The First Civilisation? Vinča culture with Ben Elliott

The Vinča culture of Serbia is one of the first human civilisations. Possibly the first to smelt copper, one of the earliest uses of a symbolic proto-script and a hyper industrious producer of advanced ceramics including the earliest anthropomorphic life size clay busts. Yet few know of the wonders of this ancient culture. In this episode, I spoke to the historian Ben Elliott who travelled to Serbia to make a film called Quest for Vinca which aims to increase awareness of these fascinating Neolithic people.

What did Yamnaya look like?

 

NEW YAMNAYA FACIAL RECONSTRUCTIONS: 

About 46% of the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language as a first language, and the majority of humans on earth can speak at least one Indo-European language such as English, Spanish or Hindi. These languages all come from Proto-Indo-European speakers of the Yamnaya culture. The Yamnaya people were indigenous to the Eastern European steppe during the eneolithic and early Bronze age.

Using their skulls, the latest genetic data about their phenotype, and the latest facial reconstruction techniques, the 3D artist Robert Molyneaux was able to create realistic reconstructions of Yamnaya people for a forthcoming Survive the Jive video. We are pleased to reveal the first one in the form of this infographic which shows us what a male from Bykovo cemetery on the Volga looked like.

 His features are notably robust, particularly his chin and brow but his skull is quite long, which is typical of the dolichocephalic eastern Yamnaya. We have reconstructed him with brown eyes, which is statistically likely for his people, although we don’t have his personal DNA to check what colour hair he specifically had. His skin tone is at the darker end of the European spectrum and was based on that of modern Georgian people from the North Caucasus who have a similar range of complexions as the Yamnaya.

You can see more of him and learn all about the Yamnaya when the STJ documentary is finished later this year! In the meantime, please share this infographic all around.

Sources:

Anthony, D., ‘The Horse, the Wheel, and Language’, Princeton University Press (2007).
Haak, W., et al., ‘Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe’ (2015).
Hanel, A, Carlberg, C. Skin colour and vitamin D: An update. Exp Dermatol, (2020).
Heyd, V. Kossinna's smile. Antiquity, 91(356), 348-359, (2017).
Khokhlov, A. A., ‘Morphogenetic processes in the Volga-Urals in the early Holocene (based on craniological materials of the Mesolithic-Bronze Age)’ Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Higher Education Samara State Social and Pedagogical University (2017).
Klejn, L., et al. ‘Discussion: Are the Origins of Indo-European Languages Explained by the Migration of the Yamnaya Culture to the West?’ European Journal of Archaeology (2017).
Saag et al, ‘Genetic ancestry changes in Stone to Bronze Age transition in the East European plain’ (2021).

The Pre-Indo-European Anatolian Mother Goddess of Agriculture

Thicc Anatolian Neolithic goddess

People always ask me about Neolithic, pre-Indo-European European religion, and how much survived. I usually say that it is not possible to know much about the pre-literate Neolithic Europeans and hard to distinguish what elements of subsequent IE religion were carried on from before. However we can learn a lot by looking at Anatolia.
10,300 years ago, hunter gatherers in Anatolia started farming. This figure (above) of a seated Anatolian goddess dates to about 8000 years ago. 8,500 years ago Anatolians spread across Europe, replacing most of the people (Western Hunter-Gatherers) who were there before and bringing their agriculturally oriented religion which was heavily conscious of seasons and when to plant. To talk about pre-IE religion in Europe, is the same as talking about Near-Eastern religion since it all originates in Anatolia just as Neolithic Europeans did. Indo-Europeans invaded Anatolia and Europe over the 3rd millennium BC - the ones in Anatolia spoke languages (the Anatolian language family) ancestral to Hittite and Luwian. DNA shows that genetically, Anatolians were not altered much by the IE invasion, especially compared to Northern Europe. It is interesting therefore that their religion was so different to other Indo-European religions. For example, Hittite temples were built according to the same celestial principles as Stonehenge (aligned for solstices) and other Neolithic solar monuments.

Also worthy of note is the fact that some Anatolian peoples, such as Lycians, practiced matronymics, and a tradition of legitimacy and inheritance denoted by the maternal rather than paternal line. Lycian women were able to marry foreigners and have legitimate children but Lycian men, even aristocrats, could not. This is very unlike any other Indo-European culture and almost certainly derives from earlier customs of the Near-East!

Cybele

The goddess Cybele was Anatolian in origin; an earth mother credited with inventing agriculture. She is seems to be a pre-IE goddess and as her cult spread across the Mediterranean, she was associated and combined with other agricultural mother goddesses who were obviously derived from the same original Neolithic Anatolian figure. eg. Artemis of Ephesus was a regional cult in which the Greek hunter goddess was transformed into the Anatolian mother goddess. This cult was influential on the later cult of the Virgin Mary. The Roman goddess Ceres, whose name is cognate with cereal, was seen as equivalent to Greek Demeter (the Mother) - and her cult survived for awhile in Rome alongside the imported Anatolian cult of Cybele, who they called Magna Mater. The Romans also associated the Greek mother goddess Rhea (here seated much like Cybele or the prehistoric Anatolian goddess statue) with the Magna Mater.

