Old Europe (Vinca) language and culture in early layers of Serbian and Irish culture

And that was the science bit.

Agni is fire (One headed god). But he is also Light and Heat (Two headed god). He is also sun and thunder and fire (Three headed god). He is father (galaxy, Svarog) and son (sun, Svarožič). But also father (sun, Svetovid) and son (fire, Svarožič). He is Svarog (sky and fire god), Perun (thunder god) and Svetovid (Sun god) but all these three gods are one and the same. The book of Veles says:

"Jer tajna je velika, kako to Svarog biva u isto vreme i Perun i Svetovid." which means: "Because it is a great secret how come Sverog (hevenly and earthly fire) is at the same time Perun (thunder) and Svetovid (Sun)."

http://www.tolkien.rs/publikacije/VelesovaKnjiga.pdf

The answer to this riddle is Triglav (three headed), trojan (triple), Hromi daba, Crom Dubh, Agni.





Good night and god bless.

Branjan (Brahma)

The fire is the protector and supporter of the human race. In the winter times it is fire alone that protects people from dying from cold. At night the fire protects people from wild animals. Fire also supports us. We use it for cooking, burning forest for arable land and forging weapons and tools and many many other things.

If we look at Sanskrit, we see that Brahma means sacred, divine. Fire was considered sacred and divine. It was god's gift to humanity and once found (the feather of a fire bird) it was carefully preserved, as the chance of finding another feather of a fire bird was extremely small. This is where eternal flame practice originated from. Fire was divine, as only gods could make it.

http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0+&tinput=brahma+&trans=Translate&direction=SE

The root brahm means to go, to move, but the root brham means to spin, to rotate, which is the action performed during the fire making using two pieces of wood.

http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0+&tinput=bhram&trans=Translate&direction=SE

I will now go through Brahmā Wiki page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahma ) and give you the reasons why i believe that Serbian understanding of Branjan as protector (fire) is the original meaning of Brahma:

Brahmā is clad in red clothes. Brahmā is traditionally depicted with four heads, four faces made of gold, and four arms. He also wears a golden crown.

The red and gold are the colors of fire. Fire has golden head and red clothes.

Brahmā (Sanskrit: ब्रह्मा; IAST: Brahmā) is the Hindu god (deva) of creation and one of the Trimūrti, the others being Viṣņu and Śiva. According to the Brahmā Purāņa, he is the father of Manu, and from Manu all human beings are descended. In the Rāmāyaņa and the Mahābhārata, he is often referred to as the progenitor or great grandsire of all human beings.

In Serbian tradition it is Dabog, Hromi Daba, Svarožić who is the father of Van (the shiny, white one, the light) who is the ancestor of the Serbs.

Brahma has four faces looking at four directions of the world. Brahmā also holds a string of prayer beads called the 'akṣamālā' (literally "garland of eyes").

In Slavic tradition Svetovid, Vishnji, has four faces because he is constantly watching over the world. He is the Eye in the sky, the Sun. Name Svetovid can mean many things but they are all connected with light and sight:
Svet + vid = world + watch = The one who sees everything, the one who knows everything, the one who watches over the world. Svet + vid = Light + Sight = The one who shines the light so the world can be seen. Actually in Serbian the word Svet means Light and World, as World is what is lit up by the light of the Sun and therefore visible. Svetovid = Sveti Vid = Holy Light, Holy Sight, Sun, the high one, Vishnji.

Brahmā is often identified with Prajāpati, a Vedic deity.

Lord Brahmā, Lord Vishnu, Lord Shiva and Maharaj Manu are considered Prajapaties. Prajapati also means protector & preserver (King).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prajapati

The fact that both the Trimurti and the people are listed as Prajapaties clearly shows that Prajapati is linked with fire, creation of fire. Trimurti (Agni) was original possessor of fire, the fire itself. So original Prajapati was Agni. Then Many (Man) learned how to "bring fire out of it's hiding place". And from then on Man joined the Prajapaties.

Prajapati does mean creator, maker, progenitor. If we look at root "praja" it means:

praja - bringing forth, bearing , posterity, descendant, semen, era, progeny, procreation, subjects, family, offspring, propagation, animal, man, children, race, birth, generation, mankind, subject of a king, seed, people, husband

http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0+&tinput=+praja&trans=Translate&direction=AU

These are all things linked to human creation, family, society, race, all things that support us, protect us. Like external fire which gives us warmth and protects us from cold and wild animals, internal fire gives us ability to procreate. Sexual creation is closely related with fire creation as we will see later.

Everything is pointing to Branjanj (Brahma) being the fire part of the holy trinity, and that Indians have switched its place with Vishnji (Vishnu) because they did not understand the meaning of the Original Trinity that the "Indo Europeans" brought with them to India.

I will return to Branjan (Brahma), Fire later, when i present my understanding of the development of fire worship and it's influence on the development of Agni. Because after all Agni is fire...

To be continued

If we look at the world situation at the beginning of the great "out of Africa" migration (100,000 - 70,000 years bc) we see that we have Neanderthals living in Europe, Denisovians in Asia, "Modern humans" in south east Africa. There were many other human groups probably strewn all over the world, some of them we know about and some of them we might discover in the future.

Chris Stringer's hypothesis of the family tree of genus Homo, published 2012 in Nature:[1] Homo floresiensis originated in an unknown location from unknown ancestors and reached remote parts of Indonesia. Homo erectus spread from Africa to western Asia, then east Asia and Indonesia; its presence in Europe is uncertain, but it gave rise to Homo antecessor, found in Spain. Homo heidelbergensis originated from Homo erectus in an unknown location and dispersed across Africa, southern Asia and southern Europe (other scientists interpret fossils, here named heidelbergensis, as late erectus). Homo sapiens spread from Africa to western Asia and then to Europe and southern Asia, eventually reaching Australia and the Americas. In addition to Neanderthals and Denisovans a third gene flow in Africa is indicated at the right.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_admixture_theory#Neanderthals

What is very interesting about these ancient populations of Neaderthals and "Modern humans" is that they originate from the same parent species:

Comparison of the DNA of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens suggests that they diverged from a common ancestor between 350,000 and 400,000 years ago. This ancestor is not certain, but was probably Homo heidelbergensis (sometimes called Homo rhodesiensis). Heidelbergensis originated between 800,000 and 1,300,000 years ago, and continued until about 200,000. It ranged over east and South Africa, Europe and west Asia. Between 350,000 and 400,000 years ago the African branch is thought to have started evolving towards modern humans and the European branch towards Neanderthals. Scientists do not agree when Neanderthals can first be recognised in the fossil record, with dates ranging 200,000 and 300,000 years BP.[33][34][35][36]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal

This means that neanderthals and "modern humans" were genetically quite similar:

According to preliminary sequences, 99.7% of the base pairs of the modern human and Neanderthal genomes are identical, compared to humans sharing around 98.8% of base pairs with the chimpanzee.[3] Additionally, in 2010, the announcement of the discovery and analysis of Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from the Denisova hominin in Siberia revealed that this specimen differs from that of modern humans by 385 bases (nucleotides) in the mtDNA strand out of approximately 16,500, whereas the difference between modern humans and Neanderthals is around 202 bases. In contrast, the difference between chimpanzees and modern humans is approximately 1,462 mtDNA base pairs. Analysis of the specimen's nuclear DNA is under way and is expected to clarify whether the find is a distinct species.[9][10] Even though the Denisova hominin's mtDNA lineage predates the divergence of modern humans and Neanderthals, coalescent theory does not preclude a more recent divergence date for her nuclear DNA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genome_project


But "modern humans" and neanderthals have evolved in completely opposite environment. Neanderthals evolved in Europe where for hundreds of thousands of years they survived in cold climate. "Modern humans" evolved in hot Africa where they almost never experienced cold. This ability to stand cold is going to prove crucial in determining what happens during the "out of Africa" migration of "Modern humans". One of the evolutionary adaptations to living in the cold climate is change of skin color to white. This is what science says about whitening of the skin of the originally black "modern human" population:

Loss of body hair in Hominini species is assumed to be related to the emergence of bipedalism some 3 to 2 million years ago. Bipedal hominin body hair gradually disappeared to allow better heat dissipation through sweating[62][63]

Reconstruction of a female Homo erectus based on fossils dated c. 1.5 million years ago, the estimated time for the emergence of skin pigmentation in early humans (John Gurche, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, 2010).
The emergence of skin pigmentation dates to after this, perhaps some 1.5 million years ago (about the time of the emergence of Homo heidelbergensis), when the earth endured a megadrought that drove early humans into arid, open landscapes. This would have resulted in early human skin enduring excess UV-B radiation and xeric stress.[64] This favoured the emergence of skin pigmentation in order to increase the epidermal permeability barrier[64] and protect from folate depletion due to the increased exposure to sunlight.[7]
With the evolution of hairless skin, abundant sweat glands, and skin rich in melanin, early humans could walk, run, and forage for food for long periods of time under the hot sun without overheating brain damage, giving them an evolutionary advantage over other species.[6] By 1.2 million years ago, around the time of Homo ergaster, archaic humans (including the ancestors of Homo sapiens) had exactly the same receptor protein as modern sub-Sahran Africans.[62]
This was the genotype inherited by anatomically modern humans, but retained only by part of the extant populations, thus forming an aspect of human genetic variation. About 100,000–70,000 years ago some anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) began to migrate away from the tropics to the north where they were exposed to less intense sunlight, possibly in part due to the need for greater use of clothing to protect against the colder climate. Under these conditions there was less photodestruction of folate and so the evolutionary pressure stopping lighter-skinned gene variants from surviving was reduced. In addition, lighter skin is able to generate more vitamin D (cholecalciferol) than darker skin so it would have represented a health benefit in reduced sunlight if there were limited sources of vitamin D.[63] Hence the leading hypothesis for the evolution of human skin color proposes that:
From about 1.2 million years ago to less than 100,000 years ago, archaic humans, including archaic Homo sapiens, were dark-skinned.
As Homo sapiens populations began to migrate, the evolutionary constraint keeping skin dark decreased proportionally to the distance north a population migrated, resulting in a range of skin tones within northern populations.
At some point, some northern populations experienced positive selection for lighter skin due to the increased production of vitamin D from sunlight and the genes for darker skin disappeared from these populations.
Subsequent migrations into different UV environments and admixture between populations has resulted in the varied range of skin pigmentations we see today.

The genetic mutations leading to light skin, though different among East Asians and Western Europeans,[15] suggest the two groups experienced a similar selective pressure due to settlement in northern latitudes.[65] At what point these developments took place for sub-populations of Homo sapiens (and whether light skin also occurred independently in Homo neanderthalensis) is under debate. There is a long-standing hypothesis that the selection for lighter skin due to higher vitamin D absorption occurred soon after the Out of Africa migration some time before 40,000 years ago. A number of researchers disagree with this and suggest that the northern latitudes permitted enough synthesis of vitamin D combined with food sources from hunting to keep populations healthy, and only when agriculture was adopted was there a need for lighter skin to maximize the synthesis of vitamin D. The theory suggests that the reduction of game meat, fish, and some plants from the diet resulted in skin turning light many thousands of years after settlement in Eurasia.[66] This theory is supported by a study into the SLC24A5 gene, which found that the allelle associated with light skin in Europe may have originated as recently as 12,000–6,000 years ago,[33] which is in line with the earliest evidence of farming.[67] Research by Nina Jablonski suggests that an estimated time of about 10 000 to 20 000 years is enough for human populations to achieve optimal skin pigmentation in a particular geographic areas but that development of ideal skin coloration may happen faster if the evolutionary pressure is stronger, even in as little as 100 generations.[4] The length of time is also affected by cultural practices such as food intake, clothing, body coverings, and shelter usage which can alter the ways in which the environment affects populations.[6]

One of the most recently proposed drivers of the evolution of skin pigmentation in humans is based on research that shows a superior barrier function in darkly pigmented skin. Most protective functions of the skin, including the permeability barrier and the antimicrobial barrier, reside in the stratum corneum (SC) and the researchers surmise that the SC has undergone the most genetic change since the loss of human body hair. Natural selection would have favored mutations that protect this essential barrier; one such protective adaptation is the pigmentation of interfollicular epidermis, because it improves barrier function as compared to non-pigmented skin. In lush rainforests, however, where UV-B radiation and xeric stress were not in excess, light pigmentation would not have been nearly as detrimental. This explains the side-by-side residence of lightly pigmented and darkly pigmented peoples.[69]
Population and admixture studies suggest a three-way model for the evolution of human skin colour, with dark skin evolving in early hominids in Africa and light skin evolving partly separately at least two times after modern humans had expanded out of Africa.[13][14][15][16][17][18]
For the most part, the evolution of light skin has followed different genetic paths in Western and Eastern Eurasian populations. Two genes however, KITLG and ASIP, have mutations associated with lighter skin that have high frequencies in Eurasian populations and have estimated origin dates after humans spread out of Africa but before the divergence of the two lineages.[16] All modern humans share a common ancestor who lived around 200,000 years ago in Africa.[19] Comparisons between known skin pigmentation genes in chimpanzees and modern Africans show that dark skin evolved along with the loss of body hair about 1.2 million years ago and is the ancestral state of all humans.[20] Investigations into dark skinned populations in South Asia and Melanesia indicate that skin pigmentation in these populations is due to the preservation of this ancestral state and not due to new variations on a previously lightened population.[8][21]

Examination of the genome of late Neanderthals suggests that at least some populations may have developed light skin by 40,000 years ago.[68]

I would ask a question here? Why are scientist insisting so much on the skin color mutation occurring in "modern humans" within few thousands or even few hundred years after arriving in Europe but doubt that neanderthals did it in 400,000 years living in the same climate? If scientist believe that exposure to less sun triggers white skin as major evolutionary adaptation that allows people to live in cold climate, surely neanderthals, who lived in that same cold climate must have been white. I also believe that denisovians also experienced the same type of change except that in their case it was slightly different leading to yellowish skin color.

So at the moment when great "out of Africa" migration started we probably had white population in Europe and western and central Asia, yellowish population in south east Asia and Black population in Africa. Funnily enough recent genetic research has found that this same division of the population is present even today splitting the world in three genetically different human groups, and i believe that the split is based on the old split between Neanderthals, Denisovians and "Modern humans":

Although mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomal DNA are particularly useful in deciphering human history, data on the genomes of dozens of population groups have also been studied. In June 2009, an analysis of genome-wide SNP data from the International HapMap Project (Phase II) and CEPH Human Genome Diversity Panel samples was published.[51] Those samples were taken from 1138 unrelated individuals.[51] Before this analysis, population geneticists expected to find dramatic differences among ethnic groups, with derived alleles shared among such groups but uncommon or nonexistent in other groups.[52] Instead the study of 53 populations taken from the HapMap and CEPH data revealed that the population groups studied fell into just three genetic groups: Africans, Eurasians (which includes natives of Europe and the Middle East, and Southwest Asians east to present-day Pakistan), and East Asians, which includes natives of Asia, Japan, Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Oceania.[52] The study determined that most ethnic group differences can be attributed to genetic drift, with modern African populations having greater genetic diversity than the other two genetic groups, and modern Eurasians somewhat more than modern East Asians.[52] The study suggested that natural selection may shape the human genome much more slowly than previously thought, with factors such as migration within and among continents more heavily influencing the distribution of genetic variations.[53]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern_humans

Let's have a look again at the map showing the "Out of Africa" migration:




Do you see how from 100,000 to 40,000 years the "modern human" population only moved through tropical zones? Why? Because "modern humans" were black people who evolved to live in hot tropical places and could not survive the cold. So what happened that enabled "modern humans" to move into Europe 40,000 years ago? Maybe this is where the answer lies:

Anatomically modern humans originated in Africa about 250,000 years ago. The trend in cranial expansion and the acheulean elaboration of stone tool technologies which occurred between 400,000 years ago and the second interglacial period in the Middle Pleistocene (around 250,000 years ago) provide evidence for a transition from H. erectus to H. sapiens.[33] In the Recent African Origin (RAO) scenario, migration within and out of Africa eventually replaced the earlier dispersed H. erectus.
Homo sapiens idaltu, found at site Middle Awash in Ethiopia, lived about 160,000 years ago.[34] It is the oldest known anatomically modern human and classified as an extinct subspecies.[35] Fossils of early Homo sapiens were found in Qafzeh cave in Israel and have been dated to 80,000 to 100,000 years ago. However these humans seem to have either become extinct or retreated back to Africa 70,000 to 80,000 years ago, possibly replaced by south bound Neanderthals escaping the colder regions of ice age Europe.[36] Hua Liu et al. analyzing autosomal microsatellite markers dates to c. 56,000±5,700 years ago mtDNA evidence. He interprets the paleontological fossil of early modern human from Qafzeh cave as an isolated early offshoot that retracted back to Africa.[37]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern_humans

Here is the map that shows where neanderthal remains were found so far:



So when "modern humans" arrived into middle east, they run into neanderthals. And quickly turned either back to Africa or east into Asia. Why? Why didn't "modern humans" from Africa just wipe the primitive neanderthal aside and continue to Europe? Because we now know that when neanderthals and "modern humans" met in middle east 70,000 years ago, they didn't really differ very much in intelligence and technology, but they did differ greatly in physical strength.

Neanderthal anatomy differed from modern humans in that they had a more robust build and distinctive morphological features, especially on the cranium, which gradually accumulated more derived aspects, particularly in certain isolated geographic regions. Evidence suggests they were much stronger than modern humans[1] while they were comparable in height; based on 45 long bones from at most 14 males and 7 females, Neanderthal males averaged 164–168 cm (65–66 in) and females 152–156 cm (60–61 in) tall.[2] Samples of 26 specimens in 2010 found an average weight of 77.6 kg (171 lb) for males and 66.4 kg (146 lb) for females.[3] A 2007 genetic study suggested some Neanderthals may have had red hair and light skin color.[4][5]

Neanderthals made advanced tools,[61] had a language (the nature of which is debated) and lived in complex social groups. The Molodova archaeological site in eastern Ukraine suggests some Neanderthals built dwellings using animal bones. A building was made of mammoth skulls, jaws, tusks and leg bones, and had 25 hearths inside.[62]
While largely carnivorous,[63][64] and apex predators;[65] new studies indicate Neanderthals had cooked vegetables in their diet.[66][67] In 2010, a U.S. researcher reported finding cooked vegetable matter in the teeth of a Neanderthal skull, contradicting the earlier belief they were exclusively (or almost exclusively) carnivorous[63] and apex predators.[65][66]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal

So what happened when the white neanderthal and black "modern human" met in middle east? Well it seems they had lots of sex. And produced lots of mixed babies:

Genetic testing in the last decade has revealed that several now extinct archaic human species interbred with modern humans. These species left their genetic imprint in different regions across the world: Neanderthals in all humans except Sub-Saharan Africans, Denisova hominin in Australasia (for example, Melanesians, Australian Aborigines and some Negritos) and there was also interbreeding between Sub-Saharan Africans and an as-yet-unknown hominin (possibly remnants of the ancient species Homo heidelbergensis). The rate of interbreeding was found to be relatively low (1-10%).[17][18]

You can read more here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_admixture_theory#Neanderthals

Here is another interesting thing about the genetic mixing between "archaic human species and modern humans":

However, modern humans do not share any mitochondrial DNA with the Neanderthals,[12] an observation that puts constraints on the possible types of successful mating patterns,[13] since mitochondrial DNA in primates is exclusively maternally transmitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_admixture_theory#Neanderthals

This translated into English means that when "archaic human species and modern humans" had sex, the mothers were always "modern humans". I believe this explains what happened when "modern humans" met neanderthals in middle east: men got slaughtered, and women got pregnant...And lots of mixed coffee cappuccino and latte babies got born. This new mixed race of people was originally called Cro-Magnon but is today called "early modern humans" as opposed to even earlier "modern humans" from Africa:

Cro-Magnon (Listeni/kroʊˈmænjən/ or US pronunciation: /kroʊˈmæɡnən/; French: [kʁomaɲɔ̃]) is a name that has been used to describe the first early modern humans (early Homo sapiens sapiens) of the European Upper Paleolithic.[1] Current scientific literature prefers the term European Early Modern Humans (EEMH), to the term 'Cro-Magnon' which has no formal taxonomic status, as it refers neither to a species or subspecies nor to an archaeological phase or culture.[1] The earliest known remains of Cro-Magnon-like humans are radiocarbon dated to 43,000 years before present.[2]
Cro-Magnons were robustly built and powerful. The body was generally heavy and solid with a strong musculature. The forehead was fairly straight rather than sloping like in Neanderthals, and with only slight browridges. The face was short and wide. Like other modern humans, Cro-Magnons had a prominent chin. The brain capacity was about 1,600 cubic centimetres (98 cu in), larger than the average for modern humans.[3] However, recent research suggests that the physical dimensions of so-called "Cro-Magnon" are not sufficiently different from modern humans to warrant a separate designation.[4][5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon

Where and when did these first "early modern humans" appear? In middle east of course right at the time when neanderthals and "modern humans" met there:

The Skhul/Qafzeh hominids or Qafzeh–Skhul early modern humans[1] are human fossils discovered in the Qafzeh and Es Skhul Caves in the former Mandate of Palestine, present-day Israel. Skhul Cave is on the slopes of Mount Carmel. Qafzeh Cave is a rockshelter in Lower Galilee.

The remains exhibit a mix of archaic and modern traits. They have been tentatively dated at about 80,000-120,000 years old using electron spin resonance and thermoluminescence dating techniques.[2] The brain case is similar to modern humans, but they possess brow ridges and a projecting facial profile, similar to the Neanderthals. They were initially regarded as transitional from Neanderthals to modern humans, or as hybrids between Neanderthals and modern humans. Neanderthal remains have been found nearby at Kebara Cave that date to 61,000-48,000 years ago,[3] but it has been hypothesised that the Skhul/Qafzeh hominids had died out by 80,000 years ago because of drying conditions,[4] suggesting that the two types of hominids never made contact in the region. A more recent hypothesis is that Skhul/Qafzeh hominids represent the first exodus of modern humans from Africa around 125,000 years ago, probably via the Sinai Peninsula, and that the robust features exhibited by the Skhul/Qafzeh hominids represent archaic sapiens features rather than "Neanderthal features".[4] The discovery of modern human made tools from about 125,000 years ago at Jebel Faya, United Arab Emirates, in the Arabian Peninsula, may be from an even earlier exit of modern humans from Africa.[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jebel_Qafzeh_remains

Do you see how they are painfully trying to do everything they can to remove any possibility that "early modern humans" could be the children of neanderthals and "modern humans"?

"...the robust features exhibited by the Skhul/Qafzeh hominids represent archaic sapiens features rather than "Neanderthal features".

Knowing what we know about neanderthal genes forming at least 3% of the genome of modern humans, the above statement is laughable.

When we look at the above dates, another possible scenario emerges for the faithful meeting of "modern humans" and neanderthals in middle east which created cro magnons. As I pointed out already, until about 40,000 years ago, "modern humans" stayed within tropical or sub tropical areas, as you would expect. It is possible that they colonized southern parts of middle east as well. But, then at some stage between 61,000 and 48,000 years ago, there was a southward migration of neanderthals from Europe, which reached as far as middle east. The mixing probably happened in middle east around 50,000 years ago. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA data done in order to reconstruct the demographic prehistory of Homo Sapiens, reveals statistical evidence of explosive growth around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. This coincides with the above dates of neanderthal finds in middle east. Part of this new "even more modern human" population went into Africa. There they mixed with black African "modern humans". We know that because we find neanderthal genes in Maasais in Africa:

Maasai seem to have some "Neandertal" genes in common with East Asians that are not shared by Europeans.

Admixture of Maasai with East Asians seems unlikely. Thus, there are three possibilities:
A recent back-migration of West Asians who possess these alleles
A really old back-migration of undifferentiated "Neandertal"-admixed West Asians in which these alleles had not yet been lost by drift
Origin of these alleles in the common ancestors of East Africans and Eurasians rather than introgression from Neandertals
I can't exclude the possibility that some recent Caucasoids from West Asia possessed these alleles while CEU do not. I will simply note that HapMap Tuscans (TSI), do not possess them, and neither do 471 Ashkenazi Jews from Bray et al. (2010) who are likely to be of West Asian/European ancestry. Neither do Kurds and Urkarah Dagestanis (from Xing et al. 2010) possess 2 "Neandertal" alleles on SNPs available in that dataset.

So, I will tentatively exclude the possibility that recent Caucasoid back-migrations brought these alleles to East Africa.

