Secrets of the Stone Age (1/2) | DW Documentary

the human race has been building huge stone structures for ages what are the origins of these structures what were these circular constructions used for [Music] many of these structures were sealed up thousands of years ago by the people who built them [Music] but in some cases wind and waves wore away that protective covering over time these structures are called megaliths you could call them gigantic works of art megalitres and monomethylation on black never build lost me through the pyramids technical and logistical masterpieces that push the limits of human imagination writ large stone structures like these were built in many places around the world for example in the far north of Scotland you'll find ancient constructions that are older than Stonehenge every hump and lump and bump that you see could be a new archaeological site and each year particularly during the ploughing season new sites are discovered by farmers these discoveries outline an important chapter in human history [Music] [Music] until about 12,000 years ago our ancestors were hunters and gatherers then an irreversible transition to a new way of life got underway The Fixer form of ease the transition from hunting and gathering to sedentary farming was a key development after said for millions of years people had lived by hunting and gathering in the season and suddenly their lives changed radically much more so than during the transition to industrialization or the digital age this is gobekli tepe a small hill in southeastern Turkey here in 1994 German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt discovered a series of huge stone structures including decorated pillars that weigh up to 20 tons [Music] a few years later Austrian archaeologists babaca Horesh began researching the site this is simple escape Italy typically is not only an architectural treasure and one of the most important structures of its kind in the world it also symbolizes the beginning of the Neolithic Age in the Youngstown sense [Music] the good Beckley tipper complex was built by hunters and gatherers that is before mankind became sedentary this fact revolutionized the conventional archaeological wisdom in godly begin via and we discovered a society that was completely new to us that society had such a long history and yet some aspects of it were familiar to us is an aggressive lion for example was just as much a threat to the people who built Gobekli as it is to us today what's worth thousands yearn for Stanton for those who live near the site a parallel supernatural world was part of everyday life this crane may have symbolized a connection between the earth and the heavens beetles and snakes were important mythological symbols in many cultures there seemed to have been few barriers between the natural world and the supernatural teams of archaeologists from Germany and Turkey have only excavated a fraction of the site but they've determined that this period of mysticism was relatively short-lived in Festus gerado her research indicates that the early generations of sedentary societies kept covering up these sites and sealing them shut so that they could no longer be used but these sites were preserved in the collective memory of society for a very long time there are good reasons why give aquele abandoned for thousands of years vedic announced in october Baldwin [Music] perhaps the first farmers wanted to distance themselves from the practices of their ancestors Gobekli had lost its original meaning people had become sedentary the director of the State Museum of prehistory and Halle Horrell Miller says this was a major turning point in human history vets of this Neolithic homes it was really decisive here we have nearly four thousand axe heads from the Neolithic period used axes to clear forests to create farmland they also use them to split wooden beams which were then used to build complex houses this construction of housing was a key element in the transition to sedentary life dimension wouldn't get sis hooked hunters and gatherers also stayed in one place for extended periods provided that they could find enough food but the changes that took place in the Neolithic period were revolutionary disease after illness mention is the transition to sedentary life was a key development for thousands of years people had lived as hunter-gatherers a natural way of life they fed themselves in a natural way as well they had relatively few children because the women did not become pregnant while they were breastfeeding but all that changed radically with the development of Agriculture because that prompted people to change their diets then done in the city and narrow Grainne now provided carbohydrates and domesticated animals provided meat and fats well this fits our hood that increased the fat content in the body also women became pregnant more often and this led to a population explosion that in turn meant that people had to live together in smaller spaces in houses settlements and villages the work of archaeologists is often like trying to solve a puzzle they carefully dig up artifacts that belong to a specific society and then try to recreate an image of what that society was like some objects like these shards of decorated pottery have lent their names to entire cultures for example the linear pottery culture which coincides with the first appearance of food producing societies [Music] burial sites are often rich sources of information for archaeologists not just human remains but various items that were buried with the deceased for example an expert can determine whether a person was buried properly if not animals may have gotten into the grave and chewed at the bones [Music] Maria Tesla Nicola is the director of the archaeological biology department at Vienna's Museum of Natural History she says you can learn a lot from skeletons via Kernan antes for example we've confirmed vitamin deficiencies and stress symptoms in some remains and that helps us to reconstruct what people ate and other aspects of daily life we found evidence of anemia in the upper reaches of eye sockets semen we've seen evidence of vitamin C deficiencies in the alveolar ridges and other bone formations if we analyze this evidence systematically we can extrapolate it to the entire population and try to reconstruct specific living and working conditions archeologists always try to determine the age of artifacts the development of radiocarbon dating was a major step forward in this process over the last 20 years genetic analysis has also provided important