European Pyramids (Including the Bosnian Ones)

[Sifaka317]

Evidence has been continually mounting for the past decade or so that a previously-unsuspected but semi-advanced culture or civilization, a sort of "Barbarian Splendour Super-Neolithic," existed in Europe and Asia, and especially off what are today their shorelines, at least 12,000 years ago.

But the question is whether these "pyramids" are proof of that or simply red herrings.

I only recently learned about the Vinca Culture(Transylvania/Hungary/Serbia), a Neolithic Balkan civilization going back beyond 4000BC, which had metallurgy techniques and, apparently, a written language. This last - as yet undeciphered - has been extensively investigated by Shan M Winn and Marija Gimbutas, amongst others. Gimbutas posited a peaceful, artistic, agriculture-based civilization, matrifocal in its religious viewpoint (the majority of figurines recovered from Vinca sites depict female forms). She argued that this culture was displaced by warlike, horse-riding Kurgan warriors from the Russian steppe, but that some surviving elements of the Vinca culture fled southwards, down to the Aegean and Crete.

 

[pTerryH]

Re the Vinca culture, the jury is still out on the "written language" claim. They (whoever they were) did scratch a goodly number of signs/symbols on pebbles, pottery etc, but these are not obviously writing in the true sense, and their real nature is hotly disputed. Moreover, they're found from a wider area than a single language was likely to have covered back then. Some of them do resemble some later signs in early Mediterranean-area writing systems such as Linear A, but there aren't enough correspondences to make a firm link: the few common to both areas tend to be so simple that they could easily be independent inventions. The stuff about peaceful matriarchal societies being ousted by migrating patriarchal Kurgan Culture people (who may have been the original Proto-Indo-European speakers) involves a lot of 70's feminism-driven supposition and rather less hard evidence, but I would say that, wouldn't I? I fear that, rather as in hominid evolution, we just haven't got enough pieces to make a meaningfully complete picture yet.