This leaves open two possibilities: that (i) these aren't Neandertal genes at all and were part of the ancestral gene pool of East Africans and Eurasians, or that (ii) they were brought back to Africa by a major early back-migration of undifferentiated Eurasians.

http://dienekes.blogspot.ie/2011/03/neandertal-genes-in-east-africa.html

No surprise here. The tallest tribe in Africa and one of the tallest in the world (sharing first place with Dinaric population from Balkan).

The part of the "even more modern human" stayed in middle east and part went northwards into Europe. Is there a connection between this "even more modern human" and the future appearance of Cro-Magnon man in the Balkans? I believe there is.

Here is how this northward migration seem to have went:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon

Here is a forensic facial reconstruction of a Cro-Magnon man:



This spreading of "even more modern human" northwards, to areas outside the tropical and sub tropical zones which were usual habitats of "modern humans", could have only been possible if new "even more modern humans" had different genes from "earlier modern humans". These new "cold" genes could have only come from neanderthal. But the acquiring of "cold" genes was not the only genetic improvement that this new "even more modern humans" possessed over "earlier modern humans" and neanderthals alike. It seems that new bastard race was better than it's parents put together, as usually happens with mixed breeds. It also seems that as the "even more modern humans" traveled northwards, more and more neanderthal genes were added to "early modern human" genetic structure. Once "even more modern humans" reached Balkans, there is a distinct possibility that they have mixed with another human "species" which lived in the Balkans and was recently discovered in Serbia:

The fossil was found to be at least 397,000 years old and possibly older than 525,000 years old,” explained Rink. “We used three independent techniques (electron spin resonance, uranium series isotopic analysis and infrared luminescence dating) which had remarkably consistent results reinforcing our conclusion. This established the mandible as the oldest easternmost European fossil of its kind.”

“During this time, humans in Western Europe started to develop Neanderthal traits, which is lacking in this specimen,” explained Roksandic. ”Scientists now think the evolution of Neanderthal traits was strongly influenced by periodic isolation caused by episodic formation of glaciers. On the other hand, humans in southeastern Europe were never geographically isolated from Asia and Africa by glaciers and accordingly, this resulted in different evolutionary forces acting on early human populations in this region. The Balkan Peninsula could have belonged to the postulated core area from which human populations repopulated Europe after the glaciers receded. The status of this specimen as Homo erectus s.l. fits well with this explanation.”

http://scitechdaily.com/400000-year-old-fossil-helps-shed-new-light-on-human-evolution/

We find evidence of the interbreeding between neanderthals and "even more modern humans" all over Europe:

The most vocal proponent of the hybridization hypothesis on anatomical grounds has been Erik Trinkaus of Washington University.[34] Trinkaus claims various fossils as hybrid individuals, including the "child of Lagar Velho", a skeleton found at Lagar Velho in Portugal dated to about 24,000 years ago.[35] In a 2006 publication co-authored by Trinkaus, the fossils found in 1952 in the cave of Peștera Muierii, Romania, are likewise claimed as hybrids. [36]
In his work Neanderthal, Paul Jordan points out that without some interbreeding, certain features on some "modern" skulls of Eastern European Cro-Magnon heritage are hard to explain.[37] In another study, researchers have recently found in Peştera Muierilor, Romania, remains of European humans from 30 thousand years ago who possessed mostly diagnostic "modern" anatomical features, but also had distinct Neanderthal features not present in ancestral modern humans in Africa, including a large bulge at the back of the skull, a more prominent projection around the elbow joint, and a narrow socket at the shoulder joint. Analysis of one skeleton's shoulder showed that these humans, like Neanderthal, did not have the full capability for throwing spears.[38]
The paleontological analysis of modern-human emergence in Europe has been shifting from considerations of the Neanderthals to assessments of the biology and chronology of the earliest modern humans in western Eurasia. This focus, involving morphologically modern humans before 28,000 years ago, shows accumulating evidence that they present a variable mosaic of derived modern human, archaic human, and Neanderthal features.[36][39][40] Studies of fossils from the upper levels of the Sima de las Palomas, Murcia, Spain, dated to 40,000 years ago, establish the late persistence of Neanderthals in Iberia. This reinforces the conclusion that the Neanderthals were not merely swept away by advancing modern humans. In addition, the Palomas Neanderthals variably exhibit a series of modern-human features rare or absent in earlier Neanderthals. Either they were evolving on their own towards the modern-human pattern, or more likely, they had contact with early modern humans around the Pyrenees. If the latter is the case, it implies that the persistence of the Middle Paleolithic in Iberia was a matter of choice, and not cultural retardation.[41]
Modern-human findings in Abrigo do Lagar Velho, Portugal, of 24,500 years ago, allegedly featuring Neanderthal admixtures, have been published.[42] However the interpretation of the Portuguese specimen is disputed.[43]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_admixture_theory#Neanderthals

Please note how the interbreeding between neanderthals and "even more modern humans" is called "hybridization" implying mixing of two separate distinct species, which we will see is being proven to be complete rubbish. Neanderthals and "even more modern humans", at the moment when they interbred in middle east and Europe were just two subbranches of the same species: humans.

But their mix produced what only could be described as "super humans", Cro Magnons:

The Cro-Magnon man was, compared to the other “anatomically modern humans” around him, practically a superman. They were skilled hunters, toolmakers and artists famous for the cave art at places such as Lascaux, Chauvet, and Altamira. They had a high cranium, a broad and upright face, and cranial capacity “about the same as modern humans” (can we say larger?), but less than that of Neanderthals. The males were as tall as 6 feet.

What the archaeological record seems to show is that in Europe, after millennia of almost no progress at all, even in the few areas where modern man has been found, suddenly human culture seems to take off like an explosion with the appearance of Cro-Magnon man.

Not only does culture explode, but also new ways of doing things, new styles and innovations that were utterly unknown in the period immediately preceding them, suddenly appear, only to disappear again like an outdated fad. From Spain to the Urals, sites list the developments of sewing needles, barbed projectiles, fishhooks, ropes, meat drying racks, temperature controlled hearths, and complex dwellings.

Cro-Magnon’s tools are described as the Aurignacian technology, characterized by bone and antler tools, such as spear tips (the first) and harpoons. The earliest known Aurignacian sites are in the Balkans (a cave called Bacho Kiro), and they are dated to around 43,000 years ago. Three thousand years later, the Aurignacian craze is all over Europe. They also used animal traps, and bow and arrow. They invented shafts and handles for their knives, securing their blades with bitumen, a kind of tar, as long as 40 thousand years ago. Other improvements included the invention of the atlatl, a large bone or piece of wood with a hooked groove used for adding distance and speed to spears.

They also invented more sophisticated spear points, such as those that detach after striking and cause greater damage to prey.144 The Cro-Magnon type man was also the “originator” of such abstract concepts as “time”. They marked time by lunar phases, recording them with marks on a piece of bone, antler or stone. Some of these “calendars” contained a record of as many as 24 lunations.145

Cro-Magnon people lived in tents and other man-made shelters in groups of several families. They were nomadic hunter-gatherers and had elaborate rituals for hunting, birth and death. Multiple burials are common in the areas where they were found. What is most interesting is that from 35 to 10 thousand years ago, there was no differentiation by sex or age in burials.

They included special grave goods, as opposed to everyday, utilitarian objects, suggesting a very increased ritualization of death and burial..147

They were the first confirmed to have domesticated animals, starting by about 15 thousand years ago (though ancient sapiens may have domesticated the dog as much as 200 thousand years ago).

It also seems that right from the beginning, Cro-Magnon man was traveling and sharing and exchanging not only goods, but technology.

If there was a better form of stone somewhere else, the word seemed to get around, and everybody had some of it. Distinctive flints from southern Poland are found at Dolni Vestonice, a hundred miles to the south. Slovakian radiolarite of red, yellow and olive is found a hundred miles to the east. Later in the Upper Paleolithic period, the famous “chocolate flint” of southern Poland is found over a radius of two hundred and fifty miles.151

151 Shreeve, op. cit.
144 Eric Whitaker, Steve Stewart; Article Reviews; Late Ice Age Hunting Technology (Heidi Knecht) Scientific American, July 1994.
145 Marshack, Alexander, The Roots Of Civilization - Moyer (Mt. Kisco, New York: Bell Limited 1991).
146 Preston, Douglas, “The Lost Man”, New Yorker Magazine, June 16, 1997.
147 Schirtzinger, Erin, The Evidence for Pleistocene Burials, Neanderthals versus Modern Humans, December 6, 1994.

The most amazing part of all of it is the art. Art suddenly springs onto the landscape, fully formed, with no period of gradual development; no signs of childish attempts preceding it. A piece of ivory carved 32,000 years ago is as realistic as anything turned out by the most accomplished carver of the present day.

They were the first to leave extensive works of art, such as cave paintings and carved figures of animals and pregnant women. Huge caves lavishly decorated with murals depicting animals of the time were at first rejected as fake for being too sophisticated. Then they were dismissed as being primitive, categorized as hunting, fertility or other types of sympathetic magic.

They show evidence of motifs, of following their own stylistic tradition, of “impressionist” like style, perspective, and innovative use of the natural relief in the caves. Also possible, considering the new concepts of time reckoning practiced by Cro-Magnon, are abstract representations of the passage of time, such as spring plants in bloom, or pregnant bison that might represent summer.148

Aside from pregnant women and other Goddess worship iconography,149 representations of people, “anthropomorphs,” are very few, and never show the accuracy or detail of the other animals. Humans are represented in simple outlines without features, sometimes with “masks”, often without regard to proportion, being distorted and isolated. At the Grottes des Enfants in France are found four burials with red ocher, and associated with Aurignacian tools.

148 Reeser, Ken, “Earliest Art: Representative Art In The Upper Paleolithic Era”, 1994 (after: Marshack, 1991; Grand, 1967; Ucko, Peter J., and Rosenfeld, Andre, 1967; Brown, G. Baldwin, 1932; Breuil, Abbe H., date unknown) (unpublished).
149 Stone, Merlin, When God Was A Woman (San Diego, New York, London: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1976).

Is seems though that "early modern human" or Crom magnon could have inherited it's love of painting from neanderthal:

Prehistoric dots and crimson hand stencils on Spanish cave walls are now the world's oldest known cave art, according to new dating results—perhaps the best evidence yet that Neanderthals were Earth's first cave painters. If that's the case, the discovery narrows the cultural distance between us and Neanderthals—and fuels the argument, at least for one scientist, that the heavy-browed humans were not a separate species but only another race. Of the 11 subterranean sites the team studied along northern Spain's Cantabrian Sea coast, the cave called El Castillo had the oldest paintings—the oldest being a simple red disk. At more than 40,800 years old, "this is currently Europe's oldest dated art by at least 4,000 years," said the study's lead author Alistair Pike, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol in the U.K. If the new dates are correct, they also could make the El Castillo art the oldest known well-dated cave paintings in the world—a title previously held by France's Chauvet cave paintings (pictures), believed to be at least 37,000 years old.

Many scientists had long doubted whether Neanderthals were capable of producing symbolic art. But that's begun to change in recent years, thanks in part to the discovery of pigments, tiny art objects, and what might be body paint at Neanderthal sites, according to Paul Bahn, a cave art expert and a member of the Archaeological Institute of America. "There remains a rump of blinkered scholars who still consider Neanderthals to be brutish savages, little better than animals, but fortunately they are a dwindling minority," Bahn, who was not involved in the study, said in an email. "I think almost all objective scholars now fully accept Neanderthal art." Study co-author João Zilhão goes a step further, suggesting that, if Neanderthals were responsible for some of the Spanish cave art, then perhaps there's no real distinction between them and modern humans. "It adds to the evidence ... that Neanderthals were a European racial variant of Homo sapiens, not a distinct species," said Zilhão, of the University of Barcelona. At the very least, study leader Pike said, the new findings help narrow the distance between the cultural evolution of Neanderthals and modern humans. "If you look at the [modern human] trajectory towards art, we find shell beads, bits of ochre, and ostrich shells carved with geometric designs from about 70,000 to 100,000 years ago" in Africa, he said. Now, at European sites, "we see that Neanderthals are following the same trajectory. We see shell beads, carved sculptures, and geometric designs on bits of bone. And now we see what might be Neanderthal art."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/06/120614-neanderthal-cave-paintings-spain-science-pike

The Upper Paleolithic signals the most fundamental change in human behavior that the archaeological record may ever reveal.150 The only explanation for this tremendous change is that a new kind of human appeared on the earth stage.

150 Richard Klein, Stanford, quoted by Shreeve.

I am writing this article in the same week when discovery of homo erectus skulls in Georgia has been published:

Skull of Homo erectus throws story of human evolution into disarray

A haul of fossils found in Georgia suggests that half a dozen species of early human ancestor were actually all Homo erectus. The spectacular fossilised skull of an ancient human ancestor that died nearly two million years ago has forced scientists to rethink the story of early human evolution. Anthropologists unearthed the skull at a site in Dmanisi, a small town in southern Georgia, where other remains of human ancestors, simple stone tools and long-extinct animals have been dated to 1.8m years old. Experts believe the skull is one of the most important fossil finds to date, but it has proved as controversial as it is stunning. Analysis of the skull and other remains at Dmanisi suggests that scientists have been too ready to name separate species of human ancestors in Africa. Many of those species may now have to be wiped from the textbooks. The latest fossil is the only intact skull ever found of a human ancestor that lived in the early Pleistocene, when our predecessors first walked out of Africa. The skull adds to a haul of bones recovered from Dmanisi that belong to five individuals, most likely an elderly male, two other adult males, a young female and a juvenile of unknown sex. "The significance is difficult to overstate. It is stunning in its completeness. This is going to be one of the real classics in paleoanthropology," said Tim White, an expert on human evolution at the University of California, Berkeley. But while the skull itself is spectacular, it is the implications of the discovery that have caused scientists in the field to draw breath. Over decades excavating sites in Africa, researchers have named half a dozen different species of early human ancestor, but most, if not all, are now on shaky ground. The remains at Dmanisi are thought to be early forms of Homo erectus, the first of our relatives to have body proportions like a modern human. The species arose in Africa around 1.8m years ago and may have been the first to harness fire and cook food. The Dmanisi fossils show that H erectus migrated as far as Asia soon after arising in Africa. The latest skull discovered in Dmanisi belonged to an adult male and was the largest of the haul. It had a long face and big, chunky teeth. But at just under 550 cubic centimetres, it also had the smallest braincase of all the individuals found at the site. The dimensions were so strange that one scientist at the site joked that they should leave it in the ground. The odd dimensions of the fossil prompted the team to look at normal skull variation, both in modern humans and chimps, to see how they compared. They found that while the Dmanisi skulls looked different to one another, the variations were no greater than those seen among modern people and among chimps. The scientists went on to compare the Dmanisi remains with those of supposedly different species of human ancestor that lived in Africa at the time. They concluded that the variation among them was no greater than that seen at Dmanisi. Rather than being separate species, the human ancestors found in Africa from the same period may simply be normal variants of H erectus.
"Everything that lived at the time of the Dmanisi was probably just Homo erectus," said Prof Zollikofer. "We are not saying that palaeoanthropologists did things wrong in Africa, but they didn't have the reference we have. Part of the community will like it, but for another part it will be shocking news."

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/17/skull-homo-erectus-human-evolution

These skulls from Georgia probably offer the final proof that there was always only one species of humans. And if that is the case it opens a new big question? Does neanderthal dna really represents only 3-4% of "human" dna? Or should we ask ourselves: "which Y dna haplogroups and which mt dna haplogroups are neanderthal, or more correctly European human, and which are African human, and which are Denisovian or more correctly Asian human"? Did this "even more modern human" belong to I haplogroup?

This is from Eupedia:

Haplogroup I is the oldest major haplogroup in Europe and in all probability the only one that originated there (apart from very minor haplogroups like C6 and deep subclades of other haplogroups). It is thought to have arrived from the Middle East as haplogroup IJ sometime between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, and developed into haplogroup I approximately 25,000 years ago. In other words, Cro-Magnons most probably belonged to IJ and I (alongside older haplogroups like F and C6).

http://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_I1_Y-DNA.shtml

Here is a Y chromosome time line again from Eupedia:

http://www.eupedia.com/europe/european_haplogroups_timeline.shtml

If we look at the diagram we see that at around 70,000 years before present, at the time of arrival of the "modern African man" we have a major split at CT level. This is where euro Asian and afroasiatic branches formed. You can see that DE split up at that point. It is probably part of the mixed population which stayed in middle east and eventually moved to north Africa. If we look at European branch we see that around 60,000 years before now, around the time that neanderthal remains in middle east were dated to, we have emergence of the group F, the father group of all European groups. And then at 46,000 years before now we have emergence of IJK group. This coincides with emergence of Cro Magnons in the Balkans.

In his work "Re-Examining the Out-of-Africa Theory and the Origin of Europeoids (Caucasoids)" Klyosov & Rozhanskii say this:

DNA genealogy has shown that non-Africans do not have “African” SNPs on their Y chromosomes (Klyosov & Rozhanskii, 2012; Klyosov et al., 2012). Africans and non-Africans have plenty of SNP-mutations from a common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees; however, non-Africans have apparently, not received them from the Africans (ibid.). As a consequence of this lack of DNA data, it is hard to imagine that African languages could have evolved into PIE languages. Overall, it is highly questionable that “anatomically modern homo” arose in Africa (Klyosov & Rozhankii, 2012; Klyosov et al., 2012; Bednarik, 2012, 2013),

http://tinyurl.com/o5xrqqo

Is this all just coincidence? I don't think so.

So what happened to early modern humans or Cro-Magnons as they were once called? They were still in Europe, more precisely in the Balkans, at the time of the last glacial maximum.

The Cro-Magnon of Eastern Serbia

Eighty-four graves at Vlasac produced skeletal material from 117 individuals. Scattered finds of another 65 individuals came from all over the occupied area (Nemeskeri, 1978, pp.97-98). The general character of these remains, representing a tall (females 163.32, and males 170.53 cm), robust, Cro-Magnon-type population, with a tendency toward some gracilization as the, Mesolithic period drew to a close, (Nemeskeri and Szathmary, 1978, pp.178, 179) is consonant with the reports of the 37 individuals recovered from 30 graves at Padina (Zivanovic, S., 1974, p.153), and the 85 skeletons from Lepenski Vir (Nemeskeri, 1972, p.200). Gracilization, particularly of males, is a general trend throughout Europe in the late Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic (Frayer, 1978).

http://books.google.ie/books/about/Mesolithic_Adaptations_on_the_Lower_Danu.html?id=7R5oQgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y

Among the skeletal remains were found in Lepenski vir (mesolithic culture) 160-170 individuals, which are based on archaeological and stratigraphic elements divided into two groups: A and B. The oldest group A is among the Cro-Magnon type (with its robust and fragile variant).

"The characteristics of men in group A are long or very long skull, with a medium wide or wide maximum width. Height of the skull is very pronounced. ... Cranial material is very massive. The vertikalis norm of the skull are spheroidal, ellipsoidal or wide ovoid shape. The norm lateralis profile is tall and jagged. The profile of the dominant occipital torus okcipitalis, and forms the "wide house" or "bomb ". The face is very wide and medium wide, paralelopiped. Mandible is a large, high and wide. Raums is broad with a very corrugated angulus. Postcranial skeleton is characterized by toughness, with especially distinct muscles and ligaments to the femur and humerus. Robuscity of clavicle and ribs is also expressed. The body's growth is between 175 and 178 cm. ... Cranial volume in men is between 1400 and 1500 mm3 (for female skulls of this group between 1258 cm3). "(Z. Mikic, same, p.27)"

http://www.rastko.rs/arheologija/zmikic-neolit_c.html

The temporal region and the supramastoid ridge in mesolithic skulls from Padina in the Iron Gate Gorge of the Danube

Studies of the morphological features of the temporal region of mesolithic skulls from Padina in the Iron Gate Gorge of the Danube revealed a very prominent and large supramastoid ridge which is the most striking feature in skulls of both sexes. Mastoid processes were larger in male skulls, but in 25% of the cases there was an overlap between the size of the processes in male and female specimens. The mastoid ridge was prominent in both sexes. The digastric fossa was always well defined in both sexes and in the two thirds of the skull specimens it was deep. The posterior root of the zygoma was prominent in all the skulls, but it was better developed in the male specimens. The parietotemporal suture in both sexes rises above the level of the pterion. There were no morphological or anthropometrical differences between the left and the right side of individual skulls outside the limits of natural asymmetry. All these morphological characteristics of the temporal region may help in racial and sexual diagnosis of the Mesolithic skulls from the Iron Gate Gorge.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02447214

Radiocarbon dating of a Cro-Magnon population from Padina, Yugoslavia, with some general recommendations for dating human skeletons

A previously controversial group of human skeletal remains of Cro-Magnon type from Padina in the Iron Gates gorge has been shown by direct radiocarbon dating of collagen to belong to the early Holocene period, c. 8–9000 bp. The more general applicability of the procedures used to establish the age of these skeletons is discussed with particular reference to the desideratum of including only directly dated remains in the human fossil record.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25756430?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21102806623633

Radio carbon dating of Danube gorge skeletons

MESOLITHIC AND NEOLITHIC (DIS)CONTINUITIES IN THE DANUBE GORGES

New AMS dates from Padina indicate a significant chronological depth for the use of this site (this also applies to some other sites in the Danube Gorges, such as Vlasac, cf. Fig. 14)as both a burial ground and a seasonal or semi-permanent settlement, at least from c.9500 CalBC. There are significant chronological differences in dating individual human burials, scatteredresidual remains and remains found within architectural features, such as trapezoidal buildings.For the moment, it is difficult to claim unbroken continuity for almost 4000 years, i.e. duringthe Mesolithic–Neolithic development that the available radiometric dates cover at this site, andwe suspect that there were discontinuous phases and (seasonal) episodes of occupation.
However, it seems that populations which visited this site over several millennia of theMesolithic development belonged to the same material culture/regional tradition throughout theperiod, with a good knowledge of the significance of the locale. Furthermore, it seems that thereis no major chronological break in the sequence of radiometric dates at the time when newmaterial paraphernalia, such as pottery, Balkan yellow-spotted flint and polished stone tools,appear in this region as general traits of Early Neolithic material culture tradition. We see noevidence to support a recently suggested scenario of flooding that would have caused theabandonment of this site in the period 6300–5950 Cal BC (Bonsall et al. 2002) since a numberof new AMS dates cover exactly this period.New dates from Hajduka Vodenica suggest the Mesolithic use of the site as a burialground from at least c.7500 Cal BC. There is a possible gap of around 500 years between theearlier use and a later use of the site as a burial ground around 6500 to 6100 Cal BC. However,there might have been a clear recognition of the previous use of the site on the basis of stratigraphic and spatial relations of earlier and later dated burials and architectural features.Material culture associations at the site related to the lower two portions of stone constructions(without pottery and with abundant bone tools) also suggest that the site might have been usedas an occupation settlement/base during the Mesolithic, which should be determined by futuredating of bone tools and animal bones from this area.This revised chronological framework on the basis of new AMS dates from Padina andHajduka Vodenica also significantly helps us understand the nature of the Meso-Neolithictransformations in this region, with abundant indications regarding the chronological overlappingand cultural coexistence of Mesolithic and Neolithic realms (Boriin press a; in press b).Further research and new AMS dates from both sites are necessary to achieve a fine-grained resolution of the chronological sequences and to discern particularities of very long andcomplex occupational histories at these and other locales in the Danube Gorges.

http://www.academia.edu/2478053/MESOLITHIC_AND_NEOLITHIC_DIS_CONTINUITIES_IN_THE_DANUBE_GORGES_NEW_AMS_DATES_FROM_PADINA_AND_HAJDUCKA_VODENICA_SERBIA_

The research presented here aims at disceming possible interactions between Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the bon Gates Gorge (Serbia-Romania) and the th surrounding farmers. The region has, during the fh and the 6 rnillenniurns BC. witnessed the coexistence of Mesolithic culture of the Lepenski Vir -Schela Cladovei type and the Early and Middle Neolithic of the Balkans. represented in the region by Gura-Baciului and StarCevo. At the end of this coexistence, Neolithic settlements are confïrmed on one of the examined sites (Lepenski Vir), as well as downstream from the Gorge. integrated into the Middle Neolithic Starfevo-Cris-Koros complex. in order to examine the interactions of communities with different modes of subsistence (foraging and farming respectively), the nonmetric anatocnicd variünts of the skull and postcranial skeletons were exiunined on the four sites with the largest number of individuals buried: Padina. Lepenski Vir. Vlasac and Hajdurlka Vodenicü. The analyses were performed according to sites, chronological units, and combination of sites and chronological units. Anaher set of analyses, aimed at disceming environmental (occupation/nutrition) changes that could have affected the population in transition was performed on metric variables of postcranial skeleton. The combination of these two sets of andyses argues for local continuity within the region, with high degree of initial heterogeneity, and temporal ordering as the mosi likely explanation for the pattern of change. A more pronounced difference at the time of availability of contact with Neolithic populations in the region argiles for a limited "seeping in" of a non-local population that did not result in a change of either economic base or ideology. There is no evidence of an incoming population at the tirne of change to Neolithic economy and integration of sites into the cultural circle of the Balkan Neolithic, but rather of a local population accepting the new way of life.

http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/NQ51919.pdf

Research at the old graveyard locality in the village Trnjane, near Pozarevac, have left the deepest impression on the professor Srboljub Zivanovic: Moving from the Danube to Pozarevac, we are finding skeletons - from the distant prehistoric times to the present day. Closest to Danube are Cro magnon skeletons. Further away you go, closer to present day you come, but genetically and anthropologically they are the same people the same population. The fact that we have continual use of the same spot for burrial purposes from prehistoric times to today, with the same type of skeletons from prehistoric times to today, forces us to conclude that today's inhabitants of Pozarevac (Eastern Serbia) are the same people who lived in prehistoric times in Lepenski vir - cro magnons. If you want to know if you are a descendant of a cro magnon, check the crown of your head. If you have a bump there, a ridge, you are descendant of a cro magnon. If it is all smooth, you came to Balkan from somewhere else.

