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The worlds first gold objects.

There was a wonderful exhibit in New York a few years ago called, "The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5,000 to 3,500 B.C." It was curated by David Anthony.

I thought it was an amazing exhibition.

This is the text of the Foreward to the Catalog, which gives a lot of good information.
http://isaw.nyu.edu//exhibitions/oldeurope/sites/all/themes/isaw/Forward.pdf

This is a good schematic for it:
http://dismanibus156.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/popup2.jpg

And this is a youtube of David Anthony introducing the exhibit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cHLnAgXLMY

As interesting to me as the figurines, and pottery was the trade in the spondylus shell.
 
gisp-last-10000-new.png


From 5,000BC to3,500 BC - warm period, Varna and Cucutini cultures.
3,500BC, cold snap - end of Cucutini, also first move of nomadic IE to Europe(?)
2,800 to 2,300 BC, a very cold period, more IE are pushed out of Asian Steppes.
From 1,500 BC to 500AD a very warm period with first European civilizations.
600 to 800 AD, very cold period, poverty and Dark Ages in Europe. More Asiatic Nomads move into Europe.
 
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Maciamo said:
The world's first city was apparently Eridu, the southernmost Sumerian city. According to Gwendolyn Leick in her book Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City, Eridu was founded through the fusion of three separate cultures: that of peasant Ubaidian farmers, living in mud-brick huts and practising irrigation; that of mobile nomadic Semitic pastoralists living in black tents and following herds of sheep and goats; and that of fisher folk, living in reed huts in the marshlands, who may have been the ancestors of the Sumerians. Incidentally, in haplogroup terms, this could represent the fusion of G2a, E-M123, J1 and T people.
.
Click to expand...
It is very intriguing idea, and I'm sure it happened this way on few occasions. However, for the time being, I'm more convinced about food production and population density as primal and natural forcings in building civilizations and cities. Foreign or cast domination could have been one extra element for accelerating or "condensing" a civilization, but not a necessary prerequisite.
 
LeBrok said:
gisp-last-10000-new.png


From 5,000BC to3,500 BC - warm period, Varna and Cucutini cultures.
3,500BC, cold snap - end of Cucutini, also first move of nomadic IE to Europe(?)
2,800 to 2,300 BC, a very cold period, more IE are pushed out of Asian Steppes.
From 1,500 BC to 500AD a very warm period with first European civilizations.
600 to 800 AD, very cold period, poverty and Dark Ages in Europe. More Asiatic Nomads move into Europe.
Click to expand...

Very interesting stuff.

We could add plague to the list of woes for the period 600-800 A.D. There's a great book about it called Justinian's Flea...tons of information told in a very engaging way.

http://romanhistorybooksandmore.freeservers.com/r_justinians-flea.htm
 
Maciamo said:
What makes you think that the melting of the icecaps was complete by then ? There could have been some left - perhaps the new ones that grew during the youngest dryas.

Icecaps would have melted faster in Western Europe than in Russia because of the Gulf Stream.

As far as Anatolian and Caucasian glaciers are concerned, they haven't melted completed even today (ditto for the Alps), so who can know for sure how much was left 5000 to 7000 years ago ?
Click to expand...

Yes there are still icecaps, and they are still meltin, but by 10.000 years ago, temperature was allready as high as today
The rate of melting did not increase anymore
In Siberia, rivers flow north. As long as the icecaps did block the northern seas, large parts in Siberia were flooded, but once the icecaps didn't block the rivers any more, all these shallow lakes in Siberia dissappeared.
As far as the Black Sea in concerned : the thoery says it happened 5600 BC. (7600 years ago)
But the Bosporus has a minimum depth of 36 meters.
But the sealevel didn't rise 36 meter last 7600 years.
For a 36 meter sea level rise we have to go back more than 10.000 years.
So either the connection between Black Sea and Meditteranean was made much earlier, or the Black Sea was much more shallow 7600 year ago.
That is what the theory says : before the flooding the Bosporus would have been much more shallow and the Bosporus would have been washed by the flooding.
But they made calculations : for the Bosporus to get washed that way, the level of the Balck Sea should have been at least 140 meter below the level of the Mediteranean.
Well that is impossible, given the fact that 2-3000 years before the Caspian Sea spilled over into the Black Sea and the Black Sea spilled over into the Mediterranean.

Here is the same link again re the levels of the Caspian Sea before and after ice age : it reached 22 meters above current sealevel, enough to spill over to the Black Sea

http://ubuntuone.com/p/19zG/

I was fantasising about migrations caused by Black Sea flooding too, untill I studied this article.
I even started a thread about it at the time.
 
Angela said:
There was a wonderful exhibit in New York a few years ago called, "The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5,000 to 3,500 B.C." It was curated by David Anthony.

I thought it was an amazing exhibition.

