5.3 Europe: 3000 to 1500 b.c.  (Page 6/6)

The largest man-made mound of antiquity, rising to a height of 130 feet and spreading at its base well over 5 1/2 acres, representing an amazing surveying and engineering feat of Stone Age man, has recently been excavated at Silbury Hall, not far from Avebury, in Wiltshire, England. Multiple tunnels into this giant mound have failed to reveal any skeletons and its purpose remains unknown.

Recent figures show 4,350 dolmens (usually tombs), 2,070 menhirs, 30 cromlechs and 110 alignments in France. The most impressive of all may be the 3,000 units made up of 10 to 30 columns of menhirs stretched over two miles of countryside at Carnac, France. There may have been a select class of priests trained in studying the heavens, and these may have originated in England, with a later passing on of the secrets to the priests of the Celts, the Druids. Caesar wrote that the priestly discipline of the Celts was developed in Britain and was carried from there to Gaul, and by oral, not written, tradition. Professor Thom's studies indicate that all these stone monuments were built on multiples of a standard unit of measurement called the megalithic yard and which is the equivalent of 2.72 feet. Although men had worked on these monuments for 2,000 years, after about 1,500 B.C. no more were built. Professor Hoyle believes that later generations of astronomer-priests lost the ability to keep the astronomical systems up to date, began to make errors and then lost their followings. (Ref. 99 , 215 , 176 , 7 )

Scandinavia

About 3,000 B.C. a few immigrants to Denmark brought agriculture and big, polished flint-stone axes to use as tools to clear the forest. These axes have been found by the tens of thousands. Dolmens of stone, such as we mentioned under WESTERN EUROPE, have been found in the range of three to four thousand and are more numerous in Denmark than anyplace in the world. Megalithic tombs were constructed and many dead were laid to rest in each, some of the dead wearing hundreds of amber beads.

Beginning about 2,500 B.C. there were people of at least four different cultures living side by side in south Scandinavia. They were:

• The declining remains of the megalithic civilization.
• The Single-grave Culture of Jutland, which was related to the next.
• Boat-axe Culture of south Sweden.
• Pitted Ware or Pit-comb Ware Culture, to be discussed below.

After 2,000 B.C. these various populations fused together in a Neolithic Culture which made beautiful daggers and other instruments of flint. By 1,500 metal work had appeared in a unique Northern Bronze Age.

After about 2,000 B.C. the amber beads no longer appeared in tombs, as the amber had begun to be traded to the Mediterranean civilizations. Stone cutting and flint quarries were early Danish industries. The Battle-axe people, later to be called "Teutons", appeared about 2,000 B.C., but they used no bronze for another thousand years. Farming communities were present all through southern Scandinavia throughout the third millennium B.C. and it was these Stone Age men who left the huge grave chambers. Finland and the far north were sparsely populated with the Pit-comb Ware Culture, characterized by ferocious looking, rod-like arrowheads. (Ref. 215 , 117 , 88 )

Eastern europe

The Baltic area and western Russia were colonized chiefly by Indo-Europeans after 3,000 B.C. An exception was the nomadic ancestors of the Estonians who reached the Baltic from the valleys of the upper Volga. They were related to Finns and Hungarians, with a language which was not Indo-European. In the third millennium the Pit Grave Culture of the Ukranian steppes showed wheeled carts and domesticated horses. This may represent the site of the proto-Indo-Europeans, although as mentioned above, the argument goes on. Soviet and German philologists believe that the origin of these people and their language had to be near the mouth of the Volga at the north end of the Caspian Sea, with spread from there both westward into Europe proper and southward and easterly into Iran and then India. They refer to the people as "Ur-people" and the language as "Ur language". This concept has been seconded by the United States archeologist of Balt descent, Marija Gimbutas, after her study of the kurgans (burial mounds) of southern Russia. The Kurgan people seem to have left their homes between 2,400 and 2,300 B.C. to first invade the north shore of the Black Sea and then the territory of the Trans-Caucasus. The mountain people of the latter area had already had much contact with the Mesopotamian civilizations and had a civilizing influence on the barbarian Kurgans. The Hittites may have moved out from this culture in about 2,000 B.C. (Ref. 91 ) Old river names suggest that by 1,500 B.C. the entire region between the Baltic and the Alps, the British Isles and Hungary, was occupied by people speaking a single Indo-European idiom called "Old European Language" by the Indo-Europeanist, Hans Krahe

The Ukraine and some areas farther east were soon colonized by pastoral groups, some of which were the ancestors of later-day Scythians. North of the steppe and desert belt in Russia, around fifty-five degrees north, there was a thin belt of deciduous forest with some farmers, and still north of that were scattered hunters of the reindeer. Copper working extended almost to the Arctic by 1,850 B.C. Peasant farmers from central Europe continued to push eastward along the forest belt of central Russia, growing the hardy cereals as crops and reaching Moscow and the southern Urals by 2,000 B.C. (Ref. 8 , 225 , 45 , 88 )

The Baltic linguistic group of northeastern Indo-Europeans came to the eastern Baltic and western Russia area before and about 2,000 B.C. as agriculturalists and cattle raisers. They originally reached northward to Finland and eastward to the upper Volga

Even after 2,000 B.C. the Fatyanovo Culture existed in central Russia. By 1,800 three rather distinct peoples occupied their own zones in eastern Europe. In addition to the Balts, which we have described as occupying the Baltic area, to the south was a band of Slavs extending from far in Russia west to the Vistula, and finally the entire southern area west and just north of the Black Sea was occupied by the Thraco-Cimmerians. At 1,600 B.C. the Balts and Slavs were still without the use of bronze, although it was in common use to the west with the proto-Celts and to the south among the Thraco-Cimmerians. (Ref. 136 )

Forward to Europe 1500 to 1000 B.C.