From interview with professor Dr. Srboljub Živanović, who was a professor at the Department of Anatomy, The Medical College of St. Bartholomew's Hospital. He currently lives and works in London as the director of the European Institute for Ancient Slavic Studies and fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Well I did check my skull and I seem to have all the bumps and ridges professor Živanović talks about. I have protruding back of the skull with a spike in the bone, I have ridge on my crown and my eyebrow bones are sticking out and end in sharp points. Plus my shoulders don't rotate fully and never did, so I was never able to throw stones as a kid. I always thought that this just made me weird, but now I can call my self a cromagnon (ha ha. ) I am also 6 foot 4, my brother is 7 feet tall. All my cousins and nieces and nephews are the same....And when i was growing up in Serbia I felt positively scrawny compared to other guys.

Does it make me any better or worse than people who don't have weird bumps and ridges on their heads? Of course not. But it shows that we have all these early fire related myths preserved til today, because we still have the descendants of the people who made the original myths living among us. There is really no other explanation.

This brings us to the period 40,000 years to 10,000 years before today. During this time Cro Magnon took control of Europe merging with and replacing the neanderthals. This is also the time when major advances in fire creation, management and use were made. Professor Živanović claimed in the 60's, that Cro Magnons still lives among us today in the Balkans and that many Serbs are direct descendants of Cro Magnons. The only haplogroup in the Balkans that is old enough to be Cro Magnon haplogroup is I haplogroup which originated some time between 46,000 and 38,000 years ago in the Balkans. Their descendants are still living in the Balkans today. This would explain why the oldest, most archaic language terms linked to fire and fire making are found in Serbian. If Cro Magnons were the first to really master fire, and the Cro Magnons survived in Serbia to this day, then their language survived too in old layers of Serbian language. For the same reason legends about the catching of the fire bird, the ancient hunt for fire caused by lightning, survived to this day passed from generation to generation of old Europeans.

But what about the cult of fire, the Agni (Triglav) worship, which survived only in the Balkans and in India. The link between these two locations is R1a haplogroup, the Arian haplogroup. But R1a haplogroup can be found throughout Euroasia. How come only Serbs and Indians, two people on opposite sides of R1a spectrum, preserved the Agni worship? If we look at Serbian R1a haplogroup we see that (according to Klyosov) it is the oldest European R1a haplogroup which arrived to the Balkans around 10,000 years before now:

R1a1-M17 accounts for about one-seventh to one-sixth of Serbian Y-chromosomes. Its frequency peaks in Poland (56.4%) and Ukraine (54.0%), and its variance peaks in northern Bosnia.[1] It originated around 20,000 ybp likely in southern Siberia, and some of its bearers migrated to the Balkans 10,000 to 13,000 ybp. About 5000 to 6000 ybp, they began to migrate from the Balkans to the west toward the Atlantic, to the north toward the Baltic Sea and Scandinavia, to the east to the Russian plains and steppes, and to the south to Asia Minor.[4] It became the most predominant haplogroup in the general Slavic paternal gene pool. The variance of R1a1 in the Balkans might have been enhanced by infiltrations of Indo-European speaking peoples between 2000 and 1000 BC, and by the Slavic migrations to the region in the early Middle Ages.[1][2] A descendant lineage of R1a1-M17, R1a1a7-M458, which has the highest frequency in central and southern Poland (30%, more than half of total R1a1 there), is also observed among East Slavic and Finno-Ugric peoples, but it is very rare among South Slavs, including Serbs.[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Serbs

This dating comes from the research done by Anatole Klyosov.

http://www.jogg.info/52/files/Klyosov2.pdf

If Klyosov is right, then there is a possibility that the fire making knowledge and consequent fire worship arose in the Balkans, or central Europe. It probably happened at some time between 45,000 years before now (cro magnon appearance in the Balkans, the IJK haplogrop) and 30,000 years before now (R haplogroup). If we look again at the comparative chronological tree of European Y-chromosome and Mitochondrial DNA haplogroups diagram from Eupedia, we see that haplogroup R evolved from haplogroup IJK. As cro magnon migrated eastward, part of the population moved to central Asia and there evolved into R haplogroup 30,000 years before now and later into R1 haplogroup around 26,000 years before now. These people, being the descendants of the original fire makers and fire worshipers, continued the tradition. But by this time they have probably deified the fire and probably have turned fire worship into a religion. Part of them moved eastwards to north China and India some time around 7,000 years before now. Part of them moved westwards back to Europe and arrived in the Balkans around 10,000 years before now. It is these oldest branches of R1a that carried and preserved the fire cult of Agni. This is why the Agni cult exists in Serbia and in India and not anywhere in between. R1a spread from the Balkans throughout Europe and reached Ireland at some time between 4500 and 3500 years before now. Just in time to build what we now call "passage tomb at Knowth" but what probably was a temple dedicated to Triglav, Agni. I will talk about it more later.

I hope you had fun reading this. In my next post I will try to answer the question: "when exactly did man learn how to make and properly use fire?". In order to answer this question I decided to learn how to make fire using primitive fire making techniques. I believed that in order to understand why Triglav, Agni worship developed the way it did, I need

How did humans learn how to make fire? We have three possibilities:

1. Aliens taught them
2. They had vision in which god told them how to do it
3. They did it by accident while trying to do something else

If you think about primitive fire making techniques they fall into two basic types:

1. wood on wood friction
2. stone on iron friction

To produce fire by either of these two techniques requires a lot of hard work, determination and skill. You need specialist equipment which has to be made from specific material combinations and in specific way. This equipment has to be all ready and used in very precise way in precisely ordered sequence of steps...

This is not something you just think of or stumble upon while picking your nose not only because of how complex the equipment and the procedure is. It is impossible to just invent something like this because that would require deep understanding of physics and chemistry. To invent something like a fire drill, you would need to know that friction would eventually lead to sawdust turning into coal. This was far beyond the intellectual ability of our Neanderthal and Cro Magnon ancestors. There was nothing in their experience that would lead them to that kind of conclusion and compel them to embark on inventing something as complex as a fire drill.

I believe that fire making is something that gets discovered as a unexpected side effect of some other deliberate action which involves similar equipment and similar hard work, determination and skill but which has a more obvious connection between the action and the outcome and was therefore possible to develop without deep understanding of phisics and chemistry. Like drilling.

MICRO-DRILLS

Drilling or perforating materials such as bone, shell, ivory, antler, stone or wood is a technological skill that was first invented in the distant past archaeological record. The earliest examples date to a period in time when Neanderthals were still living in Europe and the Near East. The oldest scientifically recognized drilled beads were made of ostrich eggshells. They were discovered in an early Later Stone Age stratum in Border Cave, in South Africa and date to sometime between 45,000 and 33,000 years ago.

FOUR DIFFERENT DRILLING DEVICES

FROM "A STUDY OF THE PRIMITIVE METHODS OF DRILLING", J.D. McGUIRE 1896.

Many different primitive hole drilling devices have been invented by different cultures around the world. These four drawings illustrate four of them, although there are many more. The one on the left is a bow drill, the next one is a pump drill, then a disc drill and the one to the right is an Eskimo strap drill.
There is no way of knowing which, if any, of these techniques were used to drill shell beads at Cahokia. It's only logical to theorize that one of these fairly simple machines might have been used. Only the stone drill bits and some of the drilled shells have survived. Most of the lesser stable materials that would have been used to make a drilling device have decayed long ago. But it wouldn't be impossible to find evidence of one. There has been some wooden objects found at Cahokia. In Mound 72 some of the wooden cedar stretchers were preserved and in feature 227 there was some matting and bark preserved. Also in feature 237 there was a section of twisted knotted cord.

The first drill must have been developed from an awl. An awl is defined as a small pointed tool for piercing holes in leather, wood and other soft materials.

The first drill was probably held in one hand against the material to be drilled and simply turned back and forth until a hole was bored through.

SHELL BEAD AND HAFTED MICRO-DRILL
THE MICRO-DRILL IS GREG PERINO COLLECTION

The stone micro-drill laying in the hole of this large flat disc shell bead is a perfect fit. It's one of the larger drills in the collection and the bead is one of the largest examples from the Cahokia Mounds site area. There have been hafting experiments of micro-drills done by different people over the years. Dan and Phyllis Morse (1983) reports on experiments done by Michael Sierzchula in 1980. He hafted the drills in freshly cut cane that was cut near a joint (growth node) so the joint would stop the drill from pushing in too deep. The spongy pith in the center of the cane is strong enough to hold the drill without any other fixing agent.

Large numbers of drilled objects begin to appear 34 to 28 thousand years ago during the Aurignacian period in Europe. Excavations in caves and open air sites show that an explosion of sudden and innovative cultural changes took place. People begin to use musical instruments which indicates possible ceremony, ritual and dance. Plus all forms of art appears at this time which signifies the full emergence of modern symbolic expression. Personal adornment in the form of pierced objects also becomes evident in abundance at this time. Bead making and the technology to drill holes has been an important part of human development and social structures for a long time.

http://lithiccastinglab.com/gallery-pages/2002junemicrodrillspage1.htm

The same process that produces a hole will also eventually produce a fire. I believe that someone trying to drill a hole in a wooden board or a wooden tube discovered fire making accidentally. All friction fire drill type making tools are effectively drills without flints.

The basic technique for making fire by friction involves hand spinning a drill (a stick) against the bottom of a hole in a hearth board. The hand spun fire drill, the oldest drilling wood friction method, accomplishes this through hand pressure against the drill while bearing down with the weight of the body while continuing to spin the drill as fast as possible.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYwgwoq2-Ho&list=TLGjRdCO72vcNzBATYL92CmZspvxzoCRIR

Friction from rubbing the sticks together produces heat and (if the correct woods are used) fine powdery sawdust, or char. The char is collected in a notch cut into the center of the hole. This concentrates the heat, the wood acting as an insulator. If the char is heated to 800 degrees Fahrenheit (427 Celsius) it will begin to smolder (data courtesy of Richard Baugh). Placing the smoldering char (ember) into a bed of tinder (fine, dry plant fibers) and blowing gently will cause the tinder to burst into flames. This is much easier to describe than to accomplish. Reaching 800 degrees Fahrenheit (427 Celsius) requires considerable pressure be applied to the drill.

With practice, a strong, fairly heavy, well conditioned person (Neandrthal or Cro Magnon) can get an ember in a few seconds of hard work, under ideal conditions.

What probably happened was that under pressure, the flint tip slipped up into the handle. If the person was drilling a hole in a wooden board, and did not notice that the drill had no tip, and continued to drill for a few seconds more, the friction would ignite the char and create coal. Have a look at these primitive micro drills:



You will notice that the flint tips are inserted in the center of the cane and are much narrower than the cane itself. So the produced hole will be much narrower than the cane handle. If the person was drilling a thin wooden board or a wooden pipe, then at some stage the stone tip would go right through. If the person continued to spin the drill, the wooden rim, the edge of the drill would start rubbing against the edge of the hole which was already covered in sawdust and very hot. This direct friction would almost instantly ignite the sawdust if the board or pipe which was drilled was made of a correct type of wood. One of the best woods you can use in Europe for hand fire drill is Elder wood. It produces the sawdust with perfect granularity (not too rough and not fine) which ignites at very low temperature. And believe or not elder is the best European tree for making actual hand drills with stone tips:

Hunter-gatherers and immigrant farmers lived side-by-side for more than 2,000 years in Central Europe, before the hunter-gatherer communities died out or were absorbed into the farming population.
Researchers made a new analysis of DNA and isotopes from human bones found in the 'Blätterhöhle' cave near Hagen in Germany, where both hunter-gatherers and farmers were buried. The team, led by anthropologist Professor Joachim Burger of the Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany, used stable isotopes to determine their diet, DNA to investigate how they were related, and radiocarbon to establish how old the bones were.
"It is commonly assumed that the European hunter-gatherers disappeared soon after the arrival of farmers", said Dr Ruth Bollongino, lead author of the study. "But our study shows that the descendants of the first European humans maintained their hunter-gatherer way of life, and lived in parallel with the immigrant farmers, for at least 2,000 years. The hunter-gathering way of life only died out in Central Europe around 5,000 years ago, much later than previously thought."
"Until around 7,500 years ago all central Europeans were hunter-gatherers," said Professor Mark Thomas, professor of evolutionary genetics at UCL, and a co-author of the study. "They were the descendants of the first wave of our species to arrive in Europe, around 45,000 years ago. They survived the last Ice Age and the warming that started around 10,000 years ago. And now it seems they also survived the initial wave of farmers spreading across Europe from the southeast of the continent."
Previously it was assumed that the hunter-gatherers rapidly died out or were absorbed into the farming populations. "Our study now shows that the hunter-gatherers stayed in close proximity to farmers, had contact with them for thousands of years, and buried their dead in the same cave," said Professor Thomas "This contact was not without consequences, because hunter-gatherer women sometimes married into the farming communities, while no genetic lines of farmer women have been found in hunter-gatherers", explained Burger.
For a long time the team were unable to make sense of the findings. "It was only through the analysis of isotopes in the human remains, performed by our Canadian colleagues, that the pieces of the puzzle began to fit," states Bollongino. She added: "The results showed that the hunter-gatherers sustained themselves in Central and Northern Europe on a very specialized diet that included fish, among other things, until 5,000 years ago. And what is more, the hunter-gatherers living at the same time as the farmers were genetically more similar to the pre-farming hunter-gatherers than to the contemporaneous farmers."
The team also pursued the question of what impact both groups had on the gene pool of modern Europeans. Adam Powell, mathematician and specialist in demographic modeling at the JGU Institute of Anthropology, explained: "While neither hunter-gatherers nor farmers are to be regarded as the sole ancestors of today's Europeans, it is the mixing of both populations that potentially represents the ancestry of modern-day Europeans."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131010142704.htm

Another proof that people of Central Europe could have preserved at least part of Cro Magnon culture and language to this day. This would explain the preservation of early fire myths among the R1a people.

I said already that hand fire drill, a stick that can make fire, was probably the first magic wand. What did this magic wand look like?

If you’re a beginner with hand drill in the UK – or more widely the northern temperate environment such as found in Europe and parts of North America – then a good drill material to start with is a member of the Sambucus sp. commonly known as elder.

Elders put up straight shoots which can be used to make a very good hand drill. The best shoots are often secondary growths which are striving to head upwards out of the bush to reach the light. Even though they have a pith in the middle, they have quite thick sidewalls. You always should select a live shoot. If the bark of the shoot is green it is too young. Wait until the bark is grey before harvesting for a potential hand drill. The diameter of the harvested shoot should be about 15 mm at the base.



You can see how nobly the bark is. If you tried to use a twig with bark for a hand fire drill, you will rip your palms to shreds.



To prepare the drill, first the bark should be scraped off. This can be done with the back of your knife and is quite straightforward. Even the straightest looking shoots will have kinks and slight bends in them. These need to be straightened out. What you’re aiming for is a drill that is dowel-straight.



What you want to end up with is something like this:



With tips looking like this:





http://frontierbushcraft.com/2013/06/21/getting-to-grips-with-hand-drill/

Looks familiar?

ELDER

Also known as Ellhorn, Elderberry, Lady Elder. Sacred to the White Lady and Midsummer Solstice. The Druids used it to both bless and curse. Standing under an elder tree at Midsummer, like standing in a Fairy Ring of mushrooms, will help you see the "little people." Elder wands can be used to drive out evil spirits or thought forms. Music on panpipes or flutes of elder have the same power as the wand. Remember the words of the Rede. Elder is the Lady's Tree, burn it not or cursed ye be!

http://wicca.com/celtic/celtic/sactrees.htm


So fire drill is a white straight stick about 1,5 cm (half an inch) in diameter and about 60 and 90 cm (25-35 inches) in length. Fire was powerful force which was probably deified very early in human history. The person who was able to make, summon fire using one of these fire sticks, was probably regarded as blessed, anointed, special, selected by god. I believe that during paleolithic, any person who was able to to make fire, was very quickly elevated to a position of power and authority. The source of this power and therefore the symbol of this power was the white fire stick.

The White Rod, White Wand, Rod of Inauguration, or Wand of Sovereignty, in the Irish language variously called the slat na ríghe (rod of kingship) and slat tighearnais (rod of lordship), was the primary symbol of a Gaelic king or lord's legitimate authority and the principal prop used in his inauguration ceremony.[1] First documented in the 12th century Life of Máedóc of Ferns, but assumed to have been used long before then,[2] it is last documented in Ireland in the early 17th century. In Scotland the rod was used into the 13th century for the inauguration of its last Gaelic kings,[3] and for the Norse-Gaelic Lords of the Isles into the 15th.[4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Wand

The civil ceremony took place on the rock of Doon in the presence of the Clan. The ruler-elect removed his footwear and stood in the imprint of the feet of the first Chieftain that was cut into the Inauguration Stone. O’Clery, the Ullamh, came forward and read aloud a brief summary of the laws and customs in accordance with which the Clan should be governed. An oath was then administered that these ancient practices would be preserved inviolate.

This done, the candidate set asside the sword and was presented with ‘An Slat Bhan’, a straight white rod, as an emblem of purity and rectitude and a reminder that his judgement should be unbiased and that he should be pure and upright in his actions. It was also an indication that his people would be obedient to him and that no other weapon would be required to command them. A sub-Chieft next replaced one of the wearer’s sandals as a token of submission and threw the other over his shoulder for luck.

http://irishhistoryandgenealogy.wordpress.com/category/rock-of-doon/

Here is an interesting page talking about magic wands through history:

http://www.esotericarchives.com/wands/

I said that i believe that the first fire was made accidentally as a by product of drilling using hand micro drill. Hand micro drill is basically a white rod with a crystal mounted on its tip:



Is this the origin of a scepter, a staff, a wand with a crystal or a ball on its tip representing power?

A sceptre (or scepter in U.S. English) is a symbolic ornamental staff or wand held in the hand by a ruling monarch as an item of royal or imperial insignia. Sometimes, it could be used for magical purposes, mainly by skilled magicians.

There is one particular magic wand or staff that I will talk about in a lot of detail later and that is the staff of Hermes called kērukeion meaning "herald's staff":



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caduceus

Hermes was a messenger between gods and humans, heaven and earth. His staff represents lightning. Lightning is the white shining twirling magic wand of sky god which he uses to light fire on earth. But more of this later...

There are a number of factors that can get in-between you and your fire by friction. Some of them are obvious. Wet wood is a no no straight from the start. But some of the other negative factors aren't as obvious. If the wood contains volatile substances like resin or tar, this can evaporate and prevent proper heating. Another factor is using wood that is too soft which disintegrates as opposed to forming dust. What this means that before you begin to try to achieve fire by friction you first need to start off with the right wood. Here is a list of the best UK/European woods to use with bow drills:

Alder, Birch, Clematis, Elder, Elm, Hazel, Horse Chestnut, Ivy, Lime, Oak, Pine, Poplar, Sycamore, Willow

No matter which wood you choose or have available, you need to ensure that it is both dry and not rotten (rotten wood won't make the right kind of dust).

Identifying the right wood to use isn't as easy as it sounds. A good place to begin is by practicing your tree identification skills (one good reason to get good at tree recognition!), but that's just the beginning. Naming a tree is one thing, naming dead wood is harder. Standing dead wood is easier but can still sometime present some difficulties. Finding dry wood is another challenge. This is easier in summer than it is in winter - but remember that you are more likely to "need" a fire in winter. You might be able to dry out damp wood by placing it out in the sun or next to a fire (!!!!) but again this could be tricky in a life-threatening situation. However, it's better to practice skills before you need them for real and to begin with you want everything to be on your side so you can get a feel for the process and maximize your chances for success.

http://www85.homepage.villanova.edu/timothy.ay/BoyScouts/Docs/Fire%20by%20Friction.pdf

This passage from a fire making manual contains description of the biggest problem facing anyone who wants to make fire using fire drill: "Every piece of fire making equipment has to be bone dry if you are to see any fire at all". And this is the most difficult to achieve when you need fire the most, during cold, damp, dark months of autumn, winter and spring. Our lucky bastard who managed to make fire using the micro drill, will very quickly run out of luck if his drill or his board or his tinder becomes damp. But by the time people invented micro drills they probably already new that dry things burn and wet things don't. So I presume our lucky ancestor did it's best to keep his drill, board and tinder (fire nest) dry. How did he do it? The first answer is he kept all his tools in a cave where he lived. But caves are a horrible place for humans to live mostly because they are called and damp:

Some prehistoric humans were cave dwellers, but most were not. (See "Homo" and "Human evolution".) Such early cave dwellers, and other prehistoric peoples, are also called cave men (the term also has other meanings). Despite the name, only a small portion of humanity has ever dwelt in caves: caves are rare across most of the world; most caves are dark, cold, and damp; other cave inhabitants, such as bears, cave lions, and cave hyenas, also have made caves inhospitable for people.
The Grotte du Vallonnet, a cave in the French Riviera, was used by people approximately one million years ago. Although stone tools and the remains of eaten animals have been found in the cave, there is no indication that people dwelt in it.
Since about 750,000 years ago, the Zhoukoudian cave system, in Beijing, China, has been inhabited by various species of human being, including Peking Man (Homo erectus pekinensis) and modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens).
Approximately 100,000 years ago, some Neanderthal humans dwelt in caves in Europe and western Asia. Caves there also were inhabited by some Cro-Magnons from about 35,000 years ago until approximately 8,000 B.C. Both species built shelters, including tents, at the mouths of caves and used the caves’ dark interiors for ceremonies. The Cro-Magnon people also made representational paintings on cave walls.[1]
Also about 100,000 years ago, some Homo sapiens worked in Blombos Cave, in what became South Africa. They made the earliest paint workshop now known, but apparently did not dwell in the caves.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_dweller

So caves are not kind of place where you could keep fire making equipment dry by just putting it in a corner somewhere. You would need to wrap it in something water proof like a sheet of leather or buckskin or keep it inside a pouch or quiver made of leather, buckskin or bark. That if people actually ever lived in caves. Caves are horrible dark depressing scary full of mud, water and bat droppings. I would seriously doubt that most people, if any, actually lived in them.

Think about it: Why would people seek a shelter?

1. To find refuge from predators. If this is the reason you are looking for shelter, cave is a very bad choice. Some of the most dangerous predators actually live in caves. And those that don't, can fallow you into the cave, where you are trapped with no way out. You are much better off on a tree or anywhere else from where you can run if you need to. But once people started making weapons capable of killing large game and particularly once humans started making spears, they were more than capable to protect themselves out in the open and didn't need caves as shelters from beasts. And Neanderthal was able to make spears 400,000 years ago:

Radiocarbon dating has confirmed that three wooden spears found in a coal mine in Schöningen, near Hannover, Germany, are the oldest complete hunting weapons ever found. Some 380,000 to 400,000 years old, the six- to 7.5-foot javelins were found in soil whose acids had been neutralized by a high concentration of chalk near the coal pit. They suggest that early man was able to hunt, and was not just a scavenger. The development of such weapons may have been crucial to the settling of Stone Age northern Europe, whose cold climate and short daylight hours limited hunting.

