By Predictive History in The story of CIVILIZATION — 10 Sep 2024

Civilization #4: The Paradise Lost of Marija Gimbutas

The story so far is that 200,000 years ago, we humans, Homo sapiens, were born in Africa. Then, about 50,000 years ago, because of climate change, we started to spread around the world. We went into Europe, then into Asia, then we crossed the Bering Strait into North America, then South America, and from Asia into Australia. 50,000 years ago, there were about a million of us all around the world.

The argument I'm making is that from the very beginning, we were religious. We know from the Ice Age cave paintings and from places like Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük that we had a religious belief that told us who we are and what we're doing here. As we discussed, this religious belief is animistic, meaning we believe that we all come from one source: the mother goddess. We are all the children of the mother goddess, including animals and plants. Because of this, we were a very compassionate people that were egalitarian—there was no difference between men and women. We were peaceful. There was some violence, but we didn't really fight wars. And we were artistic; we celebrated the mother goddess through paintings and artwork.

The question then is, if we were like this for most of human history, how is it that today we have war, private property, and patriarchy, where men make all the rules and women have little agency and power? I will explain how this happened. We will discuss the height of this early civilization, which the anthropologist Marija Gimbutas called Old Europe.

The Proto-Indo-European Puzzle

To begin the story, I want to tell you what we've discovered in terms of linguistics. For many hundreds of years, people have speculated that maybe English, German, Greek, and Latin all came from the same language that has been lost to us. This is a language we call Proto-Indo-European. Through decades of strenuous research, linguists have been able to conclusively prove that all these languages we speak in Europe all come from the same mother language. But not only that, but also Iranian and Indian languages like Hindi all come from Proto-Indo-European.

We know this because there are many words that sound the same in many languages. For example, "father" in English is father, but in Latin, it's pater, which is where we get the word paternity. In Greek, it's patér; in Persian, pedar; and in Hindi, pitr. The word "father" seems to come from just one word in all these different languages. Then you look at the word "mother": mother, mater, mētēr, mādar, mātā. It also sounds very similar.

If you look at the English word for "two," the number two, you can draw a schematic that shows how in all these languages, the word "two" derived from just one word: dwóh.

Linguists have been able to piece together this Proto-Indo-European language. We've also been able to figure out how this language spread. There are two hypotheses: either the language spread from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) or from Ukraine, basically Russia. We know it spread all around the world, covering basically all of Europe, including Iran and India. This was the first language of all these languages that we speak today in most of Asia and all of Europe.

The problem for linguists is, how do you piece together a language that is lost to us? What linguists did, in a very slow process, is they looked at all the words that seem to come from the same root word in different languages. They discovered that there are certain words that are distinct to this first language.

Bee
Cow
Ox
Ram
Ewe
Lamb
Pig, piglet
Sour milk
Whey
Mead
Field
Dog
Sheep
Wool
Textiles
Scratch
Plow
Oxen
Yoke
Grain
Shaft
Furrow
Wrestling
Grinding
Pestle
Household

What do you notice about these words? What patterns do you see? These words tell us about the culture and lifestyle of the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

Reconstructing a Lost Culture

From these words, we're able to figure out four things about the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

They have a word for "wheel." Unlike other cultures, these people have five different words for "wheel." What this tells us, what we can guess, is that these people, whoever they were, invented the wheel.
They have words for dairy products. They have words for cow and milk. This is important and strange. For most of human history, we were lactose intolerant, meaning we did not have the ability to drink milk. So these people not only invented the wheel, but they changed their biological system so that they became lactose tolerant. Whoever these people are, they are the first people to drink cow's milk.
They don't have many agricultural terms. Maybe they farmed, but they weren't focused on farming, whereas other cultures were.
They have words for "horse." This is important because it tells us that they were the first to domesticate the horse, meaning they could control the horse. This is significant because, throughout history, if horses see a human, they run away. That's the best way to survive. This is what we call excitability. It took thousands of years for the Proto-Indo-Europeans to domesticate the horse, which means they could ride the horse.

