My European Family

by Karin Bojs

There are also a few DNA researchers in the Pilsen lecture theatre who use a more sophisticated technology. By analysing nuclear DNA, they are able to obtain a more complete picture of the genetic history of individuals and populations. The researchers who analyse nuclear DNA believe that the picture given by those who work on mitochondrial DNA is oversimplified, too black and white. They are keen to emphasise the nuances that only their technology can detect. One German researcher working on nuclear DNA is particularly contemptuous of those whose purview is mito­chondrial DNA. I get talking to him on the tram back into the city centre once the seminar is over for the day.

  ‘Guido Brandt is an idiot,’ he says. I am rather taken aback at his plain speaking, given that we have only been acquainted for a few minutes. My impression of Guido Brandt, a German doctoral student working with the Hungarians, is that he is anything but an idiot. It is just that he uses a comparatively simple DNA technology. The strength of Brandt’s findings, and those of the Hungarians, is not the technical sophistication of their DNA technology. It is the large number of samples from locations and periods that are critical for the dissemination of agriculture in Europe.

  ***

  A few weeks later I gain a deeper understanding of the conflict. I visit Guido Brandt in his home town, the German city of Mainz. I interview him in the chilly hut where he and his fellow doctoral student have been working since the university closed their institution.

  Only a few weeks previously, Brandt was the first author of a study published in Science. Yet the university chose not to issue a press release. Instead, the press release came from a university in Australia, where a number of co-authors are based, and the National Geographic Society, which had provided financial support. The information department at Mainz’s Johannes Gutenberg University even denies there is anyone called Guido Brandt at the university, although I have enquired after him on several occasions.

  It transpires that he and a fellow doctoral student found themselves caught between two feuding professors. The two young postgraduates made a tactical error in betting on the wrong horse.

  The university’s press department also denies that the Johannes Gutenberg University now has anything to do with Kurt Alt, the former professor of anthropology in question. But he, too, exists nonetheless, and I meet him in the rooms where he and his secretary are in the process of winding up his long career. They are busy trying to empty a set of bookshelves that go all the way up to the ceiling and packing tons of books into boxes for removal.

  The interview is not particularly informative. Alt, who was a dentist before making a career in anthropology, is clearly not very knowledgeable about DNA technology and the latest archaeological findings. Yet he was a pioneer in the field, being quick to recognise the opportunities it presented and to employ people with more extensive knowledge of DNA.

  That was where it all went wrong. Alt and a newly recruited expert fell out in less than half a year. ‘I’ve never seen a personal relationship break down so quickly,’ says one of the researchers who saw it happen. That researcher has now left the whole toxic DNA field and is working in another field at a museum in Mainz. Another former member of the team has moved to Australia.

  But Guido Brandt and his fellow doctoral student are still there, working away in a chilly hut and trying to bring their theses to a successful conclusion in spite of everything. And it all seems to be going very well. The study recently published in Science, of which Brandt is the first author, deals with 364 individuals from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age in the German region of Saxony-Anhalt. It covers more individuals whose DNA has been analysed than all the archaeological studies ever published taken together. Even if his work is restricted to low-resolution analyses of mitochondrial DNA, it is still quite an achievement.

  The results confirm what earlier, less extensive studies have shown, as do the results from Hungary: all the early hunters belong to haplogroup U. They are classed as U5, like me, or U4 or U8. About 7,500 years ago, agriculture reached the region that is now Saxony-Anhalt. Archaeologists were already aware of this, partly because the linear pottery that gave its name to the Linear Pottery (LBK) culture made its appearance at exactly that time. Undoubtedly, local hunters would have joined them in the course of the journey. But it is only the lineages including haplogroups H and K that appear to have come all the way from the cradle of agriculture in Syria.

  I also meet the ‘winning horse’ – the Johannes Gutenberg University’s new professor of anthropology, Joachim Burger. His office is on the edge of Mainz’s botanical gardens, in an attractive large building that the university recently had built for him. One of his young students shows me to his study and knocks respectfully on the door.

  Joachim Burger’s face stiffens when he hears I have also met Kurt Alt and Guido Brandt. He makes it clear to me that he has no intention of forgiving Brandt for what he regards as treacherous behaviour. In other respects he is friendly. He has made tea for us and lights a nightlight to keep the teapot warm. He gives me tips about wine cellars and restaurants in Mainz. The situation feels almost like a date, rather than an interview.

  Naturally he wants to show me his newly built lab, which he describes as the most advanced DNA laboratory in the whole of Germany. But it is late afternoon, and the alarm system is so complex that we are unable to enter the lab. So Burger shows me a film about it instead, set to his own music; composing is his hobby.

  Burger is a successful researcher by any standards. He collaborates with the main players in his field and has published a number of studies in leading journals. Some of his results, pertaining to the DNA of domestic animals and people, are dealt with elsewhere in this book. I will confine myself here to the study published in Science on the same day as Brandt and Alt’s work – the one that the university’s information department chose to focus on exclusively in its press release.

  Burger says he is not really in favour of researchers analysing mitochondria in isolation, now that there are so many better methods. Yet the study he published in Science deals with mitochondria. More specifically, it covers mitochondria in combination with isotopes. It is very ingenious and interesting.