The spears show design and construction skills previously attributed only to modern humans. "They are really high tech," says Hartmut Thieme of the Institut für Denkmalpflege in Hannover, who discovered them while excavating in advance of a rotary shovel digger used in the mine. "They are made of very tough Picea [spruce] trunk and are similarly carved." Their frontal center of gravity suggests they were used as javelins, says Thieme.

The only comparable find dating to the same period is a yew lance tip from Clacton-on-Sea, England, discovered in 1911. Thieme says the Schöningen discovery is important because it proves that the Clacton lance tip was not just a chance find and that spears were probably being made in large quantities. The Clacton lance tip suggested that people may have been hunting; the three spears from Schöningen now make it fairly certain that they were not merely scavenger-gatherers. That early man hunted big game is supported by the recent discovery of a fossilized rhinoceros shoulder blade with a projectile wound at Boxgrove, England, dated to 500,000 years ago. Studies revealed the wound was probably caused by a spear. As paleoanthropologist Wil Roebroeks of the University of Leiden points out, however, "we still haven't determined whether early man hunted in large groups, or whether they used pits to trap the animals first."

Thousands of pieces of horse, elephant, and deer bone were also found at Schöningen. The bones showed cut marks from stone flints found with grooved wooden tools that probably held the flints. If Thieme can prove the flints were hafted in the wooden tools, they will be the oldest known composite tools in the world.

http://archive.archaeology.org/9705/newsbriefs/spears.html

Schöningen Spear Replication Project - all stone tools

http://www.primitivearcher.com/smf/index.php?topic=20299.0


2. To find refuge from other humans. During times of war, people often sheltered in caves, especially ones with narrow entrances, because they are easy to defend as attacker needs to crawl in and cant fight while doing so. This works only if you are faced with a bunch of thieves who pass through your territory and don't hang around too long. People could not stay in the cave for a long time as they have no water or food and sooner or later people would have to get out. If you are hiding in a cave, you might even start a fire to make food or warm up. Then thousands of years later someone will find these traces of temporary habitation and will deduce that humans lived in caves...

3. To find refuge from rain because you don't want to get wet. This is very problematic as a reason for choosing caves as permanent places of habitation. Most animals, will just ignore the rain. They will get wet then get dry. End of story. Primitive humans were probably perfectly capable of doing the same. Some people in Ireland are still perfectly capable of doing the same. They walk to work in the morning in pissing rain, with no umbrella or rain gear, then sit at the desk in wet clothes until they dry and carry on through the day. In particular if you live in hot climate, like in east Africa, getting wet is actually great. It cools you down. Finding a dry shelter only becomes important in cold climates, and or when you want to keep your stuff, like fire making equipment, dry. Sometimes if you are out in the open, and you see a storm approaching, and you are near a cave and you really don't want to get wet, or you are afraid of thunders and lightning, you can go in the cave and shelter temporarily until storm passes by. If you are a hunter gatherer and a migrant, you might stop at the same cave year after year. Or if you are a hunter and you come regularly to the area near the cave because it is a good hunting ground, you might use a cave as a base while you are in the area. You might even start a fire to make food or warm up. Then thousands of years later someone will find these traces of temporary habitation and will deduce that humans lived in caves...

4. To find refuge from cold. Again in hot climate, like in east Africa, this is not a problem. In temperate to cold climates like in Europe, this is only a problem during the winter times. We now know that neanderthals evolved to live in cold climates, so they were probably capable of withstanding much lower temperatures than we are capable to withstand today. They were also smart, and migrated south during cold winters. They were hunter gatherers, they had no reason to stay in one place if it became inhospitable, or offered no food, like north of Europe during the winter. In case of extremely cold winter spells and only for a short time, caves may even be used as temporary dwellings because they have constant year round temperature:

The normal temperature of a cave whose only source of heat is from the overlying surface or has a low geothermal gradient is the annual surface temperature of the area where the specific cave is located. For areas with a high geothermal gradient, cave temperatures are influenced by the heat from below and the average annual surface temperature. Such caves tend to be warmer than surface temperatures due to heat emanating from the earth's core.

This fact that the temperature is "the annual surface temperature" means that caves could have been used as warm shelters during extremely cold winters during temperate climate period but only deep caves with narrow entrances. Any wide open shallow cave would be completely exposed to the elements and as cold as the surrounding land. This fact that the temperature is "the annual surface temperature" also means that caves could not have been used as warm shelters during ice ages as the average annual surface temperature would have been way below zero and caves would have been as cold as deep freezers.

One other pretty obvious reason why people probably didn't live in caves, is that cave are rare and usually found far away from good sources of food. The best sources of food are river and lake edges, marshes, estuaries. You are not very likely to find caves there. And if we look at today's hunter gatherer societies, they don't tend to trek far away from their dwellings. Their dwellings are usually situated in the middle of their hunting grounds. This is because they have no way of preserving food for a long time after it was killed. They also have no way of transporting or storing large amounts of food, so the food was usually eaten at the place there it is found or at most very close to it.

So if prehistoric people hunted and spent most of their time in and around water, they must have lived their as well. Which means that they probably built shelters in the surrounding area. How difficult would have been for the primitive people to make shelters? Not difficult at all. When I was a kid my father showed me and my brother how to make shelter from branches of trees, reeds and other plant material lying around. Shelters were of this type:



We made them many times without any tools not even a knife when we were both below age of 12. We used to spend a lot of time in forests playing, picking mushrooms, hunting animals with our spears and bows and arrows, and on river banks fishing, and we used these shelters to protect ourselves from storms. If two small kids with no tools can do it, a group of strong adults with stone blades can do it even easier and better. You don't even need an axe to do it. You can break off long sticks and branches or just collect dead ones and use them for the frame. You don't even need cordage. You can fix the carrying horizontal stick between branches of near trees like this:



Or you can avoid using the horizontal beam by leaning the frame against a rock like this:



To secure the baring posts in position, all you need is a shallow notch or hole in the ground, where you can stick the bottom of the post in, to prevent it from sliding outwards. Then you can pile up some earth around it and place a large stone on top.

You Then get branches and crisscross them and intertwine them in a thick layer which will create a thick mesh. This will allow you to pile dry leaves and any other debris you can find on top of it as an insulation. To secure all that in place you can place more branches on top of the debris. Here is a picture of one of these shelters:




The picture is taken from this very good book on primitive shelters called "Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties":


http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28255/28255-h/28255-h.htm


You can make this shelter more permanent and more suited for cold climate by blocking the entrance with a wall built in the same way as the roof, and leaving only a narrow entrance big enough to crawll in and out of the shelter. Inside the shelter, you can place a thick layer of leafy branches on the ground followed by layer of dry grass and leaves, thus insulating yourself from the cold and also making the shelter more comfortable. This type of shelter is nothing earth shuttering. It is built by many animals in hedges and I don't see any reason why it could not have been built by early humans. The final product is something like this:



This picture is taken from a great article on building survival debris shelter from this site:

http://www.natureskills.com/survival/primitive-shelter/


If you have animal skins or furs, you can throw them over the main shelter frame before you start putting the first branches and that way make the shelter water proof and even better insulated. You can also place them on the ground for the same reason. You wouldn't even need to tan the skins as you won't care if they are flexible or not. Tanning is the process of treating skins of animals to produce leather, which is more durable and less susceptible to decomposition. But even untanned skins will sufice for making shelters. All you need to know is how to skin the animal and scrape the gore off the skin. Then wash it and dry it in the sun which will kill off all the bacteria.

You can build a group of shelters like this very quickly and easily and you have a village. If people were able to find and use fire, you might have had a central hearth, or even a sheltered hearth. Because the shelters are made from natural debris and we have no buried posts, the only thing that would survive to our time would be the hearth and what ever stone tools and debris and bones people left behind. I believe that most sites where we found these remains were probably villages consisting of debris houses. A lot of times not even hearths and stone tools would survive due to the fact that these shelters were built in areas that are today under water due to rising of the sea levels in last 10 000 years. If the prehistoric village site was not submerged, the fact that it was near water made it very desirable place for living in later epochs so the site probably ended up under prime agricultural and habitable land destroyed by later human activities like plowing and house building.

We can see that Paleolithic people in Europe had lots of materials they could use to make ropes and cord. So when did people actually start making and using ropes? This is what Wikipedia says:

The use of ropes for hunting, pulling, fastening, attaching, carrying, lifting, and climbing dates back to prehistoric times. It is likely that the earliest "ropes" were naturally occurring lengths of plant fiber, such as vines, followed soon by the first attempts at twisting and braiding these strands together to form the first proper ropes in the modern sense of the word. Impressions of cordage found on fired clay provide evidence of string and rope-making technology in Europe dating back 28,000 years.[3] Fossilized fragments of "probably two-ply laid rope of about 7 mm diameter" were found in one of the caves at Lascaux, dating to approximately 15,000 BC.[4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope

However there seem to be proof that people were making fine coloured plant fibres even earlier:

A team of archaeologists and paleobiologists has discovered flax fibers that are more than 34,000 years old, making them the oldest fibers known to have been used by humans. The fibers, discovered during systematic excavations in a cave in the Republic of Georgia, are described in this week’s issue of Science.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/oldest-known-fibers-discovered/

However if you go and look at Wikipedia page on bows and arrows we see this:

The bow and arrow was not the first composite projectile weapon to be invented. It was preceded by the sling and by spear throwers such as the atlatl of the Americas and the woomera of Australia. A number of cultures in historical times lacked the bow and arrow, and in others oral history records a time before its acquisition.
The earliest potential arrow heads date from about 64,000 years ago in the South African Sibudu Cave.[6][7] By 16,000 BCE flint points were being bound by sinews to split shafts. Fletching was being practiced, with feathers glued and bound to shafts.[citation needed]
The first actual bow fragments are the Stellmoor bows from northern Germany.[8] They were dated to about 8,000 BCE but were destroyed in Hamburg during the Second World War, before carbon 14 dating was available; their age is attributed by archaeological association. The oldest bows in one piece are the elm Holmegaard bows from Denmark which were dated to 9,000 BCE. High performance wooden bows are currently made following the Holmegaard design.
The bow and arrow are still used in tribal warfare in Africa to this day. An example was documented in 2009 in Kenya when the Kisii-tribe and Kalenjin-tribe clashed resulting in four deaths.[9][10]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_and_arrow

If first arrow heads date from 64,000 years ago, then people must have already been able to make strong good quality cordage 64,000 years ago, good enough to make a bow. What is the point of haveing arrows without a bow? However it is very important to see that they were only "potential" arrow heads, meaning small pointy pieces of stone that could have been used as arrow heads.



http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.ie/2010/08/oldest-arrow-heads-found-in-south.html

Do they really look like arrow heads to you? Or just sharp pointy pieces of rock?

It is quite possible that people were able to make bow quality cordage 64,000 years ago. We definitely don't have any evidence that people were able to make any type of bow quality plant cord until much later. But bow quality cord does not need to be made of plant fiber. One of the best materials for making bow string is sinew:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg-nHeTQN04

We haven't found any 64,000 years old sinew strings. But if we look at the earliest estimated dates for the beginning of leather production based on artifacts, we see that Neanderthals could have been able to make leather by tanning skins 100,000 years ago. Research into how mammals – including humans – keep their body temperature at healthy levels suggests that even during the warmer parts of the last ice age, they would have needed decent body coverings. Skins thrown over their shoulders – Palaeo-pashminas? – wouldn't have cut it.
Another study looked at what modern day hunter-gatherers wear according to the local climate, and built a model predicting what Neanderthals would have needed to wear to stay warm. Even after correcting for Neanderthals being able to cope better with the cold, the results suggested they would have needed to cover at least 80% of their body during cold periods, especially hands and feet.
Quite astonishingly, there is physical evidence that Neanderthals more than 100,000 years ago were tanning animal skins – a stone tool from the site of Neumark-Nord in Germany has preserved scraps of organic material stuck to it that were soaked in tannin, the substance in oak bark used to make leather. It was probably part of the tool handle that got wet while the hides were being worked.
Although they lacked fine needles of the sort found much later, Neanderthals didn't need these to sew their leather, as their abilities to make stone and wood tools were easily enough to produce a sharp piercing object for threading thong.
Further back in time things get more fuzzy, but also really interesting. We have to get down and dirty – with lice. Body lice are adapted to living in clothes, and so must have evolved once humans started to wear them.DNA evidence suggests this happened at least 170,000 years ago and so people must have been wearing clothes even earlier than the oldest archeological evidence.

So if Neanderthal was able to process animal skins into leather 100,000 years ago, he was probably able learn how to make sinew cordage at some stage after that? Sinew cord making is very complicated procedure but give people 40,000 years and they will figure it out.

How does all of this affect the dating of the development of fire making equipment?

The first hand fire drill probably developed from hand hafted micro drill which probably developed from an arrow. If you think about it, people would have used sharp stones to make holes for a long time before first of these stones was hafted onto a spear, then onto an arrow. After that it was a matter of time before someone who needed to make a hole would have used an arrow to do so. He would have twirled it first in the way you would twirl a screwdriver. And then he might have decided to twirl it using both hands, and bingo you have a hand micro drill.

The first arrows are at most 64,000 years old. This would make the oldest hand drills potentially also at most 64,000 years old. This would then make the earliest hand fire drills also at most 64,000 years old. But not older.

I would say they are all probably a lot younger than 64,000 year. We have a huge gap between the first "potential" arrow heads dated to 64,000 years ago and first actual proof of arrow heads shafting dated to 16,000 years ago. Surely if we arrows were invented 64,000 years ago they would have quickly caught on and we would have a solid evidence of arrow use between 64,000 and 16,000 years ago. Do we?

We have the first proven signs of drilling dated closer to 35,000 years ago and it was with pointy stones not arrows:

Around 35,000 BCE, Homo sapiens discovered the benefits of the application of rotary tools. This would have rudimentarily consisted of a pointed rock being spun between the hands to bore a hole through another material.[1] This led to the hand drill, a smooth stick, that was sometimes attached to flint point, and was rubbed between the palms. This was used by many ancient civilizations around the world including the Mayans.[2] The earliest perforated artifacts, such as bone, ivory, shells and antlers found, are from the Upper Paleolithic era.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drill

Regardless whether we decide to go with earlier date or later date for bow and arrow invention, the date falls after the date when "Neanderthal" Europeans and "Modern" Africans met in the middle east. I would say that without Neanderthal leather making knowledge and technology, arrows would not have been invented as we would not have had anything to use as a bow string. Why do I think that "Modern" Africans did not know how to make leather? Because they did not have to know. You start needing leather when you star wearing skins and they turn hard and brittle if they are not tanned. If you are living in tropical Africa the last thing you want to wear is leather clothes or any clothes at all. And what you don't need you don't invent. Even today Kalahari bushmen use plant fibers and not sinews for bow string.

https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CCwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jelldragon.com%2Ftheoldways%2Fgrashoek.htm&ei=CImMUqqxEOzA7AatioGoBw&usg=AFQjCNHNSARx6fPeRmdS468g9T6YUJvFHQ&sig2=-b6yBby0fhqWKdDXBE30cA

And they wear no cloths except for the loin cover:



And still live in flimsy debris huts which are basically built to protect people from the sun:





This does not make them stupid or unable to think or invent. It just means that they are extremely addopted to living in their surrounding. All hunter gatherer cultures live the same type of life: they work as little as necessary to survive and spend the rest of their time having fun basically. They were perfectly capable of developing extremely potent poisonous chemical mixtures that they use for their arrow tips, which is only possible if you are capable of analysis, abstract thinking and planing. But they never needed warm clothes or worm dwellings so they never bothered inventing them. It is the same with all surviving hunter gatherer communities. They all still live in stone age, because where they live, in tropical areas where food is plentiful, the stone age technology would do just fine.

But Neanderthals lived in continental Europe, and there if you weren't able to stay warm during winters, you didn't survive. So inventing ways to stay warm, like warm fur and leather clothes and shoes and warm padded water proof shelters, was a matter of survival. And it is amazing how inventive people get when they are faced with life and death situation.

I saw a documentary on the television few months ago. It described an experiment which tried to determine if harsher living condition will produce smarter individuals of the same species. They used a small bird which lives in north America from Alaska to Mexico. In Alaska it has to really try hard to find food. In Mexico its a all year long party. They took eggs from nests in Alaska and nests in Mexico. They raised both birds in captivity without any adult birds around them. They did this to exclude any possible transmission of knowledge from adult birds to chicks. When both birds were grown up, they gave them the same test: they have put seeds in little holes and covered the holes with glass tops. Birds were able to see the seeds but not to get at them without finding the way to lift the glass top. The bird which grew from the Alaskan egg found the solution to the problem within couple of seconds. The bird which grew from Mexican egg didn't even know where to start and never solved the problem. This is a ground braking experiment It proves couple of very important things:

1. Harsh living conditions which force you to constantly adopt, change, solve problems will make you more clever, wise, able to solve problems. I don't think this equates with intelligence, as intelligence is more a potential for solving problems. If you have two equally intelligent people, of which one grows up using his brain for solving problems and the other doesn't, they will quickly diverge in their ability to solve problems. This is exactly what the bird experiment has shown.
2. These living conditions and experiences will actually cause epigenetic changes in your body. This intelligence carrying epigenetic changes will be passed on to next generation, We know that our life experiences cause epigenetic changes which can then be passed onto our children which would then be affected by those epigenetic changes. The bird experiment shows that ability to solve problems could be at least in part governed by epigenetic changes caused by our parents experience. Basically if you are a child of smart parents you have more chance to be smart yourself.

What we used to call instinct isn't instinct at all, but genetically stored experience (problem - solution pairs) of past generations.

Archaeological data shows that "Neaderthal" Europeans were as clever as "Modern" Africans. This bird experiment shows that they could potentially have been a lot better at solving problems and inventing things then "Modern" Africans, simply because they had to. And if we look at the human history since Paleolithic times, we see the same pattern repeated to this day: If you don't have to invent it you will not invent it. Necessity and Laziness are mother and father of all invention.
But we also have to consider "expectation" as an important factor which determines whether one culture will progress technologically or not. Take for example subsistence farmers in Serbia. In the mid 20th century they still lived technologically on the same level as Vinca people 7000 years before them. The houses were the same, furniture, clothes, agricultural and other tools, livestock, vehicles. Everything was the same. This was not because these people were not intelligent, but because they did not see reason to change anything. What they had worked, and gave them life they wanted. Their expectations were met perfectly by their technology and they simply didn't bother changing anything. As soon as electricity, roads, radio, television reached these villages, expectations changed and life changed. And it changed so rapidly that today you will be hard pressed to find anyone living the way they lived only 40 years ago. New technology is everywhere but not all the old ways were forgotten. People adopted new things, like electrical appliances, cars, mobile phones...which did not exist before. They also replaced oxen pulled plows with tractors because they are more efficient then the old tools. But they still do a lot of things "the old way" simply because there isn't a better way to do it, either because better tools are too expensive or just not available. The use of wooden sledges as main transport vehicle is one example:



If you look at the house in the background you will see that it is made from wattle and daub but it has double glazed windows...:)

Here is another example of what i am talking about. Bushmen with bows and arrows, shorts and mobile phones:



So people forced to deal with problems will solve them or perish. Once solutions are found they are adopted by other people if they serve some practical purpose.

Back to fire making. Everything I have discovered so far, points to Neanderthals as being the important carriers of the technological development necessary for discovery of fire making equipment. It also points to period after 65,000 BN, but more probably period after 35,000 BN as the period when fire making equipment was discovered. It also points to Europe as the place where that discovery took place.

And this finally (thank god) brings me to the end of my paleolithic excursion. I ventured into Paleolithic to find the answer to the question:

If the memories of the time when man had to hunt the fire bird, and the time when man stole fire from gods survived to historical time, when did man discover fire making?

I believed that the only way these memories could have survived was if fire making was not invented millions of years ago, but thousands of years ago.

And if the inventors of fire making belonged to our human species who were able to pass this memory down to us. I believe that i have managed to prove (at least to myself) that that was actually the case. Fire making was invented by Cro Magnons withing last 35,000 years. And descendants of Cro Magnons preserved the memory of the time before the fire making was invented and the time after it was invented.

This brings me back to Triglav, Trimurti, Agni. In my next post I will talk about the first man who used the fire drill, and the memories of him preserved in Sanskrit and Serbian.

Hi Everyone

To all of you, Happy holidays, what ever you are celebrating. I hope you are all healthy, happy and are looking forward to another year of luck and good fortune.

Viett.

Thank you for reading and i am glad that you are finding my writing helpful and informative. Thank you for letting us know about I La Galigo manuscript. It sounds very interesting. Do you know of any resources on the net where we can find translations of the manuscript? You say that In Indonesia you have preserved a lot of the terms from Hindu mythology in their original form and meaning. This is quite typical of isolated minorities. They cling to their language and culture in order to preserve their identity, because they feel threatened by the foreign culture they are surrounded with. In that way then often manage to preserve old and archaic cultural traits, which have been long abandoned in the area where they are a cultural majority, and where they were secure enough to let their culture evolve. This is why such minorities are so important for reconstructing ancient cultures and languages. Again thank you for your comments and I hope that you will continue reading this thread as the best is yet to come.

I haven't written anything here for a while. I have been busy looking for the father of Agni. But the more i found about him, the more questions i had that needed to be answered. And a month later I am almost ready to present my findings. I will start today, and hopefully i will finish my story about the father of Agni in next couple of weeks. So here it goes:

The father of the sacred fire, Agni, was named Tvastri, the divine carpenter. He made swastika the equipment for producing fire. Swastika consists of pramantha, the upper stick, the spindle, drill, and arani or under stick, the board. By rubbing pramantha against arani, the friction produces the heat and subsequently flame, divine Agni. Agni is born in a depression made at the intersection-point of two pieces of wood, which are orthogonal to each other.



If we look at the names of the two parts of swastika, we find that they have these meanings in Sanskrit and Serbian:

mantha

Sanskrit

pra - before, forward, in front, forth, very, like, resembling

manthA - churning-stick, sun or a sun-ray, shaking about, agitating, stirring round, churning, drink in which other ingredients are mixed by stirring, instrument for kindling fire by friction

pramantha - the spindle used to produce fire in fire drill

Serbian

pra- prefix with meaning great, ancient

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pra-

pràmājka f (Cyrillic spelling пра̀ма̄јка) - progenitress, ancestress

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pramajka


manta - to spin, spinning, something that is spinning. mantati - to spin, manta mi se - i am dizzy, the world is spinning

Pramantha means the ancient spinning stick, spindle of a fire drill, the original, the ancient way of making fire. In Serbian mantati means to spin. mandati means to sway, to wander there and back aimlesly, to make a movement with your hand like playing string instrument with a bow, pulling back and forth, or like kindling fire with pramantha.

arani

Sanskrit

araNi - mother, sun, the bottom piece of wood used for kindling fire by attrition

Serbian

aran - good, fertile, something that gives birth to something
arnica, aranica - medow that used to be wheet field
oranica, oranje - plowed field
oran, aran - plowed
orač - plowman
orati - to plow

Plowing the land is the equivalent to having a sexual intercourse with the land, where the plow is a penis penetrating and opening the earth up for sowing. The product of this union between the man and the earth, is grain, bread.

aran - bread in irish. from àr - plough, Early Irish ar, Welsh ar, ploughed land; Latin aro; Lithuanian ariù Gothic arjan, English ear, plough.

ἀρόω

From Proto-Indo-European *h₂erh₃- (“to plough”). Cognates include Old Armenian արաւր (arawr), Latin arō, Old Church Slavonic орати (orati), and Old English erian (archaic English ear).

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%80%CF%81%CF%8C%CF%89#Ancient_Greek

We find the same sexual metaphor in fire making. Oran, aran means something that is plowed. In Sanskrit, ending "i" is used to create feminine words. So arani is a female piece of wood, the one which is plowed, penetrated by pramantha, the male piece of wood. The product of their union is charcoal, Agni which appears in the hollow created by rubbing of pramantha against arani. This is the fire womb, the hiding-place, the cave, where Vedas say that Agni was "squatting in a hiding" before Matarisvan or Mitarisvan brought Him out. Here is a picture of Agni brought out of his hiding place:



This sexual intercourse which creates life is the main meaning of lingam and yoni symbol. The creation of new life, animal or plant, as well as creation of fire, which was considered alive, was always performed by interaction of lingam and yoni, be it penis and vagina, plow and earth, thunder and earth, pramantha and arani...

So who was Matarisvan?

