We have all been taught that the cradle of civilization was in the Middle East, but a prehistoric village in the south of France suggests that Europe has a rival claim… In November, 1985, Julia Roussot-Larroque, director of Historical Research for France’s Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), supervised what proved to be an unnerving discovery. At the excavation of a prehistoric site in Provence, some 50 kilometres northeast of Marseilles, there were uncovered the remains of small stone houses arranged as if on a street… French scientists concluded that the inhabitants had been a previously unknown people who had begun the tradition of “megalithic” structures… were carbon-14-dated to 7000-6000 BC.
...In August, 1999, in a discovery so recent it has not yet been published in scientific journals, let alone the popular press, a CNRS team excavated a prehistoric site at Viols-le-Fort some 60 airline kilometres north of Narbonne. They found the familiar Cardial stone houses, megalithic-style doorways and domesticated grains and sheep bones. The date? Two thousand years before any evidence of the Neolithic age in Asia Minor or Palestine: 10,000 BC…
Did the Neolithic arts of agriculture, animal domestication and village living come from Western Europe? Could even alphabetic writing have come from the West? If so, a fundamental reappraisal of Western civilization will shake our ideas of history during the next few years.
Warning: some of the book covers of his books have a bit of side view semi-nude female anatomy.
From his home page:
This man’s work significantly inspired the multi-racial and sexual coalition resulting in Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.
Considering most of his books and articles, according to these pages, have to do with Europeans and their presence in North America and ancient presence in Europe, I have no clue what that little quote is referring to.
I know nothing about Michael Bradley or his works. The article on Viols-le-Fort seems quite good and he does not seem to be source of the information in the article. Yes the quote makes no sense what so ever to either. You would think he would be pro-European given the first article on Viols-le-Fort. I have no idea what he is trying to say in the quote. The “The Iceman Inheritance” looks like it might be interesting.
Just read the Iceman Inheritance promo page. The guy is a self-hating Jew who has been involved in a lot of projects to benefit people of varying ethnicities in the Third World. Other Jews in the publishing industry screwed him over because, supposedly, the information in his book pegs most Jews today as being, of all things, descendants of Neanderthals. Oh, and Caucasians like us are aggressive, racist, and sexist because…of our experience during the last Ice Age.
All righty then…
Laurel
who is not sure how much trust she would put in the pronouncements of this individual…and who now knows where that statement on his home page came from: the machinations of an over fertile mind…
Well “interesting” was not the best choice of words for Michael Bradley. I do read a lot stuff very quickly and come back to them later to finish. It is a shame the first article on Viols-le-Fort is good. Sadly I cannot seem to much about the site at Viols-le-Fort that is not in French.
Here are some good pictures of Viols-le-Fort and other ancient buildings in France:
This image from the page you cite, Fichier:Capitelle gard2.jpg, looks similar in many respects to the ancient beehive houses of Ur, the region Abraham came from. Another French stone house that looks similar to the beehive houses of Ur, and this ancient guy was smart enough to build a stair up the side of the house…probably to make it easier to repair. Of course, when one imagines the amount of time the buildings have survived in all these locations, it’s quite remarkable. Our current model American houses would probably be considered disposable by these people.
In Florence, Italy, people still live in apartment buildings over 700 years old.
That’s interesting in and of itself, without the whole construct Bradley ladles on top of the discoveries.
So, Faust, you got me thinking about the Stone Age in Sweden. I came up with this article, published in 1899, which is actually very interesting.
THE Swedes, although the oldest and most unmixed race in Europe, realized very late the necessity of writing chronicles or reviews of historic events. Thus the names of heroes and kings of the remotest past are helplessly forgotten, and lost also the history of its earliest religion and institutions.
It is true that some skulls, very much like those of the Laps, have also been found in the graves of the Stone Age; but it must be borne in mind that these burial places, impressive through their size and the amount of work and mechanical skill necessary for their erection, can be believed to have been originally intended only for kings or chieftains, and their families. It was probably a custom, as in later heathen times, to bury with such distinguished people a number of slaves, dead or alive. The presence of skulls of a non-Scandinavian type can thus be explained, without the necessity of accepting the theory of an early mixture of two races.
The article as a whole is very interesting; what I find particularly interesting is how casually, in 1899, authors mentioned race and whether races in the area mixed or did not mix. Try mentioning that today…
Yes those ancient stone buildings are remarkable. All of the houses were built without mortar, the stones were just carefully fitted and stacked together. I seem to recall the Stone Age people of the British Isles also built some quite good stone houses too.
“The Germanic people: their origin, expansion, and culture”(1960) by Francis Owen has lot of good information on Stone Age Europe. Also “The Aryans: A Study of Indo-European Origins”(1926) by Vere Gordon Childe is quite good.
The Journal of African History, Vol. 12, No. 1. (1971), pp. 1-9.
“In Nubia, according to the analysis of physical anthropology, the original Europoid (Caucasoid) stock of the population was several times overrun by Negroid waves, flowing from the South. Negroes and Negroids penetrated to Egypt only sporadically, and their frequency, uneven according to time, place and the diagnostical knowledge of the investigator, has been estimated as 1 to 5 per cent. An increase in the number of Negroes was observed only in the New Kingdom, in connexion with the expansion of Egyptian domination to the south. From that time onwards, they were pictured as symbols of the south. The perfect portrayal of their morphological features shows that the Egyptian artists knew them very well.”
“By the individual analysis of nasal measurements and indices of the first Badarian series in comparison with the mixed Europoid-Negroid series from Wadi Qitna in Nubia (fourth-fifth century AD), with the Europoid series from Manfalout in Upper Egypt (Ptolemaic period) and with a series of recent Nilotes, I came to the conclusion that the distribution of the Badarian skulls extends from the Europoid to the Negroid range.”
“Of the total 117 skulls, 15 were found to be markedly Europoid, 9 of these were of the gracile Mediterranean type, 6 were of very robust structure reminiscent of the North African Cromagnon type. Eight skulls were clearly Negroid… We may conclude that the share of both components was nearly the same, with some overweight to the Europoid side.”
“In some of the Badarian crania hair was preserved, thanks to good conditions in the desert sand. In the first series, according to the descriptions of the excavators, they were curly in 6 cases, wavy in 33 cases and straight in 10 cases. They were black in 16 samples, dark brown in 11, brown in 12, light brown in 1 and grey in 11 cases.”
A recent report of an ancient textile facility, of sorts, is turning heads. Sifting through the debris on a cave floor in the Republic of Georgia, scientists recently discovered evidence that the early cave dwellers processed textiles in the cave. While searching for ancient pollen grains, they found tiny flax fibers in the dirt. Some of these fibers were woven, some were cut, and some were dyed black, gray, turquoise, or pink. They also discovered evidence that these people were processing fur (for clothing) and animal hides.
Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.
For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.