This was a theory. What's interesting is that archaeologists started to dig up things and discover the linguists were right. By studying the language, the linguists had four hypotheses, and archaeologists were able to provide evidence that this was true. The most exciting thing is that for the past 5 to 10 years, advances in genetics and DNA technology have allowed us to look at the DNA of these skeletons and confirm a lot of these hypotheses. For the longest time, we guessed that the Proto-Indo-Europeans existed, but now we have conclusive scientific evidence that they did exist and who they were.

Archaeological evidence shows wheels were invented about 3500 BCE in this area, basically Russia. Because "wheel" is part of Proto-Indo-European, then this language, whoever started to first speak it, must have been speaking after 3500 BCE.

We have a lot of words for milk: to milk, sour milk, buttermilk, cheese, cow. Dairy products were a very important part of their culture and their diet. DNA evidence shows us that these people, who we call the Yamnaya, were able to develop enzymes that allowed them to be lactose tolerant. In about 4500 BCE, very few people could drink milk. By the time of the Yamnaya, about a thousand years later, they could basically all drink milk. And because they could drink milk, what happens to their body? They get taller. We know from the evidence that these people are taller than everyone else. In fact, because they drank milk and ate a lot of protein, they were on average 20 centimeters taller than farmers.

A Note on Modern Milk

The milk we drink today is very different from the milk that they drank. The milk they drank came from cows that were raised in grasslands, so it was all-natural. The milk we drink today comes from cows that are raised in factories, and we inject a lot of drugs and hormones into these cows. If you drink natural milk, your bones will be healthier, and you'll grow taller. That's just biological evidence. But the milk we drink today has a lot of chemicals, and the sourcing of the milk is from factories. The reason why is we want to make the milk cheaper, but it's worse for you. In other words, if you really want to be healthy, you should go buy a cow and drink from that cow.

What's really interesting is the domestication of the horse. There's a gene in the horse for excitability; the horse is programmed to run away if it sees danger. It took about 3,000 years, from 5500 BCE until 2200 BCE, to domesticate the horse because it's very hard to make horses not run away. Further evidence for the domestication of the horse is that we've been able to dig up skeletons. What we see is the skeletons of the Yamnaya are different from other skeletons because they ride horses, which changes the curvature of the skeleton. The evidence is pretty overwhelming.

Eventually, they were able to put all the pieces together. They put the horse and the wheel together and created the wagon. The wagon meant they could move from place to place, and they became what we call nomadic pastoralists. The way they make a living is they have cows and sheep, and they take the animals from place to place to eat the grass. They're able to do that because they can put all their belongings into a wagon and move. These are the people who were the first speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and eventually, they were able to spread their language all around the world, from Europe to India to Iran.

Conquest or Diffusion?

We are able to confirm that these people actually existed and that they did spread their language around the world. Now, the debate is: how did they do so? There are two sides to the argument.

The first side believes these people were conquerors. Think Genghis Khan and the Mongols; they went around and were able to spread their language by conquering other people. Think of the European conquest of North and South America, where the English, Spanish, and French went and eradicated the local population.

The second belief is that it was not violent; it was just cultural diffusion. This means I came to your country or your village, and I was able to influence you and convince you that my language is superior. Think of English, where China has not been conquered by the West, but people want to learn English because they think that learning English will give them more life opportunities.

So there are two sides of the debate: one of conquest or one of cultural diffusion. This debate went on for a long time, and for most of that time, we believed it was cultural diffusion. But now, for the past 5 to 10 years, we have overwhelming DNA evidence that it was, in fact, conquest. It was a genocide. It was a violent conquest.

How can we tell the difference between conquest and diffusion?

If I conquer you, I eradicate your genes. I kill you. Therefore, your genes do not come into the present day. Whereas if it's diffusion, your genes are still around. A lot of the earlier genes have been eradicated; therefore, it must have been a violent conquest.

Next, we will look at the Europe before the conquest.

Old Europe: Before the Conquest

A lot of what we know about this period of Europe comes from a very famous anthropologist, Marija Gimbutas. The Ice Age ended about 12,000 years ago. The planet was warming, which allowed for agriculture. We also know that agriculture started in Anatolia (Turkey), Egypt, and Mesopotamia. This region was the first to warm up, but it also had better soil than other places. They discovered farming in this region, and then about 6,500 BCE, agriculture started to spread around the world to Europe and then over to England.