Here you can read what vedas say about Matarisvan:

http://worldhinduism.org/documents/rigveda.html

This is what Arthur Anthony Macdonell says about Matarisvan in his book "Vedic Mythology":

Matarisvan. Matarisvan is not celebrated in any hymn of the
RV., and the name is found there only twenty-seven times, occurring twenty-
one times in the latest portions of that Veda and otherwise only five times
in the third and once in the sixth book. In these six older passages
Matarisvan is always either identified with Agni or is the producer of fire.
Though the myth of Matarisvan is based on the distinction between fire and
aT personification which produces it, the analysis of the myth shows these
Two to be identical. Nothing even in any of the later books of the RV.,
can be said to show clearly that the conception of Matarisvan prevailing in
the other Vedas and in the post-Vedic period, had begun to appear in
that Veda...

Matarisvan would thus appear to be a personification of a celestial form
of Agni, who at the same time is thought of as having like Prometheus
brought down the hidden fire from heaven to earth. Hardly anything but
lightning can be his natural basis. This would account for his being the
messenger of Vivasvat from heaven to earth (6,8 4 ), just as Agni himself
is a messenger of Vivasvat (35) between the two worlds 1 . In the AV.
Matarisvan is still found as a mystic name of Agni (AV. 10, 8^9- 4). but
generally in that (AV. 12, i 51 &c.) and other Samhitas, the Brahmanas and
all the subsequent literature, the name is a designation of wind. The transition
to this conception is to be found in a passage already quoted (3, 29"):
Agni, when as Matarisvan he was formed in his mother, became the swift
flight of wind 2 , and Agni in the air as a raging serpent is elsewhere com
pared with the rushing wind (i, 79 1 ). Such a statement might easily have
been taken later to interpret Matarisvan as the wind.

The word matarisvan, which is without a cognate in any other Indo-
European language, has every appearance of being a purely Indian compound...

https://archive.org/stream/vedicmythology00macduoft/vedicmythology00macduoft_djvu.txt


In the above text it is said that Matarisvan has no equivalent in any other Indo European language.

In Serbian and in Irish Ban, Van means white, bright. In Serbian svan = s van means with whiteness, with brighteness = light. Svanuti = S Van uti = with white (light) be = to dawn, to get bright, to get white. Svanuće = Dawn

In Serbian mater is the equivalent of the English word mother or Sanskrit Matr.

Materisvan = Materi svan = the mother of light - the giver of birth to light, the one who produced light, who gives life. This producer of light is fire, Agni, both celestial, sun fire, and terrestrial, human fire, and so Matarisvan is Agni. But also the producer of fire is the producer of light by extension. So Matarisvan is the heavenly swastika, Slavic Svarog, that produces the fire of the sun. Matarisvan is also the lightning, the fire bird (žar ptica), the East Slavic (Russian) Bird Mater sva, that brought the fire from heavens to Earth and gave it to people.

This is what Book of Veles says about bird Mater Sva:

I evo ptica Mater Sva peva o tom danu i mi očekujemo to vreme kada će se Svaroži krug kod nas završiti. Potom će Mater Sva doći k nama. Govoraše nam Mater Sva kad bejasmo bedni: Branite zemlju našu dobro...Nad nama nadleće Mater Sva, jer nedaće nove nam pritiču. Granice naše behu slabe te neprijatelji mnogi nam domove i ognjišta pališe. Tuga nadvi naš kraj. Dim spaljenih stepa izvi se do Svarge. Mater Sva kliče do Višnjeg da nam šumu za vatre ognjišta naših podari...Mater Sva o slavi nam pojaše, o pobedama nad neprijateljem i mi joj verovasmo jer slava po ptici Višnjoj nebom ruskim pronosila se o nama ...A ustremi se na neprijatelja bijući krilima Mater Sva i klicaše nam da zemlju branimo.
I borili smo se za ognjišta plemena našeg jer smo Rusiči...A govoraše Mater Sva da je budućnost naša slavna. I odlazimo u smrt kao u praznik...Molimo Boga da oganj pošalje kako bi Mater Sva slavu pronela na krilima svojim do predaka naših. I tu pesmu pojemo uz vatre večernje i staro slovo govorimo o slavi, o svetom Sedmorečju gde su bili naši gradovi i za koje su naši očevi ratovali. A tu smo zemlju napustili
a sada se u drugoj zemlji za opstanak borimo...A ptica Mater Sva o slavi nam je govorila i molila nas da slavu očeva povratimo...I ptica Mater Sva peva o nama i slavu nam proriče: i nama samima i mačevima našim...Ptica Mater Sva poje nam da podignemo mačeve u odbranu. Bije ona krilima i prašinu do Svarge podiže. Od neprijatelja nas brani, jer je za nas brižna. Mi pobeđujemo, jer krik njen dopire do srca naših.

http://www.ivantic.net/Ostale_knjiige/Velesova_knjiga.pdf

Here is the translation of the above excerpts from book of Veles:

And here is bird Mater sva, singing about the day which we are eagerly awaiting, when the circle of Svarog will end. Then Mater sva will come to us. Mater Sva spoke to us when we were miserable: defend your land well...Mater Sva flies over our heads, because new adversities are coming. Our borders were weak, so our enemies came in great numbers, and burned many of our homes and destroyed many of our fire hearths. Sorrow is everywhere in our land. Smoke from burned steppes rises all the way to Svarga (heaven). Mater Sva shouts all the way to the heavenly father (Vishnji, Vishnu), to give us forests for our fire hearths... Mater Sva sang to us about our passed glory, about our victories over our enemies and we believed her. Because the our glory was spread throughout Russia by the bird of Vishnu...And Mater Sva rushed down on our enemies, hitting them with her wings, and whe shouted to us to defend our land. And we did fight for firehearths of our ancestors because we are Russians...And Mater Sva said to us that our future is glorious. And we go to death like to a celebration...We pray to god to give us fore (Oganj, Agni), so that Mater Sva could take our glory to our ancestors (this is description of a funeral fire). And we sing this song around the evening fire, and we tell the old stories about our glorious past, about the land of seven rivers, where our cities were once, and for which our fathers fought. And we had deserted that land or our fathers, and are now fighting for survival in a foreign land...And bird Mater Sva was telling us about our past glory, and was begging us to regain the glory that our fathers once possessed...And bird Mater Sva sings about us and is foretelling us a great glory to come, both to our swords and to us...Bird Mater Sva is telling us to raise our swords in defence. She is flapping her wings, and dust (smoke) is raising all the way to Svarga (heaven). She is defending us from our enemies, because she cares for us. And we are victorious, because her cry reaches our hearts.

We can see that Russian Mater Sva is heavenly Materisvan, but that by the time book of Veles was written down, the name has already been altered and the original meaning was forgotten.

And in the end Matarisvan is the man who produced fire using terrestrial swastika, fire drill. In some vedic translations Matarisvan is called MItariswan or Mitarisvan:

http://www.forgottenbooks.org/readbook_text/Rig-Veda_Sanhita_1000189602/237


In Serbian Dar is a present, dariti, darivati is to give present. Mi means to me. Svan means light. So Mitarisvan = Mi dari svan = the one who gives me light (as present). So the meaning of the name stays unchanged.

In his amazing book and TV series "Atlantean Irish", Bob Quin talked about cultural similarities between Huns, Tatars, Avars and other Steppe people from Eurasia and the Irish and had postulated hypothesis, based on purely cultural similarities, that (at least some) Irish (Gaels) come from the same stock as these steppe people. His incredible vision has been confirmed by genetic data which places both the Irish and the Steppe people within the Arbin (R1b) genetic family. This would place the arrival of Gaels into Europe firmly into the Indoeuropean or even post Indoeuropean invasion time. But Bob Quin also said that the Irish language (at least part of it) is very old, and predates the the Indoeuropean invasions. He based this claim on a peculiar fact that the west of Ireland, even in Burren area, is full of toponimes which contain root "doire" meaning oak. What is amazing about this is that there have not been any oaks growing in these areas since the 4th millennium bc. They were all cut by the first farmers and the stumps were covered by bogs at the latest at 2000 bc.

It would be a mistake to think that the Mesolithic people of Ireland suddenly invented farming and became Neolithic. Rather, Ireland's Mesolithic hunters were displaced or assimilated by Neolithic settlers who gradually arrived in Ireland from Britain and brought the technology with them. The practice of farming had spread from the Middle East, through eastern and southern Europe to reach Britain around 4000BC. Again it seems that it arrived in Ireland via the Scotland-Antrim link. Evidence from Cashelkeelty, county Kerry, suggests that this happened between 3900BC and 3000BC [4 p28].

The Neolithic settlers set about clearing upland forest (which was thinner and easier to clear than lowland forest) with stone axes, or by burning it, in order to build their permanent farms. As Ireland did not have many native cereal crops, and wild pigs were the only farm animals native to Ireland, the settlers brought with them cows, goats and sheep. It is conjectured that these aninals were transported across the Irish Sea on wooden rafts towed by skin-boats or dugout canoes (hollowed tree trunks). They also brought wheat and barley which they planted in their farms. The newly-cleared upland was used for agriculture, but erosion and overgrazing was soon to cause it to stagnate, acidify and eventually evolve into peat bogs. Thus most of Ireland's upland peat bogs (although not the lower ones) are actually artificial features inadvertently created by Neolithic farmers.

How is it possible that we have all these place names related to oak forests in the areas where the last oak stump was covered by bogs before 2000 bc? Bob postulated that these place names survived from the time when oaks still grew in the west of Ireland. Everyone laughed. They said that it is ridiculous to even imagine that words and place names would survive for 5000 years. But it seems that Bob Quin, one of the people who inspired me to start my own investigation, was right. Language and culture are far more resilient then people think. We are seeing, in case of the fire bird, "Mi dari svan", "Mater Svan", "Mater Sva", that words, concepts can survive not 5000 years but for at least 12000 years and probably a lot longer. I want to thank Bob Quin for his work and I would recommend his work to anyone interested in understanding the Irish culture.

I would like to make few comments about swastika. Because Swastika (fire drill) is constructed by just two orthogonal sticks, we have many different complex Swastikas with two, three, four, six, eight and more fire drills.

This first picture shows how you construct the rotating fire wheels from swastikas:



This second picture shows the link between the snake (zmija in Serbian), the cross, the circle, the swastika, and the fire crosses of Europe:



And here are Vinca script symbols. Can you find the above symbols among them?




Also, the swastika found of the 12000 years old fire bird was already stylized, which means that Swastika as a symbol of fire was already old at 10,000 bc. This means that the fire cult symbolized by the fire Bird and Swastika predates the last glacial maximum and comes to us from the times of Cro Magnons through the R1a population of Eurasia and their language and myths. How old are then some of the myths from Eurasia? And how old is this "old European" language I think I am uncovering?


Now let's go back to Tvashtar, the god (man) who created swastika. In vedic sources he is known under various names: Tvashtri, Tastar, Tastar, Tvashtri, Tvashtar, Tvashtar, Tvastar, Tvastar, Tvastr, Tvastr, Tvashtri, Twashtar, Twashtar, Tvashtri, Twashtri, Twashtri or Tvashtri.

Tvastr is said to be the father of Agni (the god), but also a man who made agni (fire). So Tvastr who made fire became the father of Agni the god. But Tvastr is also the father of Viśvarūpa or Triśiras. Triśiras means three headed, Triglav, Trimurti. So Triśiras is Agni as Trimurti. With one head he constantly read the Vedas, with the second he took in nourishment, and with the third he observed all that was happening around him. He daily increased his power, and Indra grew wary of him, fearing that he would eventually absorb all of the universe. Indra sent the most beautiful women from the heavens to seduce the ascetic, but he ignored them, continuing his studies. Indra grew desperate and decided to kill the youth, sending his thunderbolt down. This still did not alleviate Indra's fears, for the body still radiated a divine light. Finally, Indra ordered a wood cutter to remove Trisiras' three heads. Here we can see clearly that Trisiras is Agni, fire, as only wood cutter could extinguish his light.

Tvashtri was enraged by Indra's actions, and created the demon Vritra to avenge his son's death.

In the early Vedic religion, Vritra (Vṛtra "the enveloper"), is an Asura and also a serpent or dragon, the personification of drought and enemy of Indra. Vritra was also known in the Vedas as Ahi ("snake"). He appears as a dragon blocking the course of the rivers and is heroically slain by Indra...For this feat, Indra became known as Vritrahan "slayer of Vritra" and also as "slayer of the first-born of dragons". Vritra's mother, Danu (who was also the mother of the Danava race of Asuras), was then attacked and defeated by Indra with his thunderbolt. In one of the versions of the story, three Devas - Varuna, Soma and Agni - were coaxed by Indra into aiding him in the fight against Vritra whereas before they had been on the side of Vritra (who they called "Father").

We can see here that Vritra is clearly associated with fire as he is a "dragon" and dragons are creatures of fire. He is the personification of drought, meaning he is the fire of the sun which causes drought. Dragon and snake are also symbol of force, electricity and also symbol of the cord wrapped around the fire drill, whose writhing and coiling around the fire stick creates the force that produces fire, Agni. The snake or dragon which bites it's tail represents the sun, the fire of the sun. It coils around the sun's axes and creates the same force like the fire drill, which ignites the sun's fire. It is very interesting that the mother of Vritra, the fire of the sun, is Dana, Danica ("dan" is day in Serbian), the morning star, the mother of the sun who announces his birth every morning. She opens the gates of the sun's palace, to let the sun's chariot out. The fact that Agni calls Vritra it's father means that Vritra is fire himself, or to be more precise the fire drill which produces the original charcoal, the baby fire. The same goes for Varuna, Vuruna the oven, hearth in which Agni burns. Varuna was also created by Tvastar, the maker of Agni to house Agni in it.
Do you remember Serbian word "vatra" which means fire? Official etymology is that it's root is unknown, probably pre Indoeuropean. But as i already said before, vatra has clear etymology in Serbian: vatra = vrtr = vr + tr = vrt + trl = spin + rub = this is the motion of the fire drill while it is making fire. But "vrrr" and "trrr" are also sounds that spinning spindle and rubbing stick make. So "vrtr" is probably one of the oldest names for man made fire because it is onomatopoeic, it is made from sounds of making fire. And here we see that vrtra is made by Tvastar (is the son of Tvastar). So Vrtra is Vatra - Agni.

In this video demonstrating the use of a bow fire drill, starting from 3:29 you can clearly hear the sound of fire making, which became the word for fire vrtr, vatra:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0bEoVhxFJ8

How old is this word? 10000 years? More?

In Bhagavata Purana we read this discription of the creation of Vrtra and his battle with Indra:

http://tinyurl.com/phqqy7e

Bhagavata Purana: Tvastri became enraged at the death of his son (Trisiras). He gave offerings to Agni for the destruction of Indra. A huge and fearful Asura rose out of the sacrificial fire.

This is direct link between Agni and Vritra (vrtr, vatra, fire).

Bhagavata Purana: The Devas threw their weapons at him, but he swallowed them all.

Fire melts metal and burns wood.

Bhagavata Purana: Wonderstruck they prayed to Vishnu for help. Vishnu asked them to go to Dadhichi and pray for his body and assured them that the weapon made of his bones by Visvakarma would cut off the head of Vritra. The Devas went to Dadhichi and got his body. Visvakarma made the thunderbolt instru ment (Vajra) out of his bones.

So Visvakarma (the other name for Tvastr) made Indra's weapon, the thunderbolt so Indra can fight Tvastr's son Vrtra.

Bhagavata Purana: Indra went with this instrument at the head of the Devas to fight with Vritra. The fight took place at the commencement of Treta Yuga in the first Yuga cycle of Vaivas-vata Manvantara, on the banks of the Narmadci.

This is very important.

According to the Laws of Manu, one of the earliest known texts describing the yugas, the length is 4800 years + 3600 years + 2400 years + 1200 years for a total of 12,000 years for one arc, or 24,000 years to complete the cycle (one precession of the equinox). There is no mention of a year of the demigods or any years longer than the solar year, which is consistent with description in The Holy Science.

The long count view of the yuga cycle with its vast time scale was challenged by the 19th/20th-century Indian yogi Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, guru of Paramahansa Yogananda.[3]
In his book, The Holy Science, Sri Yukteswar explained that the descending phase of Satya Yuga lasts 4800 years, the Treta Yuga 3600 years, Dwapara Yuga 2400 years, and the Kali Yuga 1200 years. The ascending phase of the Kali Yuga then begins, also lasting 1200 years. The ascending phase of the Kali Yuga began in September 499 AD. Since September 1699, we have been in the ascending phase of the Dwapara Yuga, according to Sri Yukteswar.[3]
In The Holy Science, Sri Yukteswar wrote that the traditional or long count view is based on a misunderstanding. He says that at the end of the last descending Dvapara Yuga (about 700 BC), "Maharaja Yudhisthira, noticing the appearance of the dark Kali Yuga, made over his throne to his grandson [and]...together with all of his wise men...retired to the Himalaya Mountains... Thus there was none in the court...who could understand the principle of correctly accounting the ages of the several Yugas."[3]
According to Sri Yukteswar, nobody wanted to announce the bad news of the beginning of the descending Kali Yuga, so they kept adding years to the Dvapara date (at that time 2400 Dvapara) only retitling the epoch to Kali. As the Kali began to ascend again, scholars of the time recognized that there was a mistake in the date (then being called 3600+ Kali, even their texts said Kali had only 1200 years). "By way of reconciliation, they fancied that 1200 years, the real age of Kali, were not the ordinary years of our earth, but were so many daiva (or deva) years ("years of the gods"), consisting of 12 daiva months of 30 daiva days each, with each daiva day being equal to one ordinary solar year of our earth. Hence according to these men 1200 years of Kali Yuga must be equal to 432,000 years of our earth."[3]
Sri Yukteswar explained that just as the cycle of day and night is caused by a celestial motion (the earth spinning on its axis in relation to the sun), and just as the cycle of the seasons are caused by a celestial motion (the earth with tilted axis orbiting the sun) so too is the yuga cycle (seen as the precession of the equinox), caused by a celestial motion. He explained this celestial motion as the movement of the whole solar system around another star. As our sun moves through this orbit, it takes the solar system (and earth) closer to and then further from a point in space known as the "grand centre" also called 'Vishnunabhi', which is the seat of the creative power, 'Brahma', [which]...regulates...the mental virtue of the internal world." He implied that it is the proximity of the earth and sun to this grand centre that determines which season of man or yuga it is.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuga

If this is true, and it is very likely to be true, considering that the sun was the main god of the Vedic people, then the battle between Vritra and Indra occured 6700 bc. And it seems that the 7th millennium Bc was a period of drastic long lasting climate changes, which severely affected people throughout the world:

c. 7000 BC: Wild horse populations drop in mainland Europe; horse disappears from the island of Great Britain, but was never found in Ireland (Horse & Man, Clutton-Brock) Extinction probably caused by climatic shift, leading to excessively rich spring feed and mass lameness from founder, making them easy prey (Bolich & Ingraham)
c. 7000 BC: English Channel formed[2]
c. 7000 BC: Neolithic Subpluvial begins in northern Africa
6440±25 BC: Kurile volcano on Siberia's Kamchatka Peninsula has VEI 7 eruption. It is one of the largest of the Holocene epoch.
6250 BC: Eruptions occur in the Indian Heaven Volcanic field in central Washington State
c. 6200 BC: The 8.2 kiloyear event was a sharp decrease in global temperatures that lasted for 2-4 hundred years, possibly caused by an influx of glacial meltwater into the North Atlantic ocean.
c. 6100 BC: The Storegga Slide, causing a megatsunami in the Norwegian Sea
c. 6000 BC: Rising sea levels form the Torres Strait, separating Australia from New Guinea
c. 6000 BC: Between 12,000 BC and 5000 BC it appears that massive inland flooding was taking place in several regions of the world, making for subsequent sea level rises which could be relatively abrupt in many places worldwide

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7th_millennium_BC

Is this the fight between Vrtra (fire of the sun) and Indra (clouds, thunder and rain) that is described in Vedas? Quite possible.

But maybe things are actually even simpler. Maybe four yugas are just four seasons, four quarters, four three months periods which together make one solar year. In Sanskrit, trita means third but also trinity.

http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0+&tinput=trita&trans=Translate&direction=SE

Trita yuga would then be third quarter. Starting from winter solstice, third qarter would begin at the summer solstice. This is St John's day, day of St Vid, the day of Svetovid, Vishnji, Vishnu, which marks the beginning of summer. This is when sun starts ruling the year. This is also when the thunderstorm season starts. The sun becomes the most powerful in the middle of the third quarter, trita yuga, around the beginning of August. This is when the sun's heat, sun's fire is the strongest and the drought is the worst, and when all eyes are turned towards the sky, in expectation of the first August thunderstorms. The second of August is the Crom Dubh day, Lugh day, Lughnasad in Ireland. This is also the day of St Elias, Ilios, the holly sun, but also the day of Perun in Serbia. On that day Perun kills Vid (sun) in the shape of Veles who had stolen his cows (clouds) and releases the waters of heaven (rain) on Earth.

No need for three legged cows, and fancy maths. But only if you live in the Balkans and Central Europe, where climate has four seasons and where the driest part of the year is the end of July, beginning of August. This makes no sense in tropical India, where period from Jun to September is the wettest period of monsoon rains. They do fill the rivers, but the meaning of the third season was lost to Indians:

Monsoon is a tropical phenomenon. Indian subcontinent, lies northwards of the equator up to the Himalayas and Hindukush, primarily in the tropical zone of the Northern Hemisphere. Weather pattern involves winds blowing from the south-west direction (known as South-West Monsoon) from the Indian Ocean onto the Indian landmass during the months of June through September. These are generally rain-bearing winds, blowing from sea to land, and bring rains to most parts of the subcontinent. They split into two branches, the Arabian Sea Branch and the Bay of Bengal Branch near the southernmost end of the Indian Peninsula. They are eagerly awaited in most parts of India for their agricultural and economic importance.
Subsequently later in the year, around October, these winds reverse direction and start blowing from a north-easterly direction. Given their land to sea flow, from subcontinent onto the Indian Ocean, the system with less moisture brings rain to only limited parts of India like Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. This is known as the North-East Monsoon. However, this rain is responsible for the rice bowls of South India. This mechanism completes the annual Monsoon cycle of the Indian subcontinent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon_of_South_Asia

This is another proof that Vedas did not originate in Asia but in Europe and were brought to Asia but European Invaders.

Yukteswar wrote The Holy Science in 1894. In the introduction, he wrote:

The purpose of this book is to show as clearly as possible that there is an essential unity in all religions; that there is no difference in the truths inculcated by the various faiths; that there is but one method by which the world, both external and internal, has evolved; and that there is but one Goal admitted by all scriptures.[20]
The work introduced many ideas that were revolutionary for the time — for instance Yukteswar broke from Hindu tradition in stating that the earth is not in the age of Kali Yuga, but has advanced to Dwapara Yuga.[20] His proof was based on a new perspective of the precession of the equinoxes. He also introduced the idea that the sun takes a ‘star for its dual’, and revolves around it in a period of 24,000 years, which accounts for the precession of the equinox.[20]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukteswar_Giri


The "dual star" of our Sun, around which it revolves in a period of 24,000 years and which accounts for the precession of the equinox, is Sirius. The small dark "dog" star, the boy with long hand, which commands our bright Sun and which is most powerful during "dog days" of summer, the days dedicated to Crom Dubh and Lugh. Here is an excerpt from a very interesting article on Sun - Sirius system and how it causes precession of the equinox:

The vast majority of observable stars are binary or multiple star systems. In these systems, two or more stars share a common focus of revolution and are gravitationally bound to each other in defined orbits. This is such a common observation such that the gravitational interaction of multiple stars appears to be the "normal" mode of stellar system formation...

...Is the idea of a solar companion to our Sun unprecedented? Not at all, in fact there have been numerous scientific publications examining the evidence for a "dark star", literally speaking, to which our Sun could be gravitationally bound in a definite orbit [3]. This alternate dark star is known as Nemesis, and its proposition comes primarily from observed perturbations of orbiting objects such as the planet-sized Kuiper belt object named Sedna [4]...

...Walter Cruttenden of the Binary Star research institute has propounded that a solar companion need not necessarily be of the "dark star" variety. Given the paucity of empirical observations and measurements of the movement of many of the bright stars within our own local galactic sector, it is with some justification that visible stars be examined to see if any may share a common focal point with our own Solar System [5]. At the heart of the poly-solar system theory is a simplification of the mechanics of constellation precession (precession observable) with a more logical model, one that does not rely on a putative wobble of the Earth but instead explains the precession observable with the movement of the Solar System itself...