This is the text of the Foreward to the Catalog, which gives a lot of good information.
http://isaw.nyu.edu//exhibitions/oldeurope/sites/all/themes/isaw/Forward.pdf

This is a good schematic for it:
http://dismanibus156.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/popup2.jpg

And this is a youtube of David Anthony introducing the exhibit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cHLnAgXLMY

As interesting to me as the figurines, and pottery was the trade in the spondylus shell.
Click to expand...

I believe you Angela.
I learned about this civilization a year ago.
It is amazing how even European people know about this civilization.
 
Nobody1 said:
Something 'terrible' did happen;

David W. Anthony - The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (2010) [Princeton Uni.]
Between about 4200 and 3900 BCE more than six hundred tell settlements of the Gumelnita, Karanovo VI and varna cultures were burned and abandoned in the lower danube valley and eastern Bulgaria. Some of their residents dispersed temporarily into smaller villages like the Gumelnita B1 hamlet of Jilava, southwest of Bucharest, with just five to six houses and a single-level cultural deposit....Metal objects now were made using new arsenical bronze alloys, and were of new types, including new weapons, daggers being the most important "We are faced with the complete replacement of a culture" the foremost expert on Eneolithic metallurgy E. N. Chernykh said. It was "a catastrophe of colossal scope...a complete cultural caesura" according to the Bulgarian archaeologist H. Todorova

British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara - Ancient Anatolia (1998)
increasing evidence for disastrous happenings in Romania and Bulgaria as barbarous, almost certainly Indo-European, peoples moved west massacring and causing panic. The Gumelnitsa-Karanovo VI culture was destroyed.
Click to expand...

I've read the book too. The burning of 600 villages would have happened around 4000 BC during a very cold winter.
The author even suggests that some Indo-Europeans came to the Danube delta looking for shelter and food for their cattle.
The subsequent quarrels with locals would have been the cause for the burning of the houses followed by a fullscale invasion of some IE tribes.
But there are indications that by 4200 BC there were allready internal problems within the Balkans : deforestation? erosion? exhausted land? jealousy?
I don't buy the story of a harmonious society without social inequality.
Not everyone could have lived in that kind of luxurious housings and have been burried with lots of gold and copper.
Somebody had to dig the ores in the mines and somebody had to work the land.
There must have been a good amount of jealousy.
 
Angela said:
And this is a youtube of David Anthony introducing the exhibit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cHLnAgXLMY
Click to expand...

Angela, the presentation by David Anthony is allready outdated today.
He talks about green and blue ores which is malachite and azurite from which copper is relatively easy to extract.
It now appears they were able to extract copper from many more complicated ores.

http://antiquity.ac.uk/Ant/087/1030/ant0871030.pdf

They should organize a new exhibition in NY within 5 years, they'll have a lot more to show by then. ;-)
 
bicicleur said:
Yes there are still icecaps, and they are still meltin, but by 10.000 years ago, temperature was allready as high as today
The rate of melting did not increase anymore
In Siberia, rivers flow north. As long as the icecaps did block the northern seas, large parts in Siberia were flooded, but once the icecaps didn't block the rivers any more, all these shallow lakes in Siberia dissappeared.
As far as the Black Sea in concerned : the thoery says it happened 5600 BC. (7600 years ago)
But the Bosporus has a minimum depth of 36 meters.
But the sealevel didn't rise 36 meter last 7600 years.
For a 36 meter sea level rise we have to go back more than 10.000 years.
So either the connection between Black Sea and Meditteranean was made much earlier, or the Black Sea was much more shallow 7600 year ago.
That is what the theory says : before the flooding the Bosporus would have been much more shallow and the Bosporus would have been washed by the flooding.
But they made calculations : for the Bosporus to get washed that way, the level of the Balck Sea should have been at least 140 meter below the level of the Mediteranean.
Well that is impossible, given the fact that 2-3000 years before the Caspian Sea spilled over into the Black Sea and the Black Sea spilled over into the Mediterranean.

Here is the same link again re the levels of the Caspian Sea before and after ice age : it reached 22 meters above current sealevel, enough to spill over to the Black Sea

http://ubuntuone.com/p/19zG/

I was fantasising about migrations caused by Black Sea flooding too, untill I studied this article.
I even started a thread about it at the time.
Click to expand...
Interesting, maybe you are up to something. I'm going to read up some more about this, especially the sea level during Younger Dryas. It was very cold and dry'as at that time period. :rolleyes2:
 
LeBrok said:
Interesting, maybe you are up to something. I'm going to read up some more about this, especially the sea level during Younger Dryas. It was very cold and dry'as at that time period. :rolleyes2:
Click to expand...

the current level of the Caspian Sea is -27 meter
in the article you can read that the level of the Caspian rose twice after the ice age : once to +22 meter, spilling over to the Black Sea,once to 0 meter.
I guess the youngest dryas was in between those 2 rises.
 