evidence experts can now examine human and animal DNA that is several thousand years old [Music] anthropologists yo Keem burger says that genetic analysis of livestock can provide information on the migration patterns of Neolithic farmers de la escena de zoo Hung Vuong we did our very first tests on domestic animals and determined that all the European cattle are descended from Iranian cattle today those animals are found in Switzerland or East Frisian or somewhere but they originally came from Anatolia and the Middle East and then we thought perhaps we can apply that hypothesis to the migration of Neolithic kingdoms and after ten years of research we were able to determine that these people from Anatolia especially Northwest Anatolia are indeed the ancestors of all the European Neolithic peoples for fun Allah would allow overpays Neolithic ascent it's difficult to find well-preserved genetic material from this period in warm environments bones decay more quickly and with them the genetic evidence another problem is that sometimes older genetic material has been contaminated by newer material which produces inaccurate results still archaeologists have come up with some interesting findings in Dagenham genetic analysis some skeletons from Northwestern Turkey specifically an area south of Istanbul shows that Neolithic people in modern-day Germany and Spain were descended from an imaging people that we call a genes there is evidence that the migrants at that time used both the Mediterranean and Balkan route farming people spread rapidly throughout Europe over several hundred years but not in an organized way this research facility is located in torn in Austria Maria Tesla Nicola and her colleague Tomas Prohaska are using analytical chemistry to try to determine the migration patterns of ancient peoples de mogi curtain TV yet stop the technology we have today is incomparable better than it was 20 years ago we can use invasive and non-invasive methods plus isotope analysis which has been widely used in anthropology for about 15 years to track prehistoric migration patterns in our c14 here for Houska examines a tooth that's about 5,000 years old tooth enamel does not change over the course of a person's life so scientists can tell from its composition where people grew up the same technology is used to determine the place of origin of some modern day foods the place of origin can always be clearly determined whether in plants animals or humans imprinted business orders we can now use this data to confirm a definite pattern of migration and not just a transfer of ideas in effect we've been able to track the colonization of Europe from I hope our colony see it [Music] there are a few traces of Europe's original residents the hunters and gatherers who lived there for thousands of years they were probably displaced by the new settlers or absorbed into new societies at this point Europe had been settled by migrants from the Middle East but what prompted them to move into this new territory dicker in devarim diminish kovanda to sangee beautiful asana it's hard to say I don't think it had anything to do with overpopulation not at that point in time population density was low compared to what it is today nearly ten peoples may simply have heard about this region and decided to go there perhaps some groups have been there and came back and spread the word I can only speculate but I think one reason may have been simple human curiosity of Keynesians I understand I get it [Music] hunters and gatherers eventually learn to travel by sea later some of the sedentary farmers also use boats to travel west we don't know whether they used sailboats or rowing boats in any case rowing boats were easier to maneuver [Music] these migrants spread gradually to Mediterranean islands including one that today is known as Malta the Republic of Malta actually consists of three inhabited Islands Malta itself plus Kamino and Gozo and several smaller islands that are uninhabited Malta is located approximately 80 kilometres south of Sicily on a clear day one can see Sicily from Gozo and likewise one can see Gozo from Sicily so one must assume that there was a degree of curiosity and people from Sicily as wondering as to what this land was that lay slightly beyond the horizon however it's it's it's hard to grasp why people would decide to leave such a fertile island as Sicily and in order to occupy and colonize somewhere that was far away [Music] the first to arrive were probably explorers perhaps then followed by their families [Music] about 2,000 years later some of the residents started building temples [Music] the origins of these monumental structures are still shrouded in mystery some of these limestone blocks weigh up to 20 tons they could turn to dust before we find out more about them Tim Egan been a marine archaeologist at the University of Malta is trying to preserve the ruins here he's photographing some of them Goffman converts the photos to 3d animated images this is what the temples might have looked like but he says he's running out of time to complete his work what's incredible is that the rate of erosion has been much faster over the past 70 years than it has been in the past four thousand five hundred years and that is not just because they've been uncovered but because you have aspects such as acid rain pollution carbon monoxide and so on that actually accelerates so it's not just the period of time since they've been uncovered but since you've got all these modern pollutants this is really accelerating the rate of erosion [Music] this is the Hodja M temple complex on the main island it's a major tourist attraction the canopy is designed to protect the site from the elements and slow the process of erosion [Music] you know these temples are a thousand years older than Stonehenge which for a country that's a colony of Britain this becomes a big thing all of a sudden our Neolithic is a thousand years older than the people that are ruling us you know so this is a this is also this is what I mean about the political factor that these structures come to play [Music] but why did people build these structures we humans want a comfortable life we want not to be hungry not to be sick and the way to do it was to make sure that the gods were were smiling upon you and one way to make the gods smile upon you was to build monuments in their honor this is what the site looks like without the canopy we can now reconstruct how the temple might have looked in its original form but we can only speculate about its actual purpose and what sorts of rituals might