...Is there a candidate for binary revolution among the visible stars? Logically we could begin with the closest star to our own, which is Alpha Centauri. At a distance of 4.37 light years, it is the third brightest star and, as is common, it is itself a binary system.

Another star that shows evidence of being gravitationally bound within the system and is called Alpha Proxima. Alpha Proxima is 0.2 light years from Alpha Centauri AB, about 400 times the distance of Neptune's orbit from the Sun. This shows that a dual or poly star system does not have to necessarily be in close orbital interaction. However Alpha Centauri lies at a declination of -60°, which is well out of the plane of the Solar System, and as such, has a near circumpolar motion in the sky.

A more suitable candidate would be a star closer to the plane of the Solar System, or celestial equator. Sirius meets this criteria, at a declination of -17°. It is also the brightest star in the night sky, three times brighter than Alpha Centauri and twice as bright as the next brightest star Canopus. Sirius is also the 5th closest system of stars to our own [6]. More significant is the fact that The Sirius Research Group has been recording the position of Sirius for approximately 20 years now and has not recorded any measurable alteration in its location relative to the precession [7]....

http://www.viewzone.com/sirius.html

Let's continue with the description of the fight between Indra and Vrtra:

Bhagavata Purana: After a severe fight, the chances shewed themselves favourable to the Devas. The Daitya and Danava chiefs began to shew their backs to the enemies. " What is this my companions ? " exclaimed Vritra, " Is not death inevitable ? And what death is more enviable than that with honor and glory? There are two modes of death, rare though they be, that are given the palm in all religious books one is by control of the Pranas by means of Yoga and the other is by facing enemies foremost of all, in the battle field. "

This Vritra's speech from the desrcription of the fight between Vrtra and Indra, has a direct counterpart in Serbian medieval tradition:

Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović (Serbian Cyrillic: Лазар Хребељановић; ca. 1329 – 15 June 1389) was a medieval Serbian ruler, who created the largest and most powerful state on the territory of the disintegrated Serbian Empire. Lazar's state, known in historiography as Moravian Serbia, comprised the basins of the Great Morava, West Morava, and South Morava Rivers. Lazar ruled it from 1373 until his death in 1389. Lazar's political programme was the reunification of the disintegrated Serbian state under him as the direct successor of the Nemanjić dynasty, which ended in 1371 after two centuries of rule over Serbia. Lazar had a full support from the Serbian Church for this programme, but powerful Serbian nobles did not recognize him as their supreme ruler.
In the Battle of Kosovo fought on 15 June 1389, Lazar led the army which confronted a massive invading army of the Ottoman Empire commanded by Sultan Murad I. Both Prince Lazar and Sultan Murad lost their lives in the battle. Although the battle was tactically inconclusive, the mutual heavy losses were devastating only for the Serbs. Lazar's widow, Milica, who ruled as regent for her minor son Stefan Lazarević, Lazar's successor, accepted Ottoman suzerainty in the summer of 1390.
Lazar is venerated in the Serbian Orthodox Church as a martyr and saint, and is highly regarded in Serbian history, culture and tradition of the Serbs. In Serbian epic poetry he is called Tsar Lazar.
Lazar is celebrated as a saint and martyr in ten cultic writings composed in Serbia between 1389 and 1420;[39] nine of them could be dated closer to the former year than to the latter.[40] These writings were the principal means of spreading the cult of Saint Lazar, and most of them were used in liturgy on his feast day.[41] The Encomium of Prince Lazar by nun Jefimija is considered to have the highest literary quality of the ten texts.[28] Nun Jefimija (whose secular name was Jelena) was a relative of Princess Milica,[40] and the widow of Jovan Uglješa Mrnjavčević. After his death she lived on with Milica and Lazar. Jefimija embroidered her Encomium with a gilded thread on the silken shroud covering Lazar's relics. Stefan Lazarević is regarded as the author of the text carved on a marble pillar that was erected at the site of the Battle of Kosovo.[28] The pillar was destroyed by the Ottomans,[28] but the text is preserved in a 16th-century manuscript.[42] Patriarch Danilo III wrote Narration about Prince Lazar around the time of the translation of Lazar's relics. It is regarded as historically the most informative of the ten writings,[40] though it is a synthesis of hagiography, eulogy, and homily. The prince is celebrated not only as a martyr, but also as a warrior.[43] The patriarch wrote that the Battle of Kosovo ended when both sides became exhausted; both the Serbs and the Turks suffered heavy losses.[44] The central part of Narration is the patriarch's version of Lazar's speech to Serbian warriors before the battle:[45]

You, O comrades and brothers, lords and nobles, soldiers and vojvodas—great and small. You yourselves are witnesses and observers of that great goodness God has given us in this life... But if the sword, if wounds, or if the darkness of death comes to us, we accept it sweetly for Christ and for the godliness of our homeland. It is better to die in battle than to live in shame. Better it is for us to accept death from the sword in battle than to offer our shoulders to the enemy. We have lived a long time for the world; in the end we seek to accept the martyr's struggle and to live forever in heaven. We call ourselves Christian soldiers, martyrs for godliness to be recorded in the Book of Life. We do not spare our bodies in fighting in order that we may accept the holy wreathes from that One who judges all accomplishments. Sufferings beget glory and labours lead to peace.[46]


In Serbian epic tradition, Lazar is said to have been visited by an angel of God on the night before battle, and offered a choice between an earthly or a heavenly kingdom, which choice would result in a peaceful capitulation or bloody defeat, respectively, at the Battle of Kosovo.
"...the Prophet Elijah then appeared as a gray falcon to Lazar, bearing a letter from the Mother of God that told him the choice was between holding an earthly kingdom and entering the kingdom of heaven..." [67]
According to the epics, Lazar opted for the Heavenly kingdom, which will last "forever and ever",[68] but had to perish on the battlefield. “We die with Christ, to live forever”, he told his soldiers. That Kosovo’s declaration and testament is regarded as s covenant which the Serb people made with God – and sealed with martyrs’ blood. Since then all Serbs faithful to that Testament regard themselves as the people of God, Christ’s New Testament nation, heavenly Serbia, part of God’s New Israel. This is why Serbs sometimes refer to themselves as the people of Heaven.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazar_of_Serbia

The "gray falcon" that brought the message to Lazar from "mother of God" is no other than "Mater Svan", Shiva, Živa, the messenger of Agni, Triglav, the light of Enlightening. "We die with Christ, to live forever" is actually we "We die with Agni, Triglav and his "Sun" Vid, Svetovid, to live forever". The names have changed, but for the Serbs, the ancient warrior caste of the Vedas, the message stayed the same even today. I might personally prefer the Irish motto: "Beidh lá eile ag an bPaorach." which literally translated means: The power fellow will have another day, and actually means: We will live to fight another day. After all there are now almost 100 million Irish in the world and less then 10 million Serbs. But you have to admire the endurance of this belief among the Serbs through millenniums.

Let's continue with the description of the fight between Indra and Vrtra:

Bhagavata Purana: Vritra remembered the wicked deeds of Indra and addressed him thus " O thou assassinator of a Brahmana ! Thou didst kill thy own Guru, my brother Visvarupa. Thou didst raise faith and trust in my brother s mind and still thou didst kill that innocent, wise Brahmana, your own Guru, having been initiated by him in Yajna. Your karma makes you worse than even Rakshasas. I shall kill thee with this Trident and make over thy body as food for vultures...Vritra then took the trident in hand and attacked Indra Indra then had recourse to Vajra and he easily cut off both the trident and one hand of Vritra.

Vritra's weapon is trident, trishula, the weapon of Shiva, the energy of Agni. Indra's weapon is vajra, which can be single or double trident, trishula. Thus Indra is effectively fighting Shiva and therefore Agni. But this next passage is clearly showing us that this is not real battle, but just a natural phenomenon of drought being "killed" by rain and that the whole "game" is being governed by the sun, here called Bhagavan - Bhaga van - the god of light, the sun.

Bhagavata Purana: Vritra took a club in the other hand and struck both Indra and the elephant. The Vajra slipped out of the hands of Indra and he felt ashamed to pick it up in the presence of his enemy. " Pick it up, O King of Devas, and kill your enemy. This is no time for shame or sorrow. It is not you or I that are the real actors. Bhagavan is guiding us all. He guides the whole Universe. Look at me. I have been worsted, hand and weapon gone, still I am trying my best to kill you. This our fight is but like the game of dice in which the life of one of us is the stake."

When we look at Bhagavan on Wikipedia we find this:

Bhagavan, also written Bhagwan or Bhagawan, from the Sanskrit nt-stem bhaga-vant- (nominative भगवान् Bhagavān) literally means "possessing fortune, prosperous" (from the noun bhaga, meaning "fortune, wealth", cognate to Slavic bog "god", Russian богатый (boga'ch) "wealthy"), and hence "illustrious, divine, venerable, holy", etc.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavan

This above translation is wrong. Both bhaga and vant mean to give, to distribute, to allot, to share...So bhaga vant means give give, which makes no sense.

http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0+&tinput=+vant&trans=Translate&direction=SE
http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0+&tinput=bhaga&trans=Translate&direction=AU

But Bhaga van means giver of light, which is the exact description of the Sun and of Agni, the fire which burns in three worlds and gives us light.

In some traditions of Hinduism Bhagavan is used to indicate the Supreme Being or Absolute Truth, but with specific reference to that Supreme Being as possessing a personality (a personal God).[2] This personal feature indicated in Bhagavan differentiates its usage from other similar terms[3] such as Brahman, the "Supreme Spirit" or "spirit", and thus, in this usage, Bhagavan is in many ways analogous to the general Christian conception of God.
Bhagavan used as a title of veneration is often translated as "Lord"...

The Bhagavata Purana (1.2.11) states the definition of Bhagavan to mean the supreme most being:

The Learned Know the Absolute Truth call this nondual substance Brahman, Paramatma or Bhagavan.[a]

The Sanskrit word bhagavan is explained in the Vishnu Purana (6.5.74, Venkateshvara edition 1910) by the great authority, Parashara Muni,
the father of Vyasa Deva, defines Bhagavan as one who possesses six opulences completely, as follows:

The Supreme Personality who possesses all riches, all strength, all fame, all beauty, all knowledge and all renunciation is called Bhagavan. There are many persons who are very rich, very powerful, very beautiful, very famous, very learned, and very much detached, but no one can claim that he possesses all riches, all strength, etc., entirely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavan

This bog (Serbian word for god) who gives light and all the ritchies is Dabog (the giving god of the Serbs, also known as Hromi Daba) and Dagda (the giving god of the Irish, who I believe is Crom Dubh). But Hromi daba or Crom Dubh is also Triglav, Agni, and so is the Bhagavan who directs the "game of dice" played by it's two heads, Vishnu and Shiva, Sun and Lightning, Vrtra and Indra.

Let's continue with the description of the fight between Indra and Vrtra:

Bhagavata Purana: They again engaged in fight. This time Indra cut off both the club and the other hand with the help of Vajra Vritra then opened his mouth and swallowed Indra. There was loud wailing and lamentation all round. But Indra broke through the interior of Vritra with the help of Vajra, and he then forcibly applied the bolt to cut off the head of Vritra. The bolt though actively employed could only sever the head of the Asura King in 360 days.

This last sentence confirms that we are talking about the natural cycle of the sun, as the old sun year in India and around the world before 8th century BC had 360 days.

http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-ancient.html

So Indra killed two Tvastar's sons. How come then Indra is also depicted as the son of Tvastar? Because lightning is direct consequence of the interaction between Sun (sky) and Earth, both being the "home of Tvastar" and his creations. But electricity is also the energy that powers the universe, the Agni unmanifested.

So who is Indra, the slayer of Vrtra? This is what Wikipedia says about Indra:

Indra, also known as Śakra (power) in the Vedas, is the leader of the Devas or gods and the lord of Svargaloka or heaven in the Hindu religion. He is the god of rain and thunderstorms.[1] He wields a lightning thunderbolt known as vajra and rides on a white elephant known as Airavata. Indra is the supreme deity and is the twin brother of Agni and is also mentioned as an Āditya, son of Aditi. Indra is, with Varuna and Mitra, one of the Ādityas, the chief gods of the Rigveda (besides Agni and others such as the Ashvins). Here again we see the holy trinity, Triglav, Agni, but this time under names of Mitra (Vishnu, Vishnji, Vid, Svetovid, Sun), Varuna (Brahma, Svarog, Fire), Indra (Shiva, Živa, Perun, Thunder, Electricity).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra

Indra is the son of Tvastar because he is Agni at his most powerful and dangerous: the sun of "dog days", the sun of Lugh and of lughnasa , the sun of Crom Dubh, the sun of Perun, the sun of Mithra, burning and thundering sun, Ilios.

In Vedic religion,Tvastar, is the first born creator of the universe. He is the visible form of creativity emerged from the navel of the invisible Viswakarman[1] In Yajurveda purusha suktha and in the 10th mandala of the Rigveda his character and attributes are merged with the concept of Hiranyagharbha/Prajapathy or Brahma. The term, also transliterated as Tvaṣṭr, nominative Tvaṣṭā, is the heavenly builder, the maker of divine implements, especially Indra's Vajra and the guardian of Soma. Tvastar is mentioned 65 times in the Ṛgveda[2] and is the former of the bodies of men and animals,' and invoked when desiring offspring, called garbha-pati or the lord of the womb.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tvastar


Tvastr is a divine artificer, who created the universe. Very important thing for understanding who Tvastar was is the fact that he created Vajra, the divine weapon of Indra, the thunder god. So Tvastar created lightning, the heavenly fire drill which ignites stars and brings fire to earth. I believe that Tvastr was the originally a man, a carpenter, a maker of a fire drill who became idolized and was then deified. One of the most common tools people use when trying to understand processes in nature is extrapolation. Basically people try to explain one process using the available knowledge about another similar process. Faced with the mystery of the universe, the sun and lightning, people used extrapolation to explain their existence and their workings. If man Tvastr creates material things on Earth, there must be equally god Twastr which created universe in the first place. This heavenly Tvastr is also known as visible form of Viswakarman emerging from his (her, it's) navel. Basically if the man Tvastr was born out of a navel (womb) of his mother, Tvastr must have been born out of the navel (womb) of Viśwákarman. But in essence Viśwákarman and Tvastr are one and the same:

Viśwákarman ("all-accomplishing, maker of all," "all doer"; Tamil: Vicuvakaruman; Thai: Witsawakam) is the personified Omnipotence and the abstract form of the creator God according to the Rigveda. He is the presiding deity of all craftsmen and architects. He is believed to be the "Principal Architect of the Universe ", and the root concept of the later Upanishadic Brahman / Purusha....Vishwakarma is visualized as Ultimate reality (later developed as Brahman) in the Rig Veda, from whose navel all visible things Hiranyagarbha emanate. The same imagery is seen in Yajurveda purusha sukta, in which the divine smith Tvastar emerging from Vishwakarma...In later puranas he is sometimes identified with vedic Tvastar...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vishvakarman

There is no surprise then that Yajurveda pictured Tvastar/Viśwákarman as the Prajapati[8] and in the Atharva veda he is mentioned as Pashupati. Shwethashwatharopanishad described him as Rudrasiva, the one who is dwelling in all living forms. In Serbian and in English we still say "to make kids" "praviti decu". So "maker" is another word for "father".

There is a saying "as above so bellow" from hermetic texts:

These words circulate throughout occult and magical circles. They are recorded in Hermetic texts, although they originated in the Vedas.The actual text of that maxim, as translated by Dennis W. Hauck from The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, is: "That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracle of the One Thing."[28] Thus, whatever happens on any level of reality (physical, emotional, or mental) also happens on every other level.
This principle, however, is more often used in the sense of the microcosm and the macrocosm. The microcosm is oneself, and the macrocosm is the universe. The macrocosm is as the microcosm and vice versa; within each lies the other, and through understanding one (usually the microcosm) a man may understand the other.[29]

Here is a picture of the Magician displaying the Hermetic concept of "As above, so below."



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeticism#.22As_above.2C_so_below.22

So hermetic texts tell us that earthly world is a reflection of a heavenly world. This could well be true. But I believe that people came to this conclusion by explaining the heavenly world using their knowledge of the terrestrial world, and that they created gods in heaven to match the man on earth, not the other way round. The saying "as above so bellow" should really be "as bellow so above", and Tvastr and Agni are crucial for understanding of this process of god creation.

The man Tvastr (carpenter) created tools, weapons, vehicles (chariots) and houses for men. So heavenly Tvastr, Vishwakarma must have created the flying chariots of the gods, and all their weapons and divine attributes and cities in which they dwelt.

Vishwakarma/Tvastar is particularly credited with creating the missiles used in the mythological era, including the Vajra (lightning), the sacred weapon of Lord Indra...Hindu scriptures describe many of Vishwakarma's architectural accomplishments. Through the four yugas (aeons of Hindu mythology), he had built several towns and palaces for the gods. Among them were, in chronological order, Svarga (Heaven) in the Satya Yuga, Lanka in the Treta Yuga, and Dwarka (Krishna's capital) in the Dwapara Yuga...It is said that when Lord Shiva married Parvati, he asked Viswakarma to build a beautiful palace for them to reside in. Vishwakarma built a palace made of gold....

In a battle with Tripurasura, Shiva called Vishvakarma and asked him to make a suitable chariot, bow and arrow. The chariot was made entirely out of gold...Shiva installed a divine weapon known as pashupatiastra (the arrow of pashupati- another name given to Lord Shiva ) into his arrow and shot it at Tripura. The arrow burnt up Tripura into ashes in a split second....

Tvastar/Vishwakarma is therefore the maker of Shiva, lightning, electricity. Tvastr was the maker of Vajra, the thunderbolt, lightning, which was the weapon of both Indra and Shiva and which was in essence Shiva himself. Tvastr was also the maker of Shiva's "golden" chariots, bows and arrows and of Shiva's golden palace. Shiva, the electricity, the lightning, through Tvastar, the creator, creates golden cities and palaces (suns and galaxies) in which he lives. He shoots vajras, golden arrows (lightning bolts) from heaven, while riding in golden chariots (sun). So it is not a surprise that in the Vedic period the term Vishwakarma first appeared as an epithet of Indra (thunder, Shiva, Perun), Surya (sun, Vishnu, Vid, Svetovid), and Agni (fire, Brahma, Svarog), or Trimurti who is Agni (fire) in it's three forms. The things that connects these three entities, gods, is electricity, Shiva, so Agni is material form of Shiva in the same way Tvastr is material face of Vishvakarma.

I will talk i detail about Indra and Shiva later.

So we see here that Tvastar made fire and lightning, two heads of Agni, Triglav. But Tvastar is also a solar deity in the epic of Mahābhārata and the Harivaṃśa. He is the father of Surya, the sun god, and used pieces of Surya to make the three worlds (heaven, earth and underworld). Some other sources say that he was Surya. And other that he was Surya's brother.Surya is extremely important god in Vedic pantheon. Since the dawn of civilization, both human and animal life have been dependent on the creative and destructive powers of of the Sun God. Man therefore showed great reverence to it. Spiritually the Sun played the symbolic role of the male, with Mother Earth as the female receiving the seed, nourishing and nurturing growth. The Sun’s importance is reflected in all Vedic hymns such as Rig Veda. Some hymns of the Rig Veda indicate that he is the only god. This is not in contradiction with the belief that Agni was the only god or that Shiva was the only god. This is because of interconnection between the Sun, Electricity and Fire, and the way they all are each other's brothers and fathers. In the Hindu way of life, the Sun is present in all the Vedic hymns. The solar orb signifies the hymns of the Rig Veda, and Vedic Aryans loved the brighter side of life and the Sun with his dazzling light formed an important object of worship. He is described as the giver of all life on the earth, and the upholder of Dharma. He is ever traveling in his chariot keeping a vigilant eye on the good and bad deeds of mortals and gods alike.
Vedic Sun is also translated as three bodied so the Trinity is also traced to the Sun. He has triple capacity for "producing forms by his heat, preserving them by his light, or destroying them by his concentrated force of heat. This is Serbian Triglav, Vishnji (Svetovid, Vishnu, the high one, the creator), Branjan (Svarog, Brahman, the defender) and Živa (Perun, Shiva, the destroyer in a shape of lightning).

Mahabaratha states about the Sun "The Sun is the gateway to the path of the gods". Taittiriya Upanishad: “He who dwells in man and who dwells in the sun is one". Chandogya Upanishad: “The sun thus represents the supreme Principle, first non-manifest, then manifest".

http://vedicgoddess.weebly.com/3/post/2012/10/chaya-ma-chaya-devi-goddess-ghhaya.html

Who is this "one who dwells in the sun and in man, the unmanifested then manifested"? It is Shiva, electricity in the form of solar radiation, the energy that powers both the Sun and Man and without which there would be no life.

Here we see that Tvastar is the father of all three heads of Agni. He is the Creator, Progenitor, Craftsmen par exelance. His power was so great, that he was credited not only with creating human tools, houses and vehicles, but also with creating the human race, animals, earth, heaven and gods themselves.

I hope you are finding this interesting. I hope to continue with my story about Tvastar soon. Until then stay happy.

The description of Twastri as a divine carpenter opened a very important question: If Twastri was a carpenter, when did carpentry as a craft start? Finding the answer to this question, would help us also find out when the fire making was actually invented. I believe i have managed to prove that it did actually happen within last 50 thousand years and probably in Europe by Cro Magnons. Considering that Cro Magnon descendants still live among us today, it is perfectly possible that they have preserved the memory of the time before fire making was invented (the Fire bird time) in their myths and legends. They have also preserved memory of the first craftsmen who became holy stone masons and holy carpenters of later religions. They also preserved the memory of first cordage makers who later became holy weavers. And they preserved the memory of the first fire makers, who eventually were deified in Twastr the father of Agni.

But this respect for craftsmen and their craft is not possible without the existence of craft and craftsmen, and crafts and craftsmen can not exist without division of labor. And anthropology is telling us that in hunter gatherer communities there is no division of labor. Everyone is taught and does everything. And this is done as a preservation mechanism as a group of generalists is more likely to survive then a group of specialists. You kill a generalists and that has minimal effect on the group. You kill a specialist and that has a huge effect and can lead to the demise of the whole group.

By 12,000 years ago, human populations had spread into most of the habitable regions of the globe, including Australia and the Americas. With the aid of their flexible, rapidly evolving cultures, these groups, loosely organized as small bands of "hunter-gatherers" were able to adapt to virtually any environmental situation.

The essence of hunting and gathering or what we might think of as foraging economies is to exploit many resources rather than to depend heavily on only a few. This means they tend to have a generalized subsistence strategy rather than a specialized one. Small, mobile human groups subsist on whatever resources are available within a defined territory. They adapt to conditions as they find them, using what is already there. They tend to move on a seasonal basis lacking any permanent settlements in an effort to optimize different sources of food throughout a relatively large territorial range. Having a fairly large range has relatively little impact on the environment. Hunter-gatherers tend to accumulate a large and intimate knowledge of their range and the food sources, dangers, and opportunities which exist within it. This knowledge is largely communal; it is shared by the group.

In most circumstances, the activity of gathering of resources is very important providing 75 to 80% of the total calories consumed. We often think that hunting provides the major portion of the diet but it tends to only provide the balance. Technically, we ought to speak in terms of "gathering and hunting" rather than "hunting and gathering." In existing hunting and gathering cultures, women usually do most of the gathering, while the men specialize in hunting. This is recognized as division of labor. Other than this kind of gender specialization--and it is by no means universal--there is little specialization of roles within the Hunter-gatherer group.

Hunter gatherer societies typically enjoy a surprisingly diverse diet and abundant leisure. They live in a small, personal world seldom consisting of more than 250 people. Hunter gatherers have no accumulated wealth; they have marriage rules that require them to marry outside of their immediate group; the form bonds with neighbors largely through marriage and can rely on neighboring groups in time of need. Strong marriage bonds form alliances between groups making it unlikely that hostilities will ever exist.

http://web.mesacc.edu/dept/d10/asb/lifeways/hunt_gather.html

It seems that hunter gatherers preferred to enjoy life rather then labor and toil to invent new things.

It used to be believed that food surpluses made social complexity and craft specialization possible with the increased time for leisure and occupational specialization. This was until it was pointed out that many egalitarian societies with plentiful resources had plenty of leisure time but no craft specialization. More recently it has been shown that food surpluses did not produce social complexity and specialization per se but rather made those things possible.

http://anthromama.com/2012/03/26/craft-specialization-social-complexity/

It seems that hunter gatherers found the way to live as well as possible with as little work as possible and stopped there. If you have everything that you want why bother inventing anything new.

