[SunkenCiv]

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[sinanju]

At the Royal Ontario Museum.

Their website mentions that the settlements could be as much as 10,000 - 15,000 people and that they would burn them down and relocate every 50 - 70 years. Interesting.

I know from prior readings that the Neolithic period was probably the worst time to be a human being. Life was based around a few semi-domesticated plants, farming methods were crude, malnutrition was rampant and disease endemic. People hadn’t learned about basic sanitation; necessary when you live in one place rather than move around. Average human life expectancy supposedly reached it’s nadir during this period.

Perhaps the Trypilians were among the first culture to master these basic lessons. The regular burning and relocation sounds sort of like the tropical swidden (slash and burn) lifestyle on a larger scale. Probably they moved when the soil showed signs of wearing out, leaving the ashes of their dwellings to help fertilize things for a return decades later. Still the long time frame and organization necessary for such planning and execution seem exceptional.

The important thing to remember, well-known nutjobs aside, sedentary agricultural civilization was impossible before the end of the Ice Ages around ten thousand years ago. Before then, the Earth’s climate was too chaotic and fluctuating to allow for any but a few million hunter-gatherers.