have been carried out there who was allowed to enter the inner sanctum and who was not there is a clear division between the inside space and the outdoor space the temple is built covered over it is the realm of the priests or priestesses the outside is open to the elements and the rim of the common people this division is clearly thought of in the design of the temples the interior of the temple is hidden from the outside world this hole in the stone may have been used by an Oracle it provides a connection to the temple interior what was sacred to the local residents at that time what gods did they worship if any did they have sacrificial rituals we can only speculate the site leaves many questions unanswered the temples of Malta were used for about 2,000 years and then they were abandoned why did that happen coming the moment at one time and this is very typical of prehistoric cultures they were not able to achieve real societal consistency they had no established traditions that could be passed down from generation to generation like written records a class of priests or a line of hereditary rulers those are key elements in cultural development prehistoric cultures that did not have these elements didn't last long [Music] some of the farming peoples who sail towards Central and Western Europe traveled as far as what is now Spain and Portugal and the Brittany Peninsula in modern-day France [Music] the rocky coastline provided building materials for these new settlers they created a new society at the dawn of the Neolithic Age a society that remains a mystery to this day [Music] the temples that were built in Malta are unique to that island just as these rows of standing stones are to the village of Carnac on Brittany south coast [Music] the legacy of these and other structures has been preserved in one of the regional languages Breton the word men here means long stone Dolman means stone table it describes a specific kind of grave it's impossible to accurately translate these words into other languages experts have tried to solve the mystery of the standing stones in vain Serge Khasan is an archaeologist at the University of not schizophonic are not mix of the found impression everyone who sees people worst honest by the scope and the simply boggles the mind and it gives new meaning to the word monumental ok let me do one monomer 33 the rows of stones cover an area of more than 3 kilometers this site used to be much larger [Music] every rock is distinctive and each one could have its own individual meaning some researchers believe that the stones represent an expression of political power others believe that supernatural forces were at work here still others simply see row upon row of gravestones [Music] the simpler stick to your original or a local design and we don't know its origins but you really can call it architecture - it takes you [Music] the rows of stones extended from the coast into the interior perhaps they indicated a pathway of some sort if so where did it lead it shall be given Einstein one thing is clear and this applies to all megalithic structures a single it's a sacred construction that involves the landscape and living space you really can't see that in the rolls of stones and they're linked to a sacred site [Music] megalithic sites are found on many Mediterranean islands and along the Atlantic coast as far north as Britain [Music] they were also built along the North Sea and the Baltic Sea coasts but there are none of these sites in modern-day Hungary Austria or southern Germany that is places where migrants travelled overland what's the explanation for that so but the Neolithic at centre as these Neolithic peoples left central Anatolia they experienced the sharp reduction in cultural diversity they were farmers when they arrived in Europe as they traveled along the Balkan route they lost their connection to their previous society including the construction of large monuments they became highly specialized farmers and they were very good at it but it was not a life that was rich in culture [Music] all the demons the only light not much the migrations from the Fertile Crescent to Austria continued for nearly 5,000 years [Music] in many parts of Europe receding Ice Age glaciers left behind lots of boulders the Neolithic migrants found large areas of fertile topsoil and what is now eastern Austria but there weren't a lot of large rocks that could be used for construction so they used other materials in the 1980s researchers who were analyzing aerial photographs discovered circular shapes in the soil in Austria's Danube region this was definitely something worth looking into rittany esna gave me smitten loaf building materials like those aerial photos led to excavations and they found these huge monuments that were more than 6,000 years old archaeologists wondered what they'd been used for for this course and there was a lot of discussion about it back in the 1980s - and for all sorts of possible explanations everything from forts to meeting places temples or cattle pens milk I think even here archaeologists use radar to scan the area to get an idea of what sort of structures might have been built here fences ditches or entry ways archaeologists Wolfgang no Bauer has used this equipment to investigate sites around the world [Music] for example no Bauer was able to prove that Stonehenge perhaps the world's most famous prehistoric monument was originally made of wood [Music] these circular shapes can be seen from the air only at certain times of the year provided that they've not been covered up by blowing soil no bowel found a total of 40 circular ditches in the vine fatal region of northeastern Austria in 2005 archeologists volcon lobha sir and his team reconstructed one of these ditches near the town of Helton burg they used stone tools and the same materials that would have been available during the Stone Age including wood bone and plant fibers [Music] but it's the stone structures that tell us the most about our ancient ancestors on the North Sea island of silt for example there are more than 500 burial sites made of stone [Music] a number of Neolithic tombs can also be found on the northern German mainland and in Denmark archaeologists continue to excavate and analyze some of these sites these large stone tombs were often used for centuries [Music] these are mega lit clay bird as well these megalithic tombs gave people a sense of identity local residents perform their rituals it helped them to reaffirm their existence so these sites really did help to shape society at that time in their lunch after