Our ancestors fascinate me. And I don’t mean just my grandparents or great-grandparents. I mean the ancestors who moulded my native continent, Europe, and turned Spain into the place that I now call home.
Some time ago I visited the site of some Neolithic rock wall painting not far from where we live. They were seven thousand years old but still spoke to us about a life which wasn’t wholly alien to us.
Far closer to home is another place, far closer to our age. A Bronze Age settlement from just three and a half thousand years ago. There we saw no art, but the remains of a small farming community, with its water cistern, its grinding stones for grains, its oven for baking bread.
The earlier people had been hunter-gatherers, or forages as many archaeologists seem to prefer calling them. The Bronze Age settlement belonged to farmers. That’s a huge change. Farmers have to work a hell of a sight harder, the downside of a move to an economically more enriching existence.
But there’s also a massive psychological development that has to take place. A forager collects food to eat at once. A farmer, however, has to keep some of his harvest as seed for next year. That means that, even if hungry, farmers have to refrain from eating some of the food that’s just in front of them, so they can sow for the next harvest or to keep livestock alive.
It’s hardly instinctive to defer the satisfaction of needs in this way.
The other big difference between these two communities was that the painters of the rock walls were black. Their successors were white.
So, what happened between the two?
Agriculture, which so transformed life, arrived. People turned up from the Middle East, where farming had been pioneered. Some of the foragers, amazed by the newcomers’ celebrity status – the Neolithic equivalent of a New York cabby marvelling at the splendour of a Trump Tower, and probably with no better basis – decided to see whether they too couldn’t make a success of this superior way of life, and switched to farming. Agricultural communities sprung up among the foragers.
It’s likely that quite a lot of them spoke languages rather like Basque, unrelated to any other in the world today. Somehow, the two groups coexisted in what I like to think may have been peace, although all those rock paintings with their clouds of arrows and bands of foes marching towards confrontation, suggest that I’m probably being naive.
Meanwhile, far, far to the East, in a blood-chilling real-world echo of The Lord of the Rings, a dark force would soon start to build. In time, it would spell the end of these farming and foraging communities. Though, when I say ‘in time’ I mean something like a millennium or two, so it wasn’t a prospect that should have kept many of the intervening generations awake at night.
Herders living on the Steppes of southern Ukraine and Russia some 4000 kilometres away, between the Black Sea and the Caspian, were about to be introduced to some significant technological changes.
There was the horse, initially as food. Horses are cheaper to keep than cattle, because they use their hoofs to scrape away snow to get at the grass underneath and will even break ice to get at the water. Ideal for an environment with cold winters, like the Steppes.
Later, the herders learned to ride them, which meant they could herd even further into the grasslands, in bad times when fodder was scarce. What’s more, if you got fed up with herding, the nice thing about a horse is that it could get you quickly to a farming community to raid it, carrying you away quickly afterwards before the pursuit could get its act together.
After that, they learned about the wheel. And boy, were they good with it, developing the extraordinary skill you need to build a wheel out of wood, especially difficult when they switched to the spoked variety, so much lighter than solid wheels. With wagons, they could go further into the Steppes, and manage even bigger herds.
They didn’t stop at wagons, though. They also built the war chariot. In fact, they probably invented it.
What’s more, they had several good sources of metal ores, just as people were waking up to the fact that it was time for a copper age, and then a bronze age. Not only did they get immensely rich, they also got some great metal weapons, which went well with the horses and the chariots, to turn them into a terrifying force.
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| Reconstruction of the head of a Yamnaya man |
Eventually they reached Iberia, present-day Spain and Portugal. And their impact was massive. Genetic studies show that some 40% of the DNA of today’s Iberians is from the Steppe herders. But practically 100% of male DNA is from them.
Compare this with what happened in Britain when the Angles, Saxons and Jutes showed up. Today, British men owe about 4% of their genetic material to them. Women owe nothing. So, like what happened with the Yamnaya in Spain, it was men who showed up, not couples, and they bred with the local women. But most of the locals survived.
I said ‘bred’ because we’re not talking about marriage. I can’t imagine the Yamnaya in Spain sought any kind of consent. The men were murdered or, at any rate, prevented from fathering any more kids. Instead, the invaders set to work on the women to father the race that would populate Iberia.
That would include the inhabitants of the Bronze Age settlement near us. They probably spoke an Indo-European language, though it wouldn’t have been Spanish: that derived from the Latin which the Romans brought with them. It may well have been a Celtic language.
Their settlement is unfortified, so their existence was probably peaceful. However, they were descended from the people who turned Spain from racially black to racially white. That probably took the form of a mass extermination. Followed by mass rape.
It seems that even the most innocent-looking prehistoric remains can hide some much more difficult back stories.
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