  Comparing different isotopes of carbon, nitrogen and sulphur provides insight into people’s diet. Burger and his team examined 29 individuals buried in a cave called Blätterhöhle. They date back to the time just before agriculture arrived in the region that is now Germany and a few millennia after that.

  The oldest individuals are quite clearly hunters. The isotopes show they lived mainly on fish and meat from wild animals, and they all had mitochondria belonging to haplogroup U. Eight of the individuals from more recent times are quite clearly farmers. They belong to typical haplogroups such as H and J, and the isotopes indicate that they ate meat from domestic animals such as sheep and cattle.

  Hitherto, the picture was blurred by 12 individuals who lived at the same time as the farmers and were buried in the same cave, but whose mitochondria were typical of hunters, belonging to groups such as U5. Now the isotopes show that they actually lived different lives from the farmers, despite being buried at the same spot. The hunters lived mainly on fish.

  Burger’s study thus indicates that groups of hunters and newly arrived farmers lived side by side for at least a few thousand years. They clearly had a good deal of contact with each other. Apart from the fact that they used the same cave as their burial ground, the farmers seem to have obtained all their stone tools from the hunters.

  Over centuries and millennia, hunters and farmers inter­mingled and merged. In addition, new waves of immigrants arrived. Guido Brandt’s major Science study of the mitochondria of people living in Saxony-Anhalt over four millennia shows clear signs of such changes. It points to subsequent waves of farming people who migrated into the region from the north and the east.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Sowing and Sunrise

  I travel to the German city of Halle to learn more about the first farmers in Germany, those
known as the people of the Linear Pottery (LBK) culture, after the patterns on their pottery.

  The Museum of Prehistory in Halle, founded in 1819, is said to be the oldest of its kind in the world. A solid edifice with huge sandstone pillars, it embodies the weight of tradition. Though the building itself is old, the displays are state of the art, accessible and based on sound educational principles.

  One of the display cases contains a small wooden model of a typical building from the time of the Linear Pottery culture. It is a wooden longhouse built on posts, its outer walls attractively decorated with red and white zigzag patterns. Pressing a button next to the display case brings forth sounds that evoke life in the longhouse: intermingling voices, children’s laughter, millstones grinding, the lowing of cattle and the cries of a goat being slaughtered.

  A similar scene is depicted in a large picture on the wall painted by a talented artist attached to the museum. It shows the farmers of the Linear Pottery culture clad in simple hide garments, with red patterns on both their clothes and their skin. Bearded men are slitting a goat’s throat. Men and women alike have long hair. Dogs, cows, sheep and goats wander about freely, but the people can avoid their animals by climbing into their stilt-house. Its walls are adorned with the skulls of cattle and geometric patterns painted in red pigment.

  Bernd Zich, an archaeologist and the director of one of the museum’s departments, guides me through the exhibitions and tells me about the first farmers in the region we now know as Saxony-Anhalt.

  They arrived 7,500 years ago. The traces they left behind them stand in strong contrast to those of the hunters already living in the area. From the very beginning the farmers were fully equipped with a complete ‘package’ of agriculture. They kept cattle, sheep and goats, and they grew wheat and leguminous crops.

  Zich believes the conceptual world of the farmers of the Linear Pottery culture was very much based on astronomy. Growing crops made it especially important to keep track of the sun and the solar year. They needed to know the right time for sowing. As farmers, they needed to plan ahead far more than the hunters had done. It was not enough just to rely on the path of the moon, as the lunar year does not correspond exactly to the solar year. Relying solely on the path of the moon would put you a whole month out after three years. That was why the vernal equinox, the summer solstice, the autumn equinox and the winter solstice were hugely significant.

  In the areas inhabited by the farmers of the Linear Pottery culture, archaeologists have found the remains of several large structures that they call solar observatories. The best known of these is Goseck. It has been reconstructed to show how it once looked. On my second visit to Halle, I hire a car and head out there.

  It is late November, with about four weeks to go until the winter solstice. The weather is cold and windy. First of all I visit the castle, which houses a small museum. The lady selling tickets at the entrance looks almost shocked to have a visitor on a Sunday in late November. There are no other visitors to be seen inside – a pity, as there is much to be learned here about the world’s oldest signs of astronomical observation. Goseck is considerably older than the Egyptian pyramids and its better-known English counterpart, Stone­henge. On a map, researchers have marked all the solar observatories that have been identified from the time of Europe’s first farmers – a dozen of them. The one furthest south is in Hungary, while the most northerly one lies outside Berlin.

  All the observatories resemble one another, though there are minor differences. The basic pattern comprises a series of circles – an embankment on the outside, followed by a deep ditch, with concentric rings of tall oak posts set close to each other inside. At Goseck, the outer bank seems to have been used as a burial place. Archaeologists have discovered several vestiges of human skeletons interred in the embankment. At other points in the circle, people lit fires and buried objects. Archaeologists believe the centre of the circle was used to make offerings. A drawing exhibited in the castle museum depicts people about to sacrifice an ox at sunrise, on the morning of the winter solstice.

