The Neolithic proletariat

Over the 1970s and the 1980s, there was something of an industry in feminist palaeoanthropology. Marija Gimbutas and her heralds, "Merlin Stone" and Riane Eisler, proposed that Europe was an egalitarian paradise until the Indo-European androcrats ruined everything.

The Indo-European invasion was, it turned out, real. It was just hard to take, given the politics involved. Mallory (not unlike Coe on Maya glyph translation) supported the Indo-European invasion against critics; the latter counter-proposed that these languages had come with the Neolithic. Genetics has ended that debate. Mallory was right. So was Gimbutas, up to that point.

But as usual it has started up new debates. Among them: if Neolithic society was so gylanic and wonderful, why'd it fall. Over 2017 to early 2019 I floated some ideas of mine own. A big factor, I thought, was plague - yes, as in yersinia pre-/para-pestis. When disease weakens a society, invaders more resistant to those diseases can take over. Someone has to.

The next question is how did the plague get in there. Plague exists out in the steppes but it doesn't destroy cities - there aren't cities. For plague to cut down a city requires a slum. It requires... a proletariat. (I think that the Harappan urban planners had solved that problem, because by then they had learned from the West: that there was a problem here to be solved.)

So here's our proletariat: "Inequality's Origins Go Back at Least 7,000 Years". After 5000 BC, which is Ceramic / Chalcolithic I believe, a revolution in ox-husbandry allowed industrial-scale farms. This was after the "mating-network" frontiers of the Balkans and the Pontic. All before the horse though, and LONG before the Indo-European language(s) had left the steppe. Large scale farming leads to chattel slavery out on the field. For those displaced who don't want to be slaves... some might flee; but most will likely just drift down town.

After 5000 BC, there was cannibalism at Herxheim. Then walls went up in Elsass at Achenheim. At some point 4400-4200 BC the men of Achenheim repulsed an invasion from the west - murdering a lot of the invaders. Note, this was all many hundreds of miles west of the Balkan ethnic frontier, called the "Cucuteni Culture" as of the middle 4000s BC. The recent map hints that the western farmers had gone up from the Rhone; the easterners, overland from the Balkans. They were related a millennium prior, but they had forgotten that by now.

This "Hyborean" situation could not do other than to force people off the undefended farms and into new cities. Cities hadn't existed here before.

WHEN'S THE BEEF 8/9/2020: 4400 BC.