The Mediterraneans
Archaeologist Dr. David H. Trump has a rule of thumb: “One stone is just a stone. Two stones side by side are a coincidence. But if you find three stones lined up together, you’ve got a wall.”
So it is with excavating prehistory. An assembly of scientific reports, anchored by an archaeological bonanza, is bringing new perspective on how we came to be who we are.
The story begins after the last Ice Age with a pre-Semitic people of the Levant. Thriving in the northwest region of the fertile crescent, they have learned to farm. Life is good and their numbers increase. The land can no longer sustain them all.
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus was the first to make this assertion, claiming that famine in lost early times drove the King of Anatolia to split the people: half to remain and half to go out and find new territory.
Coming as no great surprise, modern scientists have identified several waves of population diffusion and full-scale migration that spread from the Near East into Europe before history began.
One extraordinary group carried their traditions and their chromosomes into the Mediterranean frontier. They do appear to have been more intellectually and artistically advanced than anyone around them in the same time period. Where they settled, they made an impact. Their descendants survived through the ages with aspects of their original ancient identity largely intact until time and assimilation finally absorbed them — as Sea Peoples and Temple-Builders, later as Minoans and Etruscans, and still later in the great civilizations of Classical Greece and Rome.
Original ancestral families of settlers who make up a bridge into civilization are the people we are identifying as The Mediterraneans.
While important evidence for this story comes from Mesopotamia, Cyprus, Crete, the Cycladic islands, Sardinia and elsewhere, two places are keys to uncovering the details.
The first is Anatolia. It is in Southern Turkey that we find the archaeological remains of the first urban centers (CatalHoyuk), the oldest known built religious site (Gobekli Tepe), and the birthplace of a genetic mutation that appears, in its long passage over the sea and from generation to generation, to identify a single culture that changed the world.
The second key is Malta and her sister island Gozo, located 60 miles south of Sicily. Here are located the planet’s oldest freestanding buildings and an incomparable collection of remains created by a gifted prehistoric population.
A walk-through solar calendar in stone, complex megalithic engineering and the development of monumental architecture testify to a high level of sophistication in this society. As you will see, Malta offers a unique time capsule of the Mediterranean Neolithic scenario that cements many other pieces. (Still largely under the radar in North American scholarship, Malta’s obscurity probably played a role in the survival of so much ancient treasure.)
10,000 – 6,000 years ago, the “Neolithic Revolution” was a profound turning point in human development, changing a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of farming and settlement.
For good or evil, progress was set in motion. Being able to stay in one place meant people could start collecting things and stockpiling surplus. Bulky items like looms, furniture and pottery became practical. Knowing where their food was coming from freed folks up to think about other things… abstract things. They could start thinking about art and iconography, invention and philosophy. They could watch the skies from a single position, assembling the patterns of movements over time.
Stability and accumulated materials created a platform on which each generation could build and expand, just as we are still doing today. You would not be reading this article if technology had to restart from scratch every few years.
In the 1980’s, anthropologist Albert J. Ammerman and geneticist L. L. Cavalli-Sforza established that human migration, as opposed to the transmission of new ideas, was responsible for the spread of agriculture as a way of life from the Middle East into Europe. They identified genetic markers that still appear with varying frequency in the DNA of modern populations. These markers can be dated using a calculation based on the rate at which DNA mutates, and are extremely useful for outlining the passage of people and time.
One variation in male (or Y) DNA, labled J2, is a genetic marker that identifies descendants of the ancient Levantines. Since this Haplogroup is believed to have arisen from Anatolia, it is not surprising that its highest concentration in modern men is still there.
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