Amazing discovery! But compare to even the Southeast Europe, the Near East is a much older/ancient world. It’s possible that gold- & silversmithing (with copper) occurred in the Near East earlier but due to many invasions, robberies and genocides of all kind of races from all parts of the world destroyed many ancient places in the Near East. Hittites, Mongols, Arabs etc. Gold has always been the most precious metal and it’s possible that many cultures in the Near East found ancient gold objects and melted them down for their own purposes.
 
bicicleur said:
the current level of the Caspian Sea is -27 meter
in the article you can read that the level of the Caspian rose twice after the ice age : once to +22 meter, spilling over to the Black Sea,once to 0 meter.
I guess the youngest dryas was in between those 2 rises.
Click to expand...

The Aral sea is currently 250 feet below what it was in the late bronze-age
 
Sile said:
The Aral sea is currently 250 feet below what it was in the late bronze-age
Click to expand...

do you have a source for that?

I even don't know the current level of the Aral sea
the Aral sea is an ecological diseaster, it has almost dissapeared
they blame the Sovjets for that, who diverted to much water from the Oxus river to grow cotton in Uzbekistan
 
The link I posted in the thread about the diffusion of copper smelting could be related to these early gold discoveries. Someone has found evidence of deliberately smelted tin bronze in the Balkans that's about 6500 years old.
 
bicicleur said:
Yes there are still icecaps, and they are still meltin, but by 10.000 years ago, temperature was allready as high as today
The rate of melting did not increase anymore
In Siberia, rivers flow north. As long as the icecaps did block the northern seas, large parts in Siberia were flooded, but once the icecaps didn't block the rivers any more, all these shallow lakes in Siberia dissappeared.
As far as the Black Sea in concerned : the thoery says it happened 5600 BC. (7600 years ago)
But the Bosporus has a minimum depth of 36 meters.
But the sealevel didn't rise 36 meter last 7600 years.
For a 36 meter sea level rise we have to go back more than 10.000 years.
So either the connection between Black Sea and Meditteranean was made much earlier, or the Black Sea was much more shallow 7600 year ago.
That is what the theory says : before the flooding the Bosporus would have been much more shallow and the Bosporus would have been washed by the flooding.
But they made calculations : for the Bosporus to get washed that way, the level of the Balck Sea should have been at least 140 meter below the level of the Mediteranean.
Well that is impossible, given the fact that 2-3000 years before the Caspian Sea spilled over into the Black Sea and the Black Sea spilled over into the Mediterranean.

Here is the same link again re the levels of the Caspian Sea before and after ice age : it reached 22 meters above current sealevel, enough to spill over to the Black Sea

http://ubuntuone.com/p/19zG/

I was fantasising about migrations caused by Black Sea flooding too, untill I studied this article.
I even started a thread about it at the time.
Click to expand...

Have you considered that the Black Sea itself was completely frozen during the LGM and would have remained an enormous glacier/iceberg for a very long time after the climate warmed up ? To give you an idea of just how long glaciers can last in our climate, it has just been reported that a glacier was still in place in Scotland in the 1700's, i.e. 11,000 years later than previously thought. In light of this, it is probably too early to rule out that the melting of the various glaciers that could have fed the Black Sea through rivers (in northern Russia, Anatolia or the Caucasus), or on the Black Sea itself, could have taken much longer than we would expect.
 
There is also evidence that water levels in the Black Sea were considerably lower at some point during the post-glacial period. Thus, for example, archaeologists found fresh-water snail shells and man-made structures in roughly 100 m (330 ft) of water off the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey. Therefore it is agreed that the Black Sea had been a landlocked freshwater lake (at least in upper layers) during the last glaciation and for some time after.
In the aftermath of the last glacial period, water levels in the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea rose independently until they were high enough to exchange water. The exact timeline of this development is still subject to debate. One possibility is that the Black Sea filled first, with excess fresh water flowing over the Bosphorus sill and eventually into the Mediterranean Sea. There are also catastrophic scenarios, such as the "Black Sea deluge theory" put forward by William Ryan and Walter Pitman.
Click to expand...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea
 
Maciamo said:
Have you considered that the Black Sea itself was completely frozen during the LGM and would have remained an enormous glacier/iceberg for a very long time after the climate warmed up ? To give you an idea of just how long glaciers can last in our climate, it has just been reported that a glacier was still in place in Scotland in the 1700's, i.e. 11,000 years later than previously thought. In light of this, it is probably too early to rule out that the melting of the various glaciers that could have fed the Black Sea through rivers (in northern Russia, Anatolia or the Caucasus), or on the Black Sea itself, could have taken much longer than we would expect.
Click to expand...

maybe the flooding was the Persian Gulf, that was dry land during ice ages
maybe something similar happened like Doggerland in the North Sea
 
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