Artemis of Ephesus

Ceres

Rhea

Just as there is more Anatolian farmer DNA in Southern than Northern Europe, we see more clear evidence of the endurance of the Neolithic agricultural mother goddess in the South, and most of all among the Anatolians living in the region where her cult originated. If you want to know what religion in pre-IE Britain or Europe might have been like, then take a look at the castrated transgender priests and orgiastic cults of Cybele or other Near-Eastern semi-matriarchal cults.

Cheddar man and other Mesolithic Europeans

Troy Town Labyrinth - What does the symbol mean?

Haunted Burial Mounds - 5 Barrows and Brockenbarrow Urn of Exmoor

Debunking Cheddar Man

Genetic affinity with Cheddar man is strongest in the North

(This is a response I wrote in February 2018)

Fake news alert: there are a few fake science articles going around with a new reconstruction of a WHG (Western European Hunter Gatherer) skull from England known as Cheddar man.It was already known that WHG had darker skin than modern Europeans (genes for light skin are absent) and that they also all had blue eyes. We cannot tell exact pigmentation but to call them “black” is incredibly dishonest because it not only describes a complexion we cannot confirm but also a specific genetic racial category (negroid aka Sub-Saharan African) which WHG did NOT fall into. The closest living relatives to WHG are modern Northern Europeans such as Estonians who have a lot of European Hunter Gatherer DNA and are not African! (see map above for modern genetic affinities with Cheddar man - the further south you go, the lower it is.) 

PCA shows Cheddar Man in relation to modern Europeans (not near African clusters)

Facial reconstruction leaves a lot of room for the “imagination” of the reconstructor as you can see from these diverse examples of WHG reconstruction.

 

Cheddar man reconstruction by Beaker Lady 

 

 

 

drawing of a WHG by Mossa

Dark Cheddar man reconstruction and older reconstruction

Another misleading headline describes the Cheddar man as a “first Briton” which makes no sense because, as I have explained, a 2017 study showed that over 90% of the DNA of the British isles was replaced in the late Neolithic by an invasion of Bell-Beaker people from Holland who were themselves descended in part from Indo-European steppe peoples. All Celtic and Germanic people in Britain are descended from these people, so 10,000 years ago, when Cheddar man's people were roaming about, most of our (British people's) ancestors were living in Eastern Europe and were not in any way black! Those people are the ancient Britons since they are the progenitors of our people and the ancestors of the first people to be known as Britons (Roman era).

Mainstream media twist scientific facts for an obvious agenda. Please be aware that all science is heavily politicised these days. The team behind the study, which includes Tom Booth, a man who is committed to preventing British people from feeling a sense of rootedness from understanding the genetic history of the islands, overplayed their hand and claimed they knew the complexion of Cheddar man when it was not confirmed. The absence of genes associated with light skin in modern Europeans does not mean the presence of a Sub-Saharan African complexion. Booth's team came up with a range of potential complexions and the guys behind the reconstruction then chose to go with the very darkest of these. Then the media photographed the reconstruction and made it look even darker, and finally the journalists used headlines saying he was "black". A descent into deeper and deeper dishonesty that many have come to expect from the media these days.

The whole situation was exasperated by professional race baiter and grievance monger Afua Hirsch, of Ghanian and Jewish descent, who used the misreporting as an opportunity to promote population replacement. She appeared on Channel 4 and even had an article published in National Geographic, despite having absolutely no knowledge on the subject.

We do not have a sense of being an immigrant nation even though that is essentially what we are, and I think this is very useful in reminding people that we are an immigrant nation, everybody came here from somewhere and actually they're saying that only 10% of the current British population is descended from Cheddar Man. So most British people are more recent immigrants than him and I think that that is really helpful in changing our narrative about what immigration means - there would be no British population if it weren't for immigration and it's hard to understand that you could be so hostile to immigration as an intrinsic principle, I think there are people in Britain who feel like that, if you understand that everyone's ancestors were immigrants at some point. To see Cheddar Man with his dark skin it definitely provoked quite an emotional response in me, and I think that's the power of this. It's one thing to know that there were black people here thousands of years ago and to know that White people weren't always White. We know there were Africans here before there were English people here, for example, and so through that that gives you a sense of the idea that there's this indigenous British person who is White and essentially British is a fiction, it's a narrative that was created over time, it's not based on scientific facts so this is another feature of that really. -Afua Hirsch

In her ignorance she referred to WHG first as black people, and then as Africans! I politely corrected her on Twitter in April 2018, but in her arrogance she refused to admit her mistake.

The following video also shows that due to missing loci in Cheddar man's genome, an accurate prediction of pigmentation is not possible, and what loci were available showed that Cheddar man had an intermediate to dark black complexion but not a dark complexion. The prediction model is not reliable.


For a more balanced and informed view of Cheddar Man, see this blog post by geneticist Razib Khan.

You can also learn more about Mesolithic hunter gatherers in general from my video below.

And in the documentary below, you can find out how the WHG were replaced by, but also mixed with the Neolithic immigrants who founded the Megalith culture of Britain and Ireland. 

Sardinians are like Early Neolithic Farmers

Contemplating the Stones: Neolithic Mysteries of Britain