Posted on 08/23/2007 10:46:59 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Once the inhabitants had settled in, time seems to have stood still in Lepenski Vir. Study of the bones found there shows that there was no admixture of foreign population; the same people remained on the spot, intermarrying generation after generation, perhaps 120 generations in all - well over 2,500 years. During all that time they remained healthy. (Did they, like the ancient Greeks, toss aside the infants that did not live up to their sturdy standards?) There are no deformed or diseased bones here, and the women were so robust that it is hard to tell their skeletons from those of the men. They lived long, often into their eighties.
There were never many of them. The narrow ledge could never have had room for more than 20 or 25 houses at a time, each of which could hardly have held more than five adults. This would hardly be called a village in most countries today, but in Megalithic terms it was enormous, it represented a whole new dimension of human life. And though the community was so self-sufficient that it never had to import any merchandise, it apparently exported some of its conceptions. For at about a dozen locations on both banks of the river within a radius of some 20 miles, archaeologists have found remains of Mesolithic villages which look like crude copies of Lepenski Vir. They were smaller, the buildings were less solid, they had no carved stones or statues. But their houses and their hearths are trapezoidal in shape. Srejovi considers that Lepenski Vir must have been a kind of cultural metropolis, a mini-Rome to which outlying groups owed at least spiritual obedience.
(Excerpt) Read more at robertwernick.com ...
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Thanks, this is a very interesting site. What a location. If they got tired of fish they could take some game in the hills. Very sheltered. The town construction and art objects look quite advanced for the time.
Catal Hoyuk (sez 7500 BC, rather than 8500 BC):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catal_hoyuk
It’s easy to read these archeological clues:
1. The stone sculpture images all have sad faces with turned down mouths.
2. The scupltures are found in a hole.
3. Hole=quagmire
4. Bush is in a quagmire in Iraq
5.The destruction of their culture is all Bush’s fault.
:’D Why you don’t teach is beyond me. ;’) Looks like you’ve headed them off at the pass, nice job!
Noah's Flood:
The New Scientific Discoveries
About The Event That Changed History
by William Ryan
Walter Pitman
hardcover
Where Europe VanishesEven before it did in Mesopotamia, civilization may have taken hold in the Caucasus, where there is an abundance of both water and vegetation, allowing for domesticable animals and agriculture. The mountainous terrain shelters miniature tribal worlds lost in time. The Greek geographer Strabo (64 B.C.-A.D. 23) noted that in the Greek Black Sea port of Dioscurias, now in the northwestern-Georgia region of Abkhazia, seventy tribes gathered to trade. "All speak different languages," he wrote, "because ... by reason of their obstinacy and ferocity, they live in scattered groups and without intercourse with one another." It was on Mount Caucasus, in Georgia, that Prometheus, punished by Zeus, was chained to a rock so that an eagle could continually peck at his liver. Prometheus, who created man out of clay, represents the pre-Olympian authority that Zeus toppled; the very antiquity of the Prometheus story, which is part of the creation myth of the Greek world, could be further evidence that the Caucasus was a cradle of civilization. One theory holds that the word "Georgia" comes from the Greek word geo ("earth"), because the ancient Greeks who first came to Georgia were struck by the many people working the land.
by Robert D. KaplanExperts Face Off on Noah's FloodSAN DIEGO, Jan. 8 -- Two marine geologists from Columbia University in 1996 advanced the idea that a flood of water from the Mediterranean, rushing through the Bosporus with the force of 20 Niagaras, entered the Black Sea 7,600 years ago. In months, at most two years, the Black Sea rose, inundated surrounding plains and attained its present dimensions. As a consequence, the geologists suggested, people in the region had to flee, and this could explain the rapid spread of early agriculture into eastern and northern Europe. It was even possible, they said, that the cataclysm became a part of folk memory, inspiring the Babylonian flood myth in the epic of Gilgamesh and, in time, the biblical story of Noah. Although many fellow geologists have found the research persuasive and the Black Sea flood plausible, and still do, archaeologists and historians were skeptical from the start.
by John Noble Wilford
Dr. Stephanie Dalley, a historian at Oxford University in England and a specialist on Babylonian mythology, concluded that Dr. Ryan and Dr. Pitman "have misunderstood the meaning of the flood myth in Mesopotamia, and its use in the hypothesis should be abandoned." Then she added, "But the rest of the hypothesis is fine, as far as I'm concerned."
The layout of the settlement, with the wider "front" facing the water does remind me of a seaside design.
The Iron Gates have served as a choke point for centuries for people coming up the Danube from the Black Sea.
If this wasn’t from the Smithsonian, would be a bit skeptical.
Is there a link to a Smithsonian website over this topic? The “link” in the post goes to a SAWF.org article.
I am not surprised to hear that. Many people feel something like "how come this is not well known if true?".
That's the whole point. Because of deliberate editing of awkward facts. The real history of the Balkans shatters German and Anglo-Saxon fictitious construct of European history to pieces. No wonder that Horst Woldemar Janson did not mention Lepenski Vir. Once you know about it, You can read Janson in totally different light.
There is much more to this story than Lepenski Vir.
Do you know where this came from and how old it is?
Do I have to say that Horst Woldemar Janson was totally silent about it also? 
If you guessed Sumerian, you guessed wrong - this is 1000years older than Sumer.
The proof that civilization did not start in Mesopotamia or Crete.
This is Old Europe, the heart of human civilization
Without knowing this fact, one can not understand American mindless siding with the Islamofascists in the Balkans.
Vinca culture is another piece of puzzle. The story is even more interesting than Lepenski Vir, and even better hidden from the public view.
The world's oldest script is from there. That's where Sumerians got their ideas.
Thank you so much for those links. This ‘ping’ list has been a wonderful source for me.
The Vinca writing (if it was truly a script) comes from points further west, to examples much older than that, found among the cave paintings. Also, there’s not a resemblance between the Vinca writing and Sumerian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphics. Writing was independently invented a number of times; cuneiform is (so far) the oldest of the deciphered scripts.
A Talk With Colin RenfrewIt shows, for instance, that at the beginning of the Neolithic period, the beginning of farming in the Near East, just about everywhere was in contact with everywhere else. There is no early farming village in the Near East that doesn't get obsidian, even though the obsidian sources are hundreds of kilometers to the north. Obsidian from Melos, which is an island in the Aegean, is found way back before farming, 10, 12, 13 thousand years ago, so this meant that the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers must have been traveling in boats. Similar evidence for early seafaring has now been found in the Pacific, and it gives an indication that people were much more efficient at seafaring than had been imagined.
by John Brockman
8.25.97Flints give Cyprus oldest seafaring link in MedFragments of stone implements believed to be up to 12,000 years old have been found at two sites of Cyprus, suggesting roving mariners used the areas as temporary camp sites after forays from what is today Syria and Turkey... more than 1,000 years older than the timing of the first permanent settlers to the island... Its earliest inhabitants, dated from the 9th millennium BC, are believed to be from the land mass which now rings it north and east... "They have yielded good evidence for the earliest voyaging in the Mediterranean and for the increased mobility of people at the end of the ice age and the beginning of agriculture," [Albert J. Ammerman, an archaeologist at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York] was quoted as saying in Tuesday's edition of the New York Times.
by Michele Kambas
Tue Nov 22, 2005
FR topic
The migration from the flooded area was actually what I’d read about Catal Huyuk, but Ryan and Pitman suggested something similar about the Danube basin settlements; also, Catal Huyuk’s destruction took place during that inundation of the Black Sea.
Appreciated.
They look a little similar to Cycladic sculptures.
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