dimension D s Thomas Carr [Music] burial practices can tell us a lot about a given society and its people [Music] Miguel it flavours and megalithic people's used common burial sites there's little evidence of individual graves it's as though the deceased lost their identity during the early Neolithic period the focus was on the community not the individual those who could contribute substantially to the community were held in high regard over time our ancestors began to create high-quality elaborately designed ceramics this beautifully decorated Bowl was found in a grave near lüdersen in the eastern German state of saxony-anhalt items such as these and burial practices in general can tell us much about society including the status of women Jerusalem derive newly we've observed no major differences in the way that men were buried you Neolithic societies in many cases women were given burials that were just as elaborate as those for men and sometimes even more so but did Neolithic burial objects really indicate the status of women in society stone constructions represent spiritual immortality that is the deceased will be remembered forever Stein isn't the key element in reconstructing ancient architecture whether it's temple buildings or tunes are the stone building blocks if these structures had been made of wood we would have found very few remains we could only speculate as to how large the structure and beam but the stone blocks really gave us an idea of what it was like in prehistoric times monument Elite Eight embraced Oceanside you are [Music] there's an amazing variety of Neolithic structures in the Orkney Islands off the northeastern coast of Scotland excavation work began at this site in 2002 led by archaeologist Nick card I think what we're seeing today is just really the tip of the iceberg of what was here 5,000 years ago our eyes are drawn to these wonderful upstanding monuments but over the last 10 years the University of Highlands and Islands has embarked on a large-scale geophysical program of survey around these monuments to see what else was potentially here and what we've discovered is it the landscape which filled with monuments excavations have yielded evidence of sites that were used by cults as well as settlements and graves the concentration of Neolithic structures on the island is extensive this is the maze Oh burial site [Music] the standing stones of Stenness form one of the oldest circular structures in Britain [Music] 150 meters away are the remains of the Barnhouse settlement the entrance to the narrow headland is guarded by a 5.6 meter high monolith called the watch stone further along we find the nests of brodgar a major settlement that included houses a huge stone wall and even a Neolithic version of a cathedral archeologists have discovered other neolithic structures that lie directly on the coast [Music] this settlement includes some small stone houses much of the excavation site has been covered to protect the masonry from the elements no visitors are allowed only NIC card and his team [Music] Neolithic people were really no different from ourselves what you see here in a house is everything that you'd expect really in a modern day house without the electricity in the water the flat construction protects the structure against stormy weather the grass roof provides warmth people led a decent life here as far as we know there were no armed conflicts or other serious existential threats at the time the local forests were more widespread in Neolithic times and the climate was relatively mild thanks to the influence of the Gulf Stream the conditions were ideal for growing crops and raising livestock and there were also plentiful supplies of fish during the Neolithic what we found is that Otley had a kind of predominance amongst many other areas and what we found is that this material being brought taut they from right the way across Britain but equally a lot of the ideas that seem to dominate the prehistory of Britain seem to have originated in the Orkney Islands [Music] was the stone circle of Orkney a model for similar structures throughout Britain meanwhile archaeologists have been able to precisely determine Neolithic migration patterns all they need to carry out a comprehensive analysis are a few bones or teeth that contain traces of DNA this is the same method that proved that central Europeans were descended from the people of Anatolia researchers also came up with another surprising discovery in Anne's life and slipped wood they examined genetic material found in what is now Iran that is the heartland of the Fertile Crescent and they found a break in the migration pattern approximately between western Iran and Western Anatolia the population groups had become so diverse there are indications that they may have split up between 50 and 70 thousand years ago following the migration of anatomically modern humans from Africa both major groups became sedentary farmed the land and built houses high bone populations made the transition to sedentary culture in both Europe and Asia at about the same time but of course independently of one another [Music] megalithic structures can be found throughout Asia and especially in Korea [Music] constellations the patterns of stars play an important role in Korean mythology well into modern times it was not unusual to find images of constellations engraved on headstones but it's not always easy to determine the precise age of these relics the neolithic age appears to have been a relatively peaceful period in human history archeologists have found no evidence of armed conflict during this time the Neolithic period in Europe came to an end around 2000 BC when it gave way to the Bronze Age the stone structures remained of course today some of them serve as road markers others took on a Christian look churches were built atop burial grounds and some stone monuments simply faded into the local background in Neolithic times temple served the same purpose as mosques synagogues and churches do today this period saw the development of communities where people lived in small settlements raise their families and tended their crops and livestock idly maintain these Neolithic elements still shape our society today yeah as sometimes more than we think [Music]

Channel: DW Documentary

Views: 1,453,514

Rating: 4.3643661 out of 5

Keywords: documentary, Stone Age, Neolithic, human prehistory, monolith culture, megaliths, archaeology, ancient history, history, DW

Id: I2vYr6gx56o

Length: 42min 26sec (2546 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 12 2018