What propelled this migration from Anatolia to Europe? A good guess is war, but we don't have any evidence of war around this time. Another explanation is climate change. The weather became a lot cooler during this time, making it harder for people to farm. Also, they had been farming for a long time in this area, which meant that the soil was no longer as good as before. So you had these massive migrations of families into Europe because Europe at this time was becoming warmer, which allowed people to start to grow crops.

In about 6,500 BCE, people started to move from Anatolia into this area, and because they were moving, they brought with them their religion. Remember, the religion of Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük is one of the mother goddess giving life to everything. Because of that, we know that the people in this area were mainly egalitarian, peaceful, and artistic.

There were two massive migrations into Europe, all caused by climate change. The first migration was farmers. The second migration was pastoralists. If you look at the DNA of people today, what you will see is that around 4500 BCE, most people in Europe had genes that were a mix of farmers who came from Anatolia as well as hunter-gatherers who were there originally. But then, after 3,000 BCE, you have this green component come in, and the green represents the Yamnaya, the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

Marija Gimbutas, an anthropologist originally from Lithuania who worked at Harvard and UCLA, did decades of research into Old Europe. Her conclusion is that Old Europe was conquered by the Yamnaya people. This is what we know as the Kurgan hypothesis.

We know the burials of the farmers are very different from the burials of the Yamnaya people. The major difference is this: the people who were farmers are buried together, but the people of the Yamnaya are buried alone. Not only are they buried alone, but they're buried with weapons and with cattle and horses. What we can guess from this is that the farmers were people who did not have private property and who were egalitarian and peaceful because they didn't have any weapons. The Yamnaya were the complete opposite. These were warriors who believed in private property and who were male-dominated.

For the longest time, this is something that Marija Gimbutas argued, and she was laughed at. Why was she laughed at? She was saying that before these people came to Europe, Europe was a place that was basically governed by women, and it was artistic, peaceful, and egalitarian.

First of all, in universities, it's the men who are the professors and scholars. There were many men who thought, "There's no way women can be in charge. They're idiots. Why would women be in charge? They're stupid, they're useless. It's men who are always in charge." That's one reason. Another reason is that many people believe humans are inherently violent and have always had wars. The idea that for thousands of years Europe was peaceful can't be true because people are violent; humans are meant to go to war against each other. The third reason is that we think we are motivated by money. If you don't have money, then why would you do anything?

Marija Gimbutas had this radical idea that challenged the way that men saw the world. For men, men have always been in charge, there have always been wars, and there has always been wealth and money to motivate people to work hard. But Gimbutas said no, that's not true. For 4,000 years, from 6,500 BCE until about 2,500 BCE, before they were conquered, Europe was ruled by women. And because of that, Europe was peaceful, egalitarian, and artistic. This radical idea, which was laughed at for decades, has now been confirmed by DNA evidence, meaning that this has been proven true by science.

The Civilization of the Goddess

Let's look at what Gimbutas said. She's written quite a few books; two of her most famous are The Language of the Goddess and The Civilization of the Goddess. Her main theory is that Europe at that time had a main belief in the mother goddess who gives life to everything. She went and dug up their graves to look at their art, and she studied their language and their cultural practices.

This is her main argument about Old Europe, from The Civilization of the Goddess:

The Goddess in all her manifestations was a symbol of the unity of all life in nature. Her power was in water and stone, in tomb and cave, in animals and birds, snakes and fish, hills, trees, and flowers. Hence the holistic and mythopoeic perception of the sacredness and mystery of all there is on Earth. This culture took deep delight in the natural wonders of this world. Its people did not produce lethal weapons or build forts in inaccessible places, as their successors did, even when they were acquainted with metallurgy. Instead, they built magnificent tomb-shrines and temples, comfortable houses in moderately sized villages, and created superb pottery and sculptures. This was a long-lasting period of remarkable creativity and stability, an age free of strife. Their culture was a culture of art.

