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To: SunkenCiv; 2banana; Pharmboy

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.


7 posted on 01/08/2009 8:14:07 PM PST by sinanju
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To: sinanju
Before then, the Earth’s climate was too chaotic and fluctuating to allow for any but a few million hunter-gatherers.

Not only that, the CO2 concentration was too low to permit much plant growth.
8 posted on 01/08/2009 8:24:58 PM PST by aruanan
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To: sinanju

The problem with this is, the supposed accomplishments of this culture have been overblown for nationalist political reasons.

Agriculture is at least 14,000 years old — a multirow barley sample (which would require rudimentary irrigation) from the Middle East tested that old (unadjusted age, so it was somewhat older than that). The climate in lands 200 to 800 feet below our current sealevel would have been at least as good as it is now in northern Europe, but all that was covered with water as the glaciers melted.


10 posted on 01/08/2009 9:19:48 PM PST by SunkenCiv (First 2009 Profile update Tuesday, January 6, 2009___________https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: sinanju
before the end of the Ice Ages ... the Earth’s climate was too chaotic and fluctuating to allow for any but a few million hunter-gatherers

The entire history of human civilization is crammed into those 10K years of natural "global warming." A return to glacial conditions is likely, and with it a catastrophe far beyond the fantasies of the anthropogenic GW cranks.

12 posted on 01/08/2009 9:54:33 PM PST by hellbender
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