Middle East. If it was Euro-type whites, not Mid-Eastern-type whites, who migrated in large numbers from the Mid-East to Europe ten-K yrs ago, either they couldn’t have been fair (though they could have been Euro-type in every other way, I suppose), or they themselves must have been recent migrants into the M.E. from some cloudy place like Northern Europe where they could have evolved in the first place.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 18 Jun 2005 12:22 | #

“either they couldn’t have been fair (though they could have been Euro-type in every other way, I suppose),” (—my post, above)

Fairness is obviously linked to other traits both physical and behavioral (and likely other kinds as well, other than physical and behavioural), so it’s probably not possible for white people who lack fairness to be “Euro-type in every other way”—I take that back.

Posted by Dr. No on Mon, 11 Jul 2005 02:26 | #

Russians got their language from the old Serbian..which is still used in today in churches in prayers. Croats are Serbs who converted in Catholics. Muslims in Bosnia are Serbs who converted during the Ottoman Empire….and the region that is being described here is where Serbs emigrated from. You may laugh and call them primitive peasants, but forks, spoons and knives were used in the Kingdom while ‘others’ used fingers fore a long time. And the funny thing is that that region was called “White Serbia”. Ironic?