They spent all their time and energy producing art to celebrate the mother goddess, nature, and themselves. And this was remarkably peaceful and stable.

Rewriting History: The Origins of Writing

What was amazing about this culture is they invented writing. For the longest time, we believed that the Sumerians, who lived in Iraq, discovered writing and that writing came about for economic purposes. For example, if you are in Sumeria and you need to build a temple, you create writing. A clay tablet might indicate that a family of two will get two bushels of wheat and two vases of bread for their work today. We thought that people created writing for economic purposes in order to have an economy.

But what Gimbutas discovered is that we actually created writing before that for religious purposes. For example, an inscription on a sculpture might be saying that the mother goddess blesses this sculpture with her life and with the abundance of water in nature. Writing was a way to communicate with the mother goddess, a way to make their art divine and sacred. These people were so sophisticated they invented writing.

A Different Worldview

I want to go over some of the cultural differences between that culture and our culture to show how stark the difference is.

In today's culture, when we think of a snake, we think of poison and danger. We've been taught that snakes are dangerous. But in this culture, the snake was a symbol of life, energy, and regeneration because a snake can shed its skin. It was a most benevolent, not an evil, creature.

Another major difference is that in today's world, we think that white is good and black is bad. We can't imagine that black is good and white is bad. But in their culture, that's exactly what they believed. Black did not mean death or the underworld; it was the color of fertility, the color of damp caves and rich soil, of the womb of the Goddess where life begins. White, on the other hand, was the color of death, of bones. For most of human history, we thought that white was bad because it symbolized death and black was good because it symbolized life.

The idea of white being good and black being bad is a recent construct. It comes with the idea of race, which was invented about 200 years ago. Why? Because Europe was conquering the world, and they needed to justify why they were doing this. The theory was that they were a superior people, that their race was better than other races. Race is a recent cultural construct, and it was used to justify imperialism—the conquest of other people for no reason.

Sex, Power, and Community

The last thing I want to talk about, and this is actually the most controversial, is that back then, for most of human history, women had power and agency. What I mean by that is a woman's body was her body; she could choose to do whatever she wanted with it. In today's world, if a woman gets married, we assume the woman's body belongs to the husband. Only the husband can sleep with her. But for most of human history, this was not true.

Why do we have sexual taboos today? To shame women into "proper" behavior. For example, if a man sleeps with a thousand women, we think, "Great, he's a stud. He's good-looking, he's rich, he's tall." But if a woman sleeps with a thousand men, she's considered a bad person. She lacks ethics, morality, and character; therefore, we must avoid her. Why does this make any logical sense? We have this prejudice because men are considered superior to women, and therefore men want to control women. The best way to do that is by controlling the woman's body. This is just a cultural prejudice; there's no biological evidence this is true.

We have a lot of evidence that women want sexual agency. For example, if we look at Rhesus monkeys, females will aggressively seek males out for sex. It's the females that are proactive. You also look at bonobos. In bonobo societies, it's interesting because the females are in charge. The females have sex with each other. Why? For unity, to get along, to cooperate better. And then they will also have sex with men, but they initiate the sex.

At Harvard and UCLA, they discovered that the moment societies adopted plow agriculture, those societies had lower levels of female participation in politics and the labor force. Before, where men and women did the same work, both had the same political power. But once men showed that they could contribute more to society (through heavy plowing), men started to have more power. In other words, differences between men and women are not biological constructs; they are cultural constructs. For most of human history, men and women were equal.

There's a really fun book called by Christopher Ryan. What he argues is that for most of human history, women had sexual agency and multiple sexual partners. One piece of evidence is this: gorillas are the biggest primates, they're huge. It turns out their penises, when fully erect, are only 4 centimeters. Men, who are a lot smaller than gorillas, when erect, are almost four times as big. Why is this the case? One theory is that when women have multiple sexual partners, the man with the bigger penis will spread his genes forward. This is evidence that for most of human history, women have had multiple sexual partners.

