this map is fascinating for a variety of reasons but the particular part of it that made me fall down a wikihole was the Cucuteni–Trypillian culture, which I was not familiar with. they seem pretty cool for a variety of reasons but what caught my eye is that they’d build a city, literally the largest city in the world they would build, and then they’d live there for about sixty years, and then they’d burn the fucker down. Why? Nobody knows. They’d move somewhere else and do the whole thing over, and then maybe move back and rebuild the first city identically on the same foundations. In one place they did that thirteen times.
this is some SCP type shit. what was chasing them. what happened in these cities that they needed burning down over and over
…what
right????? also i forgot my favorite part: we can’t get buildings to burn down this way. we’ve tried, nobody has actually managed to set a fire that leaves the same kind of rubble. it is not…traditional…fire
I remember hearing about them. Anyone know if they wrote down why or if we know what language they spoke?
@frostedroyaltea - Not a lot of luck so far. We did find some pictograms on ceramic, but it’s not clear if it’s an actual script or ‘simply’ a seal or labeling system. It seems likely they were not IE, but DNA analysis so far is inconclusive, looks like there were several tribes mixed together, or at the very least random individuals living with host communities. They were probably steppe people from Central Asia, but research is ongoing.
Also somewhat unrelated, but this story about a prehistorical battle that took place in modern Germany during the Bronze Age gives us a sense of just how much we don’t know or get wrong about prehistory. It was a complex time, full of people who did lots of different things, lived in cities of 40K+ dwellers, had trade exchanges with merchants from all over the world, and even archaeologists still don’t know 90% of what happened. And there is a surprising number of civilizations that just - disappeared into thin air, and we may never know what happened.