  After a dose of theory in the little castle museum, I drive a few kilometres to the actual structure, which lies in the middle of a large, windswept field. It is a few hundred metres’ walk, and the winds are chilly. No doubt it would sometimes have been at least as cold at the time when Germany’s first farmers used the observatory; after all, its raison d’être was to let them know when the winter solstice had arrived.

  The circular embankment surrounding the structure at Goseck has a diameter of about 75 metres (245 feet). There is an opening at the northernmost point, where I enter – just as the first farmers must have done for their sacrificial ceremonies. Their dwellings were due north of the observatory, which appears to have served as both temple and burial place.

  There are similar openings to the south-east and the south-west. This means I can stand in the centre of the circle and look straight out in three directions: north, south-east and south-west. Today you can see a house through one opening and a few trees through the other. But when the observatory was in use there must have been an unobstructed view of both sunrise and sunset.

  At the time of my visit, the weather is not only cold and windy, but clouded-over into the bargain. Moreover, I’m here in the middle of the day, not at sunrise, so some of the charm of the spot is lost on me. The castle museum has several pictures by an expert photographer on display. That photographer – unlike me – timed their visit to ensure clear weather and the right time of day; the results are incomparably beautiful. The first rays of the rising sun, pointing towards a rosy horizon, gleam through the narrow gaps between the oaken posts. At that precise moment, you know the darkness of winter has begun to decline, and spring is on its way back. Once the moon has run its course a few times, it will be time to start sowing again.

  Clearly, early hunting peoples also kept a close watch on the starry sky, not least in order to determine their position and direction. But it was probably the first farmers who started a cult of the sun and moon. People in today’s Europe still experience aspects of that cult. We continue to celebrate the turning points of the solar year. For instance, our main feast day – Christmas, or Yule – is rooted in ancient festivities associated with the sun. The Bible is silent about the season of Christ’s birth. It was early Christians who decided in the third century AD that the day of his birth should be celebrated at the midwinter solstice, on the same date as an ancient feast in honour of the sun.

  Researchers have calculated the average speed at which farmers made their way towards Europe from the heartlands of agriculture on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris. If their speed had been unvarying, they would have moved about a kilometre (⅔ mile) a year. But that figure is misleading, as they are more likely to have migrated by leaps and bounds. Sometimes they moved very quickly, while at other times they remained in the same place for a long time.

  The people of the Linear Pottery culture covered the distance from the banks of the Danube in Hungary to the area around Halle in Saxony-Anhalt, in central Germany, within just 300 years – about 10 generations. Throughout that time, and for a further thousand years, the Linear Pottery people settled in locations rich in loess. Loess is a soft, deep and fertile soil comprising fine particles blown by the wind during the last Ice Age.

  At the time when the first farmers came to Europe, lush forests of hardwood broadleaved trees flourished in areas with loess soil. Lime trees, elms, ash trees and oaks had been shedding their nutrient-rich leaves for millennia. This foliage had rotted, forming layers of the finest mulch a metre (3¼ feet) thick. The dense foliage of the treetops kept out the light, so there was practically nothing growing on the ground apart from spring flowers such as hepaticas (blue anemones) and wood anemones. Basically, all the farmers needed to do was cut down the trees, press seeds into the earth around the stumps and leave them to grow. Experiments show that a skilled person can cut down a substantial tree in under an hour using a flint axe. />
  However, the boundary between loess and non-loess soils runs through northern Poland and northern Germany. Here moraine takes over, with thin sandy earth and clayey soils that are full of nutrients, but hard. The farmers stopped at this boundary for over 1,000 years. Different methods were needed to be able to grow crops on the soils further north.

  Thin sandy soils lend themselves to swiddening (slash-and-burn cultivation), a technique based on felling the trees in winter, burning everything on the ground in spring, sowing and harvesting. Crops flourish in the ash, which is rich in nutrients, but only for a few years. Later on, weeds and undergrowth take over and livestock can graze on the cleared land, while the people move on into the forest and create new clearings.

  Clayey soils can be excellent for growing crops for those with access to wooden scratch ploughs (ards). But ploughs do not plough by themselves; they need something to pull them. About 6,000 years ago oxen took on far greater significance. This can be seen from a series of finds of statues and images featuring them. Their sudden importance may be linked with the plough and the wheel.

  Bernd Zich of the Museum of Prehistory in Halle found the world’s oldest known wheel tracks as a young man working on excavations in Flintbek in the north German state of Schleswig-Holstein. The tracks are an estimated 5,500 years old. Archaeologists in Flintbek had already found the traces of a plough. Similar tracks – up to 5,700 years old – have now also been discovered in Poland, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden.

  The oldest known image of a wheeled vehicle adorns a 5,600-year-old terracotta vessel in Poland. This was discov­ered in excavations at Bronocice and is now kept in Cracow’s archaeological museum.

  Zich believes that oxen and wheeled vehicles became so important that they rapidly acquired a mythological signi­ficance. He interprets some of the stone circles made by late Stone Age farmers as a kind of representation of such vehicles. When I first visited the Halle museum, the staff were in the process of setting up an exhibition about a stone circle representing a wagon.