Even when women had partners or a husband, they still had other sexual partners. In some societies, women have many husbands, usually brothers together. Why would they do this? We've been taught that we exist to spread our genes. If I marry someone, only if I'm sure that the offspring are mine will I work hard to ensure that the children are fed, raised properly, and educated. We've been taught that we first care about our genes. That's why men want to have as many wives and children as possible, and women want to find the wealthiest husband. But for most of human history, this was not true. Why?

It has to do with the idea of religion. First, if we all come from the mother goddess, we're all equal. It doesn't matter if it's my son or my friend's son; they're all the children of the mother goddess, and therefore I have a responsibility to protect the children. There is no concept of the individual; there's only a concept of community.

Second, they really didn't understand genes. They didn't understand that a child has 50% of genes from the mother and 50% from the father. How they understood it was that the woman gives life, and the man gives energy. If you believe this, then how would you get better energy? More men. If men are giving you energy, the more men you have sex with, the more energy you have. The evidence is if you look at the people in Melanesia, they believe that semen provided energy, so you need a lot of it. What would happen is that when a woman married a husband, the members of the husband's family would come and have sex with her that very night in order to get as much energy as possible from the family.

Is this backwards or primitive?

This is not about being "backwards" or "primitive." The reason why we care about sexual exclusivity more than any other people is the idea of private property. If I have a wife and three kids, I want my three kids to inherit my money. But if my wife sleeps with other people, then who gets the private property? We have the idea of sex as shameful because we live in a patriarchy.

One last piece of evidence is this: when the people don't know who the father is, everyone has a responsibility to protect the child. The story is this: a Christian missionary goes into a village and finds people just sleeping with each other. There's no marriage, no husband and wife. The priest says to them, "You people are shameless." And one of the villagers replies:

You have no sense. You French people love only your own children, but we all love all the children of our tribe.

Having multiple sexual partners is a way to build community for everyone. If you're a small community of maybe 15-20 people, it makes sense to make sure that everyone loves each other and everyone will protect all the children.

To illustrate this fact, we know that in World War II, American pilots were sleeping with each other's wives. The reason they were doing this is that American pilots were more likely to die in war than any other soldiers. Therefore, you slept with the wife of your colleagues in order to ensure that if you died, they would protect your children, because there was a good chance you would die. You were afraid that if you died, who was going to look after your wife and children? The way you build intimacy and community is by sleeping with each other's wives so that you become one big family.

Why Female Leadership Fosters Stability

Marija Gimbutas argued that Old Europe was ruled by women, or women were part of the political class, and because of that, Europe at that time was more peaceful and more stable than at any other time in its history. So the question then is, why would women as a political class be more effective than men as a political class? There are three reasons.

Women are more willing to cooperate and collaborate. Men are competitive; we like status and power. But women are much more humble, so they are much more likely to compromise and collaborate. If men are in control, the men want all the power. But if women are in control, they are much more willing to share power with men. Also, let's just say your community gets in conflict with another community. The women leaders of your community would get together with the women leaders of that community, and you could quickly negotiate a compromise. But men are competitive; they like status and face, so it's much more likely that when men start to negotiate, it becomes violent.
Women have more emotional intelligence. Men care about rules; women care more about you as a person. Therefore, women are much better at managing people.
Women use non-violent strategies for control. Men can use violence to coerce other people. Women are not as physically strong as men, so they have other strategies for controlling people. The two main strategies are gossip—basically talking about you behind your back, which forces you to conform—but also sex. If the women spread sex evenly among the men, the men have no reason to fight. And if a man does something bad against the community, the women can choose not to have sex with this man as a way to punish him. These are all very subtle and non-violent ways of forcing people to conform to the rules of the society.

How do you control society without violence?

The way you can control people is through the idea of shame, because everyone wants to get along. Here's a fun experiment: every time you walk the hallways and you see a girl wearing red, you tell her, "You look fantastic." I guarantee you, within two weeks, all the girls in the school will be wearing red. You're controlling people, but you're not using violence. You're using the idea of gossip, shame, and flattery, and that's what women do really well.

Before the conquest of the Yamnaya, Old Europe was a peaceful, egalitarian society. A lot of the reason why is that women were given higher status in society. It was women who made the rules, who were the political class. Because of that, women were able to use non-violent ways to control society, making it much more peaceful and stable.