I posit that there was a continental sized civilization and unified culture in Europe. With a peak population of 330k that reduced to 130k by 23k BP.The academia is outdated and says that the Gravettian/Mezinian cultures lived in small units of 20-35 people and were nomadic leaderless and egalitarian people. They were the same culture. Same behaviours. The LGM and it's consequences destroyed much of the evidence. Together they selectively buried people with instruments denoting specialization and inhabited the same permanent structures for over 400 years. The largest of the structures being used as social nodes where family groups met and formed relationships. Burial items are persistently found to be from between 200-900km away. This cultural uniformity is over 4000km. Geochemical sourcing discovered the stone tools they used were being distributed over thousands of km. The figurines they produced wear clothing and the evidence suggests the different clothing types they display tells us the different clans within the wider culture and also carry abstract meaning that would have been identifiable to anyone in the culture. They had an affinity for art for music and a respected wise shaman figure.Most shocking is how advanced they were. Published and rigorously tested findings give them >Numerical notation at 43k BP>Lunar notation 43-20k BP>Music 40k BP>Art 37k BP (so advanced it was controversial)>Dog domestication twice 36-33k BP>Textiles 30k BP>Net fishing 30k BP >Ceramics 26k BP>Cartography 25k BP>Cereal processing 23k BP>Architecture 17k BP (multi ton structures)>Stellar recording 17k BPThis civilization collapsed spectacularly and their technology remerged with the Natufians who used the same grinding stone tech 8k years after Ohalo II.
Like this idea a lot but doubt anything qualified as a civilization. Their cultures were probably way more sophisticated than we can infer just looking at their stone tools. Unrelated but reminds me of a podcast I listened to years ago about breathing techniques and how there might have been meditation practices as far back as the hunting and gathering days (in India). More sophisticated than cavemen with clubs doesn't equal advanced civilization though. But it's intriguing how widespread and for how long people were carving venus figurines though. There was something keeping at least their symbol totems uniform.
>>18543674I would be the first nigga to invent a SCYTHE I tell you what.Imagine bending over like that when all you need is a POLE to fix the blade on.
>>18544947Whoever invented the pole definitely got called a fag
>>18544943>Like this idea a lot but doubt anything qualified as a civilization.Read about the Sunghir burial 34000BP.>13000 ivory beads buried with a child. It has been established that it would have taken 1 hour to carve one bead. >6 years of work if working 40 hours a weekHunter gatherers?
>>18543674>civilizationsounds more like culture.
>>18545436>Hunter gatherers?With low population density and no pesky farmers stealing best land hunter-gatherer is much more time and cost effective at gathering food than farmers.
>>18545436Looked into this once, not about the Sunghir beads and that's early as fuck, but what Gravettians probably did is gather their tribes together annually to share stories and probably goods and services and probably to prevent extreme endogamy. So they'd go off in bands of I don't remember the number let's say 40, and then might meet up at Vestonice in the summer with 10x+ that number, 10+ groupings of 40 all having a little burning man at the solstice (maybe winter makes more sense). So if they had patriarch or matriarch or shaman who was good at predicting things, maybe all the sub-tribes would offer beads to them or their children or something. Pretty sure some Native Americans did this too. You can get what looks like 6 years of labor in a single burial this way.
If you include neolithic ones, people were at Venus carving for + or - a few 40,000 years. Technically kind of still are and the idea of mother earth hasn't really gone away, if that's one of the things Venuses symbolized. That's incredible.