The "original affluent society" is a theory postulating that hunter-gatherers were the original affluent society. This theory was first articulated by Marshall Sahlins at a symposium entitled "Man the Hunter" held in Chicago in 1966. The significance of the theory stems from its role in shifting anthropological thought away from seeing hunter-gatherer societies as primitive, to seeing them as practitioners of a refined mode of subsistence.
At the time of the symposium new research by anthropologists, such as Richard B. Lee’s work on the !Kung of southern Africa, was challenging popular notions that hunter-gatherer societies were always near the brink of starvation and continuously engaged in a struggle for survival.[1] Sahlins gathered the data from these studies and used it to support a comprehensive argument that states that hunter-gatherers did not suffer from deprivation, but instead lived in a society in which "all the people’s wants are easily satisfied."[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society

If we look at archaeological data we see this:

There is no archaeological evidence of social complexity during the first two million years of human history. For most of our history, humans have lived in small and mobile egalitarian bands. Evidence of social inequality doesn't appear until the Middle Paleolithic (120 kya to 35 kya) in Mousterian deposits found in Europe (Hungary, France, Spain, etc), Near East (Qafzeh, Israel) and Northern Africa (Hayden 2007:235). These artifacts include elaborate Neanderthal burials decorated with flowers, prestige items (such as pyrites transported from long distances and elephant tusks), body ornaments of decorative and pierced seashells, pierced animal teeth and ocher (Hayden 2007:236). The shift towards social inequality became significant around 30,000 years ago and widespread by 15,000 during the Upper Paleolithic period with the emergence of elaborate burials, higher population densities, special ritual areas in caves and evidence of food surpluses, food storage and finely made prestige goods (such as 9000 ivory beads found in a burial in Sungir, Russia) which required technical skill, standardization of form, and hundreds of hours of labor (Hayden 2007:231-236). From the elaborate burials and prestige goods, one can infer private ownership of property and a social hierarchy.

http://anthromama.com/2012/03/26/craft-specialization-social-complexity/

Even this does not prove that we have craft specialization, just social specialization and social inequality. This can happen without craft specialization. Look at tribal chiefs in hunter gatherer societies of today. They enjoy special status, the society is stratified, yet there is no craft specialization. But the above dates for social inequality are very significant. They show us that there was no social inequality and certainly no craft specialization until well after "modern African humans" met Neanderthals and the only place where we see craft specialization is in the areas heavily influenced and populated by Neanderthals and the Cro Magnons and other Norther human groups, who we now know were a mixed breed between "modern African humans" and Neanderthals and Denisovans.

If we look at where primitive non specialized societies still exist, we see that they only exist in tropical places with plenty of resources and populated by people who are only descended from "modern African humans" but not Neanderthal....

I will repeat the most important thing here: "The shift towards social inequality became significant around 30,000 years ago and widespread by 15,000 during the Upper Paleolithic period"


What could have happened during this period which could have influenced such a huge shift in social organization of our Cro Magnon ancestor? The thing that changed everything was the invention of a hafted and particularly polished hafted axes.

Making simple flake stone tools is easy, and can be "invented" by accident. Because of this it can actually be done as a non specialized activity. This is exactly what we find in archaeological material. Stone flakes all the way.

It takes months of hard work to learn how to make stone blades, and it is possible to learn how to do it only if you are being shown how to do it, because it is not intuitive and easy.

So to progress from simple flake to complex worked stone tool, you need lots of experimentation and practice. Which is unheard of in observed hunter gatherer societies. Until they met Neanderthals, mad hard working, no fun Europeans...Who preferred to knock stones together all day to partying. The reason why i think Neanderthals did this was because they had to. While "modern African humans" and their descendants were partying and having sex naked on tropical beaches, Neanderthals were freezing their buts in Europe and northern Asia, and when you are cold and hungry your brain has to start working hard in order to enable you to survive. And also banging stones will worm you up ... The invention of stone tools in the first place is directly linked with availability of fine grained stones which produce sharp flakes by single blow. And they are not that common.

So eventually someone somewhere started making complex stone tools.

The oldest dated "complex" worked stone tool which would take say few hours of work to make is dated to Upper Palaeolithic and Europe:

The long blades (rather than flakes) of the Upper Palaeolithic Mode 4 industries appeared during the Upper Palaeolithic.[10] The Aurignacian culture is a good example of mode 4 tool
production.[11]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_tool


This can not be done without work specialization. And it fits time wise with other division of labor evidence.

Remember the choice: partying - stone banging...Unless you can live well (better) from stone banging why bother.

From archaeological data we can see that until first hafted stone axes were invented we had sporadic evidence of complex and no evidence of massive wood work. Basically without hafted axes you can not chop a tree down. You can cut saplings and branches but that would be it. The flake tools are too brittle and too flimsy if thin and sharp, or too blunt if thick to allow you to efficiently chop wood. And if you can't do that, you can't make anything that requires planks, beams, panels...But then after the invention of hafted axes, we have an explosion of wood work. Houses, furniture, boats, sledges, weapons, tools...There is so much demand for good wood chopping equipment that making stone axes becomes the fastest growing industry. And good stones for axes were hard to find. One other thing. Without ability to chop wood, you can not have steady supply of fire wood. So even if you new how to make fire, you could not for instance use ovens for baking pottery on industrial scale, or smelt metal....I believe that hafted axes was the single most important invention in human history. Probably more important than fire itself. No wonder then that hafted axes feature so prominently as a holy object all around the world. To make a hafted axe you need someone to make a good smooth sharp axe head of a particular shape. You also need someone to make a sturdy strong tightly fitted handle. And you need someone to make good long strong cordage and maybe some resin glue.

These are oldest known polished stone tools. Hinatabayashi B site, Shinanomachi, Nagano. Pre-Jōmon (Paleolithic) period, 30,000 BC. Tokyo National Museum.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Paleolithic


As you can see they are possibly axe heads, but this is not sure, as there is no evidence of them being hafted. These stone tools are associated with ancestors of Ainu people who are Caucasoid people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people

Then we have stone axes found in Siberia, dated to 20,000 bp

In Siberia the oldest ground axes date to 20,000 bp
in the valley of Yenisei (Oda & Keally 1973, 19, cited
by Anderson & Summerhayes 2008, 49).

The first ground-edge axes are found at the
beginning of the Mesolithic in Ireland, such as at
Lough Boora (Co. Offaly), in habitation levels dated
to 7160–6260 bc.

http://connectingcountry.arts.monash.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Geneste-et-al-20122.pdf

Right in the middle of this time period Swastika emerged as a sign associated with the fire bird. The world's OLDEST swastika is this one here associated with these carvings in the shape of birds found in the Mezin, Ukraine region. It is dated to about 10,000 BCE.



This is the actual swastika symbol from the fire bird:



So I believe that no division of labor and craft specialization occurred until the time of the Cro Magnons and other Northern Euroasian cultures which would explain the deification of early crafts like stone work, wood work and cordage production as well as fire making which persisted to modern times. This veneration of craftsmen, which clearly does not exists in primitive egalitarian societies, also brought us Twastr and other Artificer gods.

I hope you are all well and happy.

ingvaeonicus

About 50% of the Irish population are genetical carriers of the red-head gene

Several accounts by Greek writers mention redheaded people. A fragment by the poet Xenophanes describes the Thracians as blue-eyed and red haired.[5] Herodotus described the Budini people as being predominantly red haired. Dio Cassius described Boudica, Queen of the Iceni, of the ancient Britons, to be "tall and terrifying in appearance... a great mass of red hair... over her shoulders."
The Roman historian Tacitus commented on the "red hair and large limbs of the inhabitants of Caledonia",[6] which he connected with some red haired Gaulish tribes of Germanic and Belgic relation.
In Asia, red hair has been found among the ancient Tocharians, who occupied the Tarim Basin in what is now the northwesternmost province of China. Caucasian Tarim mummies have been found with red hair dating to the 2nd millennium BC.[7]
Red hair is also found amongst Polynesians, and is especially common in some tribes and family groups. In Polynesian culture red hair has traditionally been seen as a sign of descent from high ranking ancestors and a mark of rulership.[8][9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair

Tocharians spoke language which has many similarities with old Irish, but they were R1a haplogroup, which creates a big problem for "Indoeuropean" theory:

At the time of the creation of the Indoeuropeans, same people lived from Ireland to China, spoke one language, and had lots of people with red hair and were R1a genetic type.

Red haired Thracian. The only surviving fresco, Tomb of Ostrusha, Valley of Thracian Kings



http://journals.worldnomads.com/vagabonds/story/78374/Bulgaria/Valley-of-the-Thracian-Kings#axzz2sd58elET

This is the map of the distribution of the red hair in Eurasia:



The bright red spot, Udmurtia, and the reddish vertical line emanating from it is along the Volga river. Do you remember what i wrote about the Volga trading trading route?


http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=84722035&postcount=33

Anthropologists relate Udmurts to the Urals branch of Europeans. Most of them are of the middle size, often have blue or gray eyes, high cheek-bones and wide face.[citation needed] The Udmurt people are not of an athletic build but they are very hardy.[6] and there have been claims that they are the "most red-headed" people in the world.[7] Additionally, the ancient Budini tribe, which is speculated to be an ancestor of the modern Udmurts, were described by Herodotus as being predominantly red-headed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udmurt_people

Pictures of red haired Udmurts:







Red hair Gypsy kids Serbia



Red hair central Asia:

Hi all. It has been a long time. I hope you are all well. I will continue my story about Tvastar, the divine maker, creator. I will give etymology of his name, and I will then talk about the act of inventing and creating.

Tvastar/ Thworeshtar

Tvastar, the creator god of Vedas, was himself created by the people. The people who created Tvastar, the creator god, must have given him a name which in their own language somehow relates to the act of creation.

Let's have a look at Sanskrit:

tvarate { tvar } - make haste, hurry, urge
tvarA - hurry, speed
tvari - haste
tva - partly, your

You can see that the root tva(r) has nothing to do with creating or making in Sanskrit. Again we find a Vedic god whose name has no meaning in Sanskrit. But in Sanskrit we find Tvastar's double called Viśwákarman. This name actually has meaning in Sanskrit. It literally means universe creator.

Viśwákarman (Sanskrit: विश्वकर्मा "all-accomplishing, maker of all," "all doer"; Tamil: (விசுவகர்மன்) Vicuvakaruman; Thai: Witsawakam) is the personified Omnipotence and the abstract form of the creator God according to the Rigveda. He is the presiding deity of all craftsmen and architects.[1] He is believed to be the "Principal Architect of the Universe ", and the root concept of the later Upanishadic Brahman / Purusha.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vishvakarman

I believe that Viśwákarman is just Sanskrit translation of the original name of the creator god Tvastar. If we look at Avestan sources we find this:

...for instance, that the god Tvastar is also mentioned in the Avesta as a fashioner of animals pleads for a high antiquity of this tradition; cf. Boyce, 1975 p.81 f.”...

(...) and he concludes that the term tvastar- originally must have been identical with the Avestic word thworeshtar-, i.e. ‘shaper’ or ‘fashioner’.(...)

Struggles of Gods: Papers of the Groningen Work Group for the Study of the History of Religions

http://tinyurl.com/m65btbo

Tvastr thus became the preceptor of men, and as he existed from time immemorial, he was called Jurat Tvastr, or the ancient Tvastr, which was corrupted into Zara-thustra and still further, into Zoroaster. As with the orthodox Aryans, Agni or Fire (Brahm) revealed the Vedas, so with the Iranians, Zara-thustra, or Zoroaster (the ancient Fire God) revealed to them their religion as embodied in their sacred Scripture, the Zend-Avesta.

Rgvedic India

http://archive.org/stream/rgvedicindia035053mbp/rgvedicindia035053mbp_djvu.txt


This attempt to relate Zarathustra to an euhemerized Tvastr-like Avestan Divine Craftsman is interesting, instead of his name's usual etymologies "camel-driver", or "golden-camel". We find this on Wiki page about Zoroaster:

In Avestan, Zaraϑuštra is generally accepted to derive from an Old Iranian *Zaratuštra-; The element half of the name (-uštra-) is universally accepted to mean "camel"...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroaster


The name of the founder of the religion of sun fire and light means camel? This is the official etymology? How crazy is this? Yet further down on the same page we see this:

A folk etymology of the name is from zaraϑa, "golden", and the *uštra, "light" (from the root uš, "to shine").[citation needed] In yet another etymological variation, Zaraϑuštra is split into two words: zara, "gold", and ϑuštra, "friend".[citation needed] Several more etymologies have been proposed, some quite fanciful, but none is factually based.[3]

But this was of course completely ignored in favor of much more logical Camel driver....

The term Tvastar is mentioned in the Mitanni treaty, which establishes him as a Proto-Indo-Iranian divinity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tvastar

Translated to plain English this means that Tvastar is older than both Avestan and Vedic culture.

So is there a language in which Tvastar / Tvorestar would have the actual meaning related to creation and making? There is. Serbian language.

Have a look at these Serbian words:

tvar - substance, matter, shape
tvoriti - to form, to create, to build, to make
Tvorac, Tvorec - Creator

stvoriti - to finish creating, building or making, to give birth
stvoriti se - to appear
stvor - living thing
stvar - thing, material object
stvaran - real, material
stvarnost - reality
stvaralac - creative person
stvoritelj - creator, father
ostvariti - to make happen, to make appear
ustvari - as a matter of fact

Now let's try to see if the above Serbian words can help us to construct a word that means creator and sounds like Tvastar / Tvoshtar.


Tvastar, Tvoshtar = Tvar, Tvor + Star = Creator + old

Avestan name of Tvastar clearly shows that this is the case:

Tvorestar = Tvorac + star = Creator + old

But there is even better etymology. What if Tvorestar is corruption of Tvoristvar or Tvorjestvar?

Tvoristvar = Tvori + stvar = Create + thing = Creator, Maker
Tvorjestvar = Tvor + je + stvar = Create + is + thing = Creator, Maker

Tvar (matter) is used by Tvorac (creator) to Stvori (create) universe. Word Stvar (thing) literally means with matter (s tvar). Stvarnost (reality) literally means material world.


In that case Jurat Tvastr which apparently means old Creator in Avestan is misunderstanding of Jara Tvoristvar. Have a look at these Serbian words:

Jara - bright shining heat, like blazing flame or sun.
Zar - light
Zara - of light
ozariti - light up
užariti - make shining hot
žar - embers, glow, zeal. Remember žar ptica, the fire bird, the bringer of fire?

Tvoristvar - Creator

Jara Tvoristvar = Bright light and heat creator, fire or sun.
Zara Tvoristvar = Ligh and heat creator, fire or sun.


Not a bad etymology for the creator of the religion of sun, fire and light. Much better than the camel driver, don't you think?

Belief in an intermediary spirit between God and the world.

From the days of Thales (about 600 B.C.), the head of the school of Miletus, the Greek thinkers were in touch with the Orient. The Ionians were in close contact with the Persians. Pythagoras, we have seen, was believed by the classical writers to have been the pupil of Zoroaster, though several centuries intervened between them. Numenius of Apamea says that Pythagoras and Plato reproduce the ancient wisdom of the Magi and Brahmans, Egyptians and Jews. Alexandria became later a cosmopolitan seat of learning, and the intellectual East and West met there. It was here that Judaism and afterwards Christianity were Hellenized. The wisdom of the East was held in high esteem at Alexandria. Persian influence, it seems, had been felt in Greece in the early formative period of its philosophy. Zarathushtra, we have noticed, postulated a quasi-independent spirit intermediary between the godhead and the universe, Anaxagoras calls it nous, acting between God, and the world as the regulating principle of existence. Plato says in his Timaeus that the universe becomes an organism through the universal World-Soul that is created by the Demiurge, the Supreme Deity.

The Old Testament refers to the Spirit of Yahweh.1 Philo Judaeus unites the Greek and Jewish ideas about Logos and says that Logos is the first-born Son of God and acts as a viceregent of God between God and the world. He is the prototypal Man after whose image all men are created. Logos is something more than Plato's Idea of the Good, because, like Spenta Mainyu, he is creatively active. In common with Spenta Mainyu, Logos is not a personal being, and like Spenta Mainyu again, he appears sometimes as identified with God and at other times seems to be an attribute of God. The Avestan texts refer to Spenta Mainyu and his adversary Angra Mainyu as thworeshtar or the fashioners [159] or cutters and, speaking about the work of Logos, Philo speaks of him as Tomeus, 'the cutter,' employing the word of the same meaning. Again as Spenta Mainyu or the spirit of light is shadowed by the opposite spirit of darkness, so Logos, says Philo, is the Shekinah or Glory or Light of God, but he is also the darkness or shadow of God. This is so because, he adds, the creature reveals only half the creator and hides the other half. In the Book of Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom, identical with the Greek Logos, is the divine essence, living a quasi-independent existence in God and side by side with God. She works as the active agent of god in the creation of the world. In Mithraism, Mithra held the position of the Mediator between God who was unknowable and unapproachable and mankind. He fashioned the world as Demiurge. The intermediary Spirit of God occurs throughout the New Testament. Numenius of Apamea, writing in the second century, says that God has bestowed divine qualities upon a second god who acts in the world as the power for good. The Supreme God or the First principle, he adds, works in the spiritual world, whereas the activity of the second god extends to the spiritual as well as material world. Origen, writing shortly after him, says that God created Logos or the Son. His relation to the Father is the same as that which exists between Ahura Mazda and Spenta Mainyu. The Son or Logos, says Origen, is co-eternal and co-equal with the Father, but the Son is lesser than the Father. Clement of Alexandria says that Logos, represents the will, power, and energy of God. He is the creator on behalf of God. He has introduced harmony in the universe and conducts its affairs as the pilot.

He is regarded as the supreme worker, the very essence of excellence and quality in craftsmanship.[13]

M.N. Dhalla: History of Zoroastrianism

http://www.avesta.org/dhalla/history3.htm

How is it possible that we find that the Vedic creator god Tvastar has Serbian etymology? Because this etymology comes from the oldest layers of old European language which was brought to Indo-Iranian plateau by the European invaders at some time before mid third millennium bc. The fact that we don't find most of the above words in eastern Slavic languages shows that they are indeed very old. They come from the time of the original fire makers and fire priests. They survived in South Slavic languages probably because they originally came from the Balkans from the I2 population languages, and the I2 population in the Balkans continued using these words all the way to present time. If anyone knows of any other language in which we can find similar words to the above creation related words from South Slavic languages, please let me know.


Now that we know What Tvastar's name means, and who were the people who created this Creator god, let's have a look at the act of invention, creation itself. This is going to take few posts to cover. I hope you will enjoy reading it, as much as I enjoyed figuring it out and writing it.

Why would a new tool not be adopted by the people who are in contact with the inventor? Only if the new tool is not actually more effective than the old. If we find something in the archaeological material, which to us looks like it could have been one of the tools we know about, this does not mean that it actually is a tool at all. What we have found could be just something that by pure accident looks like one of the tools we know about. If we find what looks like a deliberately man made stone tool in one of the clustered sites from the same period but not in the other ones, we are probably looking at accidental byproduct of some completely different human action or a naturally occurring stone. If what we have found looks like an effective tool, and if it really was intended to be that tool, then it would have been adopted as tool, replicated, mass produced, used. Isolated pointy sharp stones that look like a spear tips, could just be a pointy sharp stones, which were never used as a spear tips. This can be because people did not know how to securely haft them as spear tips so they used them as piercing hand held tools instead. Or because it never even occurred to people that they could make stone spear tips, so the stones were actually intended to be used for something different, or the stones were just byproducts of the process of making something completely different.


Take for example stone spear tips from Kathu Pan 1 in South Africa. Archaeologists Alas, Wilkins and Chazan, claim that they have discovered the oldest stone spear tip in the world. They say:

Experimental and metric data indicate that the points could function well as spear tips. Shape analysis demonstrates that the smaller retouched points are as symmetrical as larger retouched points, which fits expectations for spear tips. The distribution of edge damage is similar to that in an experimental sample of spear tips and is inconsistent with expectations for cutting or scraping tools. Thus, early humans were manufacturing hafted multicomponent tools ~200,000 years earlier than previously thought.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6109/942

Here is the picture of different shapes of "blades" they claim they have discovered. N is the infamous spear tip.



On The Subversive Archaeologist blog, archaeologist Robert H. Gargett says this about this claim:

Once more, an example of how well-meaning archaeologists cherry-pick (never disingenuously) their assemblages for specimens that put their claims in the best light. I really, really like M. That must have been one fine flint-knapper to have prepared a core to take off that one at the end of the sequence!

The authors seem to think that they have indisputable evidence of a blade industry at give-or-take 500 kya (i.e. the product of Homo beforeneanderthalensis, no less). But when you look for their empirical basis you find virtually nothing.
Wilkins and Chazan looked at 3,786 pieces of rock (out of the more-than 2 metric tonnes of lithics culled from the site!). Of the 3,786 bits, 955 were categorized as complete flakes and 972 were called blades. A 50:50 ratio of 'flakes' to 'blades' will be important later in this discussion. So, keep 1/2 and 1/2 in mind.
The average length-to-width ratio for the blades is 2.5 (s.d. = 0.4). Therefore, approximately half of the blades are in the upper part of the range (i.e. 2.5:1 to 2.9:1) of length to width. The other 50% of the blades would just make it into the 'blade' category (i.e. between 2.0:1 and 2.49:1). Given that a) the minimum ratio to qualify as a blade is 2.0:1, b) the mean is 2.5:1 and c) the standard deviation is 0.4:1, it's impossible to say on the basis of the date presented whether the distribution of 'blade' length to width is uniform, platykurtic, normal, or leptokurtic. That's a crucial datum, as you'll see in a moment. Nevertheless, it is apparent that the distribution is somewhat skewed toward the upper end, given that the actual range of 'blade' length-to-width ratio goes from 2.0:1 to 4.5:1, strongly suggesting that it's more platykurtic than not. You see, a mystery as to the shape of distribution for 'blade' length to width casts a deep, dark cloud over Wilkins and Chazan's whole argument, because it's quite possible that the length-to-width ratio for the entire assemblage (i.e. flakes + blades) is uniform or unimodal, with a mean closer to 2.0:1 than 2.5:1. That would call into question the wisdom of creating the flake/blade cutoff in the first place. Actually, it would make it seem silly.
What of the complete flakes? Wilkins and Chazan provide no metrics for those flakes that had a length-to-width ratio of less than 2:1. I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of complete flakes in any assemblage are at least as long as they are wide (i.e. >1:1). That would mean that most of the non-blade flakes in the Kathu Pan 1 sample are between 1:1 and 2:1 in a comparison of length to width. Therefore, when compared with the entire collection of 'flakes' and 'blades' the authors examined for this study, nearly 1/2 are just on the shy side of being blades.
On that basis alone, were it not for the arbitrary 2:1 cutoff between flakes and blades, the complete flakes and blades would more than likely form a continuous and uniform distribution of length to width from near 1:1 up to 2.9:1 (with the rest of the range scattered with outliers). If that be the case (and neither you nor I have any reason to think otherwise in the absence of sufficient descriptive metrics in Wilkins and Chazan's article) it would be very difficult for the authors to sustain their inference that the blades they find at 500 kya, and in such abundance, are anything other than artifacts of the arbitrary line drawn between a 'flake' and a 'blade.'
If the authors had so much as a shred of evidence that there was preferential blade manufacturing going on at Kathu Pan 1, I'd very much like to see it. In fact, you have to wonder at some of the data presentation decisions the authors have made, such as presenting a histogram of the widths of their 'blades' rather than their lengths, and leaving out the metrics for the non-blade flakes altogether.

http://www.thesubversivearchaeologist.com/2012/02/journal-of-archaeological-pseudo.html

What the above analysis is basically confirming is that there is no detectable deliberate learning and production trail for making blade and spear tips, which would concentrate the blade production results around certain desired blade type. All the flakes are statistically random showing no sign of deliberate attempt to produce any particular type or shape of blade.

Also, all the data Alas, Wilkins and Chazan present as evidence that the stones were hafted spear tips can also prove that the stones were awls (stone tools used for making holes in wood or bone or skin). In order for a stone spear tip to be hafted onto a wooden shaft, we have to use cordage and resin. Alas, Wilkins and Chazan new this because their experiment that "proved" that stone "N" was a spear tip included hafting it onto a shaft using acacia resin and sinew.

