Merlin Stone is back, baby

Wengrow and Graeber have a book out. Joining the ranks of Murray and Herrnstein, and of Cochran and Harpending, and of Koren and Nevo... only half that team will be available to take future questions. Anyway NYT has run a summary but it's paywalled, so let's go with Steve Sailer's adaptation.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity pretends to be a deep history of the urban Balkans before (Egyptian / Sumerian) literacy, so, you know - catnip for me. The era is Cucuteni: 4100-3300 Based Count. Sailer thinks the authors are on the Left but, if they use Based Count, they're not wholly antiChrist. They also prefer lower government to higher.

Sailer calls shenanigans that these citizens were Marija Gimbutas' Old Europe with "Merlin Stone"'s female God; they had walls, which means they protected themselves from raiders, and maybe even from professional warriors. I do recall some vicious city-on-city wars up on the Rhine before that key 4100 BC century. Also one might bring genetics that these guys were polygynous. Although by 4100 BC they might have cut down on that, because of the obvious "homozygosity" that practice must entail.

Sailer brings up the horse as what ended this civilisation, but - that's also where genetics come in: the real horse invasion was an Aryan-driven monster from the West Eurasian steppe. Third millennium. These cities were over a thousand years gone, and forgotten. The people who'd replaced those cities had been wiped out, and forgotten. For the Balkan urban collapse, Davidski implicated a 3400 BC yersinia. That's spread by rats and fleas - the mouse, at least, was there already by 4500 BC. A plague of squalor moves by refugees on foot, not by chevaliers.

Interesting that the 4100 BC startpoint is a century after the introduction of the Nubian cat north of the Dardanelles . . .

I agree with the book some forms of wealth, in the Chalcolithic, were not yet possible. But other forms, namely land especially grazing land, had been at a premium for centuries already by 4100 BC. The farmers by then were even calling in the old hunter-gatherers they'd ejected, because the Flintstones knew animals better. If the mouse population was being suppressed, whatever Hanta Virus aside, it leaves more calories for humans. I propose, further, that bronze - especially tin bronze - was a gatekeeper. Copper has never been cheap compared to (industrial) iron.

So far this book looks like this generation's "Merlin Stone": bad pop-hist for the usual suburban midwits. Wengrow, like Koren (and unlike Cochran and Murray) has done his late co-author a disservice, by not overhauling a terrible thesis.

Steve Sailer is doing better, but I'll nitpick his sources on what these cities looked like. Some of them have bald spots in their centre, where there are no structures. As we know from Hisarlik, if the city is on a hill - even a tel - the middle spot is the top spot, and it tends to erode first and/or to be leveled first for new structures, an Aeolic-age temple of Zeus in Hisarlik's case. This means we're not looking at some massive field in the city; we're looking at what the excavators could find. Which would account for the lack of palaces and temples; they're not missing, they're lost, maybe even deliberately dismantled.