Examples of experimental hafted points. Points were hafted to wooden dowels using Acacia resin and sinew and then thrust into a springbok carcass target using a calibrated crossbow. The Kathu Pan 1 archaeological points show a similar pattern of edge damage to these experimental points.

https://asunews.asu.edu/20121115_stonespears

The problem is we have no record of cordage and resin production from that time, and without cordage and resin it is not possible to successfully haft stone spear tip onto a wooden shaft. When I say cordage, I mean any string like material strong and elastic enough to be used for tightening things together. For that you don't need a "cordage industry" to have developed, to have material to haft with. Sinew does not need any special treatment to be used as hafting material. It can be used fresh from the animal or dried and then reconstituted, by soaking or chewing. No specialized industry is needed to twine it into "cordage". But you still need a lot of skill to be able to extract long enough sinew strips that you can use to tighten spear tips. So it is more likely that buckskin strips were used instead of sinew. To determine when the effective stone spear tip hafting became possible, we can use archaeological evidence for the use of skins and hides, and associated tools as well as evidence for production of resin. Extraction of sinews and turning them into cord and making of resin is not easy. This is why we find such late dates for confirmed usage of skin and hide and for manufacture of resin:

First proven use of hides. Hide scraper: 50,000 years old

http://blogs.voanews.com/science-world/2013/08/13/neanderthals-invented-leather-tool-still-used-today/

First proven use of resin. Birch pitch: 80,000 years old

http://eja.sagepub.com/content/4/3/385.abstract

It is possible that some people somewhere used sinew and buckskin cords and resin before, but we don't have any evidence for it. Even if we say that it is possible that people started using resin 100,000 years before now, that is still 400,000 years later than the proposed first stone spear tip hafting date. Even if we presume that the Kathu Pan 1 "spear points" were hafted using resin and sinew, they were definitely not hafted the way hafting was done in the above experiment. Why? Because the way the above experimental spear tips were hafted on spear shafts, does not make them effective spears, and if the new spear design is not effective it will never be used in practice.

What is an effective spear?

First we have to specify that all the original spears were thrusting spears not throwing spears.

So what is an effective thrusting spear?

Effective thrusting spear is sharp enough to pierce intended target. This is not a problem as spear tips made from flint are extremely sharp.
Effective thrusting spear has a tip which is strong enough not to get damaged by the impact of hitting the target. This is a problem if the spear tip is big wide and thin. If the spear tip hits a rib, it is most likely going to break. But small narrow tips will slide off the rib. This is where design of the stone tip becomes very important.

You can read more about effectiveness of small flint tips here:

http://primitivepathways.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=65_66

Effective thrusting spear has a shaft which is strong enough not to get damaged by the impact of hitting the target.
Effective thrusting spear has a shaft which is long enough to put enough space between the hunter and the pray, preventing the pray from attacking the hunter.
Effective thrusting spear has the spear tip which is hafted in such a way that the tip does not fall off when the spear is pulled out of the target.
Effective thrusting spear has the spear tip which is hafted in such a way that the tip does not fall off when the target is moving and jerking during the fight between the hunter and the pray.

Now have a look again at the above experimental hafting done to prove that the Kathu Pan 1 stone "N" was a spear tip, and tell me what do you think, is that effective way to haft stone tip onto a thrusting spear shaft? I don't think so. It is a possible way to attach a stone to a stick. But not an effective spear tip hafting.

I have seen experiments that prove that that it is possible to attach event the the infamous "hand axes" cores to thick shaft as spear tips using friction. People who performed these experiments use them as proof that hafting could have started before resin and cordage were invented. On this youtube video you can see is what is "possible":


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZoPPczZpF8&feature=c4-overview&list=UUpgZkmbz9X4QTmMuqn9pHDw


So it is "possible" to haft "hand axes" without even using resin or cordage. The force holding the "axe" in place is friction. This is possible but not likely to have been used in practice. I could have even been done as an experiment by someone (i doubt it though). But the first time they tried to use it in practice, they would have realized that it was a bad idea. Have a look at 41 second of the film. Do you see how easy it is to remove the stone hand axe (the stone tip) out of the handle by pushing it sideways? Imagine using the spear in real life situation. So you try to spear a man or an animal. The intended target will be moving and will be covered in thick skin and fur. The moment the stone tip touches the target it will be pulled to the side by the force that the moving target produces by side stepping, walking, running, bending or any other movement orthogonal to the trajectory of the spear, and this force will make the spear tip slip out, rendering the weapon useless. If spear is your only or main weapon, you really don't want to risk the main part of it, the tip, falling out after you spent so much time making it....Especially when you are standing in front of a hurt lion, or a buffalo. If your stone spear tip falls out, all you are left with is blunt stick.

Here is the diagram of what i am talking about:



Thrusting spear with a hafted stone tip has another problem. If you strike a hard target straight on with a considerable force (as you would in real life), and your stone does not shatter on impact, which thin, sharp flint tips are liable to do if you hit a bone, it will exert so much force into the shaft, that it would at best widen the gap holding the stone and at worst it would cause the shaft to split. If the force of friction is the only thing keeping the whole contraption together, this will again render the weapon useless. Here is the diagram showing what i mean:



If we use some kind of pitch we minimize the first problem of the tip being dislodged by orthogonal force. It would become more difficult to dislodge the stone tip, but not much more difficult. You have to remember that the forces at work are huge. The second problem, the shaft splitting, would stay as a problem and would not be minimized by using resin. The longitudinal force would basically split the shaft wide enough for the resin links to be broken or the whole shaft to split, and we are back to square one.

So to avoid these problems, and in order to haft a spear tip onto a spear shaft effectively, you need to secure it in such a way that the force produced by it hitting the target does not dislodge the stone tip when the spear is used in real life situations. You also want to make sure that the stone tip is hafted in such a way that if the spear is thrust through the skin, or if it gets entangled into fur or wool, that it does not fall off when the spear is pulled back.
The only way to achieve effective hafting is by carefully designing the tip and the shaft, and by using a combination of resin and cordage to tie them together. And we see that that exact technique is used for hafting spear tips by primitive people world over: you use resing to secure the stone spear tip to the spear shaft, and cordage to strengthen the connection point and prevent the tip being dislodged by the side force and to prevent the shaft being split by longitudinal force.

What does well hafted spear tip look like?

Like this:



Or like this:



Or like this:



So unless people were able to securely haft stone points on spear shafts, they did not have effective tool for killing. Which is why we don't see wide adoption and proliferation of stone spear tips until much much later. We see a lot of sharp pointy stones, which could have been used as spear tips, if the resin and cordage was available to perform effective hafting. But without ability to perform effective hafting, these sharp pointy stones were just sharp pointy stones, not spear tips. As soon as people were able to securely haft a sharp stone tip to the wooden shaft, the combination became effective tool for killing. and we see quick adoption and spreading of this new tool.

How did people come up with an idea for stone spear tips?

In the above excerpt about prepared core knapping technique, we read this:

The use of this technique is believed to be a significant change in culture and shows an increasing growth of cognitive ability, as one that is using this method must be able to imagine the end product and maintain that image while conditioning the stone to the desired shape and end result tool.

This statement was clearly made by someone who does not understand how humans learn how to make things. People learn how to make things through imitation. They either try to imitate the shape of some thing they can see in front of them and which they want to copy. Or they imitate the way their teacher makes some thing they want to copy. Even today people learn in exactly the same way. At home you are imitating your parents. In schools you are imitating your teachers. When you are learning from a book, you are imitating the thought processes described in the book.
When we invent something new, this is just an improvement of something we learned how to imitate or combination of things we learned how to imitate. When we are solving a problem, we have in our minds the problem we are facing and the array of tools that we know of which can potentially solve the problem. We invent new tools, when none of the tools at our disposal is good enough to solve the problem at hand. This results in better tools. Only people with good understanding of the problem and the available tools can come up with better tools. Even if the invention is accidental, we can benefit from it if we know of a problem which can be solved by this accidental invention, and we can realize that the new invention can be used as a tool for solving that problem.

Our problem solving ability is based on our pattern recognition and comparison ability. This is ancient ability clearly shared by us, primates and crows. The difference seems to be not nature, but nurture. Parents and groups gathering knowledge and passing it onto their offspring through teaching and through epigenetics. If someone observes a problem - solution pattern in nature, he will remember it and invoke it when similar problem arises. Combine that with shape patterns, material patterns, force patterns and you start getting into tool making.

Where did people get the idea to make a first plain sharpen wooden stick spear? Well look at the example i gave already. Thorn pierces skin. Animal horns pierce skin. Something pointy and sharp pierces skin. If I can make this stick to resemble the shape of a thorn and horn, it will be pointy and sharp and it will pierce the skin. And we have the idea for a tool called plain wooden spear. What is left is to find the way to sharpen the wooden stick. How about these sharp stone flakes. And remember that sticks which are smoldered are harder than raw sticks. And remember that this particular type of wood is harder than that one....So you pick a hardwood sapling, cut it and sharpen it with stone flake while hardening it with fire, all the time trying to imitate the shape of a thorn or horn. And you turn your idea of a spear into a spear. After many mistakes through which you learn how to do it better and better.

Where did people get the idea to make stone arrow and spear tips in the shape they made them? Could people have observed similar object somewhere in nature which has a shape similar to a spear tip and is sharp and serrated? A natural tool which solves the piercing problem in an effective way, is hafted and has a shape similar to a stone spear tip? Are standardized stone arrow and spear tips shapes maybe similar to the shape of that natural tool? Well have a look for yourself:

Shark teeth


1. Shark teeth are not attached to gums on a root like our teeth.
2. Sharks typically lose at least one tooth per week.
3. Sharks lose their teeth because they may become stuck in prey or broken and forced out.
4. Shark teeth are popularly found as beach treasures because sharks shed 1000s of teeth in a lifetime.
5. Well after a shark dies and its body decomposes its teeth will fossilize.
6. Fossilized shark teeth are not white because they are usually covered with sediment (which prevents oxygen and bacteria from getting to them).
7. It takes about 10,000 years for a shark tooth to fossilize. The most commonly found shark teeth fossils are from 65,000 year ago (the Cenozoic era).
8. A shark’s tooth shape is dependent upon its diet. For instance, the short fin mako razor like teeth tear flesh, the tiger shark has piercing teeth to cut flesh, and the zebra shark has dense flattened teeth because it feasts upon mollusks.





Arrow and spear tips




Does anyone see any similarity here? If shark teeth are so easy to find on beaches even today when we know that shark population is only fraction of what it used to be, how common must they have been on paleolithic beaches? Shark teeth are very good tools for cutting and slicing. Flint flake is a super sharp cutting tool. All people needed to do is perfect their knapping and pecking technique to be able to produce their own flint version of shark tooth shape while looking at a shark tooth. And you get stone arrow and spear heads.

While we are talking about teeth, does anyone see any similarity between carnivore jaws and particularly shark jaws and their ability to cleanly cut they pray in half and later human toothed cutting tools like saws?

Mamal carnivore jaws:



Shark jows:



Human imitations:





Late Magdalenian saws from the Dordogne



To be able to use these kind of pattern similarities you need to be good at noticing and processing them. The main problems people needed to solve were how to make the artificial teeth and how to haft the artificial teeth onto wood. But the idea of the existence of a tooth like tools was there in nature. It just had to be recognized.

For those of you who are wondering how you weaponise shark teeth, which are already regenerating, serrated meat knives at the business end of a streamlined, electric-sensing torpedo, here’s how. You drill a tiny hole in them, and then bind them in long rows to a piece of wood to make a sword. Or a trident. Or a four-metre-long lance. And then, presumably, you hit people really hard with them.

That’s what the people of the Gilbert Islands have been doing for centuries. Sharks are an ingrained part of their culture and their teeth have been an ingrained part of their weapons. Tiger sharks feature heavily – they have thick, cleaver-like teeth that can slice through turtle shells so they make a good cutting edge. But the weapons also include the teeth from spottail, dusky and bignose sharks (you can identify species from their teeth), and none of these actually live around the Gilbert Islands today.

Shark tooth weapons from Micronesia:






Not everyone's pattern recognition and comparison ability is the same. Also, out of two people who have the same pattern recognition and comparison ability, the one faced with more varied problems will develop these abilities to a higher degree, and will be able to pass this ability to his offspring through teaching and epigenetics. If smart parents used their smartness to solve problems, their children will be smarter and better at solving problems but only if the children use their smartness to solve problems as well...Having brains is not enough. You have to use them.

Scientist are telling us that living in environments with lots of problems that need to be solved lead to development of bigger brains in individuals of the same species. Bigger brains make us more intelligent:

Researchers first began to gather evidence that big brains were advantageous after 19th century U.S. biologist Hermon Bumpus examined the brains of sparrows, some of whom had succumbed in a blizzard and some of whom survived. The survivors had relatively larger brains. More recently, evolutionary biologist Alexei Maklakov from Uppsala University in Sweden found evidence that songbirds that colonize cities tend to have larger brains relative to their body size than species still confined to the countryside. The challenge of urban life might require bigger brains, he and his colleagues concluded last year in Biology Letters.

Yet in humans and in certain electric fish, larger brain size seems to have trade-offs: smaller guts and fewer offspring. That's led some scientists to suggest there are constraints on how big brains can become because they are expensive to build and maintain.

http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2012/07/bad-news-big-brains

So more varied the problems you are faced with are the more you will have to use your analytic and synthetic skills and better you will become in solving more and more complex problems. Also the more frequent the practical problems you are faced with are, the more skillful you become in solving them which includes developing of tools for solving the problems more efficiently. Also the more varied the practical problems you are faced with are, the more varied your skills and your tools become leading quicker to creation of composite tools. So cultures who lived in the climate that changed throughout the year had to develop skills, clothes, tools and equipment that would enable them to survive and thrive in all these different climatic periods. They would also need to become aware of time and natural cycles in order to predict the arrival of winter for instance. This is exactly what happened in Europe where first calendars were developed.

Here is an 8000 years old lunar calendar (first pocket calendar) found in Serbia.



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2511828/Could-worlds-oldest-pocket-calendar-Engraved-tusk-told-farmers-harvest-crops-8-000-years-ago.html

The time of the invention of calendar coincides with the last glacial meltdown, when people started moving up north again, and when we started getting seasons again. We had people living in the temperate zones of Europe before, but I guess they were not yet smart enough to figure out correlation between moon patterns, sun patterns and climate patterns. Or maybe before 10,000 bc, these patterns were different and not so pronounced so they were more difficult to recognize. Or maybe it was just not important to calculate these patterns precisely. It was enough to see leaves turning yellow and red and to see birds flying south, to realize winter is coming and to start moving south. Maybe the real question is why did it become important to people to calculate the change of moon patterns, sun patterns and climate patterns precisely when it did? We know why knowing the date is important for herders and farmers. But why was it important for hunter gatherers 8000 years ago? Unless they were already involved in activities which required knowing the precise date, that we yet don't know about.

What ever the reason, once people did decide that calculating change in moon patterns, sun patterns and climate patterns is important, we see emergence of calendars as a tool for solving this problem.

If we apply the rule "more varied problems more brains", we would expect to find more technologically advanced civilizations in the areas that had much more volatile climate which would force people to deal with ever changing array of problems. This is exactly what we do find.

So we can see that through the interaction of our pattern recognition and comparison ability and different environmental influences which present different populations with different problems, we soon end up with different cultures characterized by different accumulated knowledge. But even within one human group we will see different accumulation of knowledge. Not all people within the same group living in the same habitat have the same observation and analytic skills. And among those who do have the same observation and analytic skills, some are lucky to see the right things at the right time which would help them to make right conclusions at the right moment.

The importance of luck in early human activities is preserved in the Irish language. Word Curadh (kurad) means one who is sticking out, who stands out, who is distinguished, hero, brave man, champion. this word consists of two words: Cur + Adh. Adh is word ending which is used in the Irish language to create a noun from a verb which is a description of an action. This word also means luck, in a sense that someone got lucky. This is very old construction because it describes exactly what happened in the oldest times when action did not always have intended consequence or result. One needed to be lucky, otherwise his work would not yield a result. So Curadh is someone who was lucky to survive all dangerous actions and by doing so he became someone who sticks out. In Serbian "biti Kurat" "biti kuronja" means hero, brave man, champion. It can also mean to have a big penis (kur), and so literally to stick out.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=85915234&postcount=150

In Serbian words for both luck and happiness are the same: "sreća". You can not be happy (srećan) unless you are lucky (srećan). Understanding of this relationship between luck and happiness is extremely important for understanding of the development of gods and religions. After realizing that there is a relationship between luck and happiness, people started wandering who decides who gets lucky and why. So they figured out that there must be some unseen force or creature which has the control over luck. So they invented gods as the ones who decide who is going to be lucky or unlucky. And this is my favorite bit: People created religions, as practices which if performed will please gods and make them bestow luck on those who perform the same pleasing religious rights. This is why all religious ceremonies involve some kind of sacrifice. Gain is linked with luck. You only gain if you are lucky. You loose if you are unlucky. If you want a big gain you need to suffer small loss. It is like giving a bit of luck back to the gods in exchange for a lot of luck. Very interesting and definitely worth exploring more.

Once a person discovers something which can benefit his survival and prosperity, he will use it. He is also most likely to only disclose it to the closest relatives and allies. This was the case in prehistory and is still the case today in an environment where multiple human groups are competing for the same resources. For instance if someone discovered how to make a spear, he would teach the members of his clan how to do it but not the members of the neighboring clan. Soon you would have a division into a spear people and the others. Spear people would as time passed become better and more skillful in making spears. They would use better stronger wood, they would make spears sharper. The spear people would become more successful in hunting and fighting. They would multiply. More spear people means more spears and more spears means more success in hunting and fighting with other human groups. The spear people can start to expand pushing and wiping out other people.

Soon enough the spear people wouldn't have to think about food gathering all the time. They would be able to use spears to kill large game which would provide them with lots of food and skin and fur.

The large game hunt probably looked like this:



Actually we know exactly that it looked like it, because we have large game hunt with spears on film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxPtb397Dxc

Spear completely changed human world. People would as a consequence have more time to think about things like inventing and making shelters, clothes, footwear. They would, because of this, be eventually able to move into the areas which require clothes and shelter in order to survive, but which are empty of people and full of food. They would have more time for leisure and art and music...All along, the knowledge in both making and using the spears as well as the experience of success and power that spears bring, would be passed and accumulated from generation to generation orally and genetically through epigenetic changes.

sinisa

Thanks for reading.

I am aware of the work of both Jovan Deretic and Anatolii Klesov. They both point at very important fact that in Serbia we have unbroken cultural, linguistic and genetic continuity through R1a population, lasting at least 12,000 years. This is why we can use Serbian language and culture to answer some of the oldest cultural and linguistic questions that are still unanswered. But Serbians are a mix. We have pretty much every old Y haplogroup present in Serbia in significant numbers. Most importantly we have huge I2a population which is probably indigenous to the Balkans, and which has also preserved their own culture and language and have added it to the mix which is today Serbian culture and Language. We also have large old R1b population in Eastern Serbia which has also added their culture and language to the Serbian mix.


This is why I have a problem with things like: "Serbian gene is 12,000 years old and comes from the son of Noah".

Firstly what does Noah have to do with any of this? Second, this statement implies that Serbs are R1a population, which they are, but only partially. If Serbs were pure R1a race, then Serbian language and culture would not have been so interesting. It is the fact that Serbs are such a mix of races, and that Serbian culture and language are such a mix of cultures and languages, which makes Serbian (Croatian, Bosnian) language and culture almost like a living cultural Roseta stone. People in Serbia, preserved some of the oldest cultural and linguistic traits which have been lost in other parts of Eurasia populated by R1a, R1b and I2 people. We have the same situation in Irish culture and language. It also hides some of the oldest I2a, R1a, R1b cultural and linguistic layers still existing in the world. This is why when we cross reference Irish and Serbian culture and language we come up with almost like a code which we can use to decipher things from these ancient cultures.

Some interesting words:

Irish

Mol, Molaim, Moladh - commend,commend,nominate,propose, praise,recommend, suggest

Slavic

Mol-im te bože - I beg you, I praise you god
Mol-ba - Pleading
Molad je (e) - c - recommended is - a commendation given to someone
Mol-io bih - If i could suggest

Lithuanian

maldà 'plea', maldýti, maldaũ - to plead, to beg,
mel̃sti, meldžiù - to request, to pray,

Hittite

mald, maltāi - request; speak,

Armenian

mаɫtΏеm - I beg,

Old High German meldôn - to announce.

What could be the root of these words?

I would suggest root "mol" meaning to beg, ask. What do we get when we apply this root to the above words:


Irish

Mol - plea (what we ask for)

Moladh - mol + je + da = plea (what we ask for) + is, approve + give

Slavic

Molim = mol + je + m = plea (what we ask for) + is + mine

Molba = molva, molve = mol + va, ve = plea (what we ask for) + said

Moladjec = mol + je + da + je + s = plea (what we ask for) + is + give + is + with

Lithuanian:

malda = mol + da = plea (what we ask for) + give
malditi = mol + da + ti = plea (what we ask for) + give + you
melsti = mol + es + ti = plea (what we ask for) + is, approve, give + you

Hittite

mald, maltai = mol + da, daj = plea (what we ask for) + give

Armenian

mаɫtΏеm = mol + to + e + m = plea (what we ask for) + that + is + mine

Old High German meldôn (> High German melden)

meldon, melden = mol + dan, den = plea (what we ask for) + is given

Do you see how all the words have roots in Slavic? Meaning all the words can be assembled from Slavic base blocks. How old are these words, when we find constructs based on these words in Hittite language? These root words are still preserved in Slavic languages, but lost in other languages which only preserved the compound words based on root "mol" (to ask, to beg)?

The only other non Slavic language which seems to have preserved the root is Irish...

So which old language do these words come from? R1a or I2?

No. It does not seem that will is borrowed from Serbian.

Great argument.

I did say the I2a languages...

Ezra can I ask you not to copy the whole chapters just so you can say things like:

No. Absolutely not. Cromlech comes from the welsh words crom and leach.

Why? Give me a reason why your explanation is better than mine? What do these two word mean?

On more constructive note, I just want to post this image, in order to explain why I believe that we can still find traces of old languages and cultures in modern languages and cultures. Hopefully the picture is worth thousand words, and will explain what I mean that roots are found in Serbian and why this is possible. Basically it all depends which languages were mixed to create which language. Serbian just so happened to be a mix of some really old languages. Pure luck really.



Nuclear family was the place where original language was created. This is also the place where language is learned.
As family grows, nuclear family becomes extended family, then clan, then tribe, then nation. All along the same language is used between members of the members of this growing family to keep communication going. Family is preserved through communication and cooperation and for that you need a common language.
If all these people are linked genetically, through father to son inheritance, I believe that we can talk about genetic languages. R1a languages, R1b languages, I2a languages...As genetic tribes mix, genetic languages mix...If genetic tribes disappear genetic language might disappear as well, unless it was passed onto in full or in part to some other genetic tribe. Today's languages are evolved mix of old languages. This is why we can find ancient language structures and words in modern languages. Serbian language is a mix of R1a, I2a, E1b, R1b...languages. Irish language is a mix of R1b, I2a, I1, R1a...languages. But Russian is a mix of R1a and N languages. Spanish is a mix of R1b, E1b...languages. Basque is pretty much pure R1b language. This is why we can find certain linguistic traits in Serbian and Irish but not in other Slavic languages or Atlantic (or as you know them Celtic) languages. Because both Serbian and Irish share I2a language traits not present in say Welsh. This is why certain words are found in some Germanic and Slavic languages but not in French or other Germanic languages. Because the languages who have these common characteristics share common R1a language...

Hi all

I have recently been engaged in a conversation with someone, and I tried to find and send him a a particular list of correlated Irish and Serbian words which I published on this thread. It took me 3 days to find them

So I decided to reorganize the content I published here in order to be able to search it and cross reference it easier. I started a multipage blog:

http://oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.ie/

I will first publish everything from this thread, fix the broken links and stuff like that. I am then going to reorganize the posts into pages, add dictionary page, documents page, links page...

I will continue publishing new posts here as well as I would like to keep this thread as a discussion thread, but my blog will contain expanded versions of the posts plus additional material.

Hi all

I have added updated version of Cromlech, Dolmen, Crom, Hrom, Grom etymological discussion and the expanded discussion about the link between Crom Dubh Sunday, Lughnasad, St Ilios day and Perun day.

http://oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.ie/2014/04/cromlech-dolmen.html

Preusse, I did say that i was going to write new material here and that i am going to update existing material on my blog. I will continue writing new material here as soon as i have it. I don't know how I can make people reply. They are reading the thread as you can see from the read count.