Bronze Age Musings
These two snippets are rather instructive and call for comment. Recall that I have posted extensively here on the European Bronze Age and the clear two thousand year impact of its emergence prior to its collapse triggered by Hekla in 1159 BCE and the advent of iron.
This was also the era of the destruction of the Sahara by widespread goat husbandry and ending the climatic optimum of the Bronze Age.
My first comment is that it is important that it is possible to link 3000 year old DNA to local residents. This was also done over an even greater time span in Western England. Possibly with bog bodies, though I do not now recall. The classic interpretation of history has been one in which tribes fought their way into other tribal lands on what appears to be an ongoing basis. Yet this says just the opposite.
The proper interpretation is to understand that agricultural communities are tied to their ancestral lands and do not move enmass except in very extraordinary circumstances. What happens instead is that in times of production success, the number of men increases far beyond the number of available women. Recall that twenty five percent of women die in childbirth. This surplus marches off looking for trouble. In fact the first natural response of a tribe on short rations would be to send off their surplus men.
My second comment is that a reconstruction of Bronze Age religious thought should be undertaken afresh. We have been informed somewhat through the Greeks, but I cannot help but feel that cult of Poseidon and Atlas anchored the Atlantean mercantile confederacy, whereas the cult of Athena was a derivative sideshow. How druidism emerged from all this is yet another interesting question. The sources give us glimpses and far too much imagination is filling in the rest.
The first article gives us a bit of the flavor of the breathless enthusiasm that tries to extend the Atlantean mythos around the world. Just embedding it properly in the world of the European Bronze Age is more than good enough. What I have been trying to explore is the actual richness of that culture.
Recall that the currency of the day was copper in all its forms. That is why tripods are mentioned almost first when plunder is discussed in Homer. For the record, the events of Homer occurred one generation before 1159 BCE and were obviously retained at the temple in Athens upon transcription. It was also that generation that would have been in active contact with both the Egyptians and the Levant leading eventually to the adoption of a modified alphabet to replace the previous unsatisfactory runic system of the priesthood.
The currency and trade collapsed after been brutally pushed by the Hekla tsunami and did not recover even partially for three hundred years. The post Atlantean world needed to find a new currency and that is the genius of the Midas myth.
Why Did Cartographer Atlas Son of Poseidon (Sidon) Hold Up the Sky Shoulder the Earth Worldwide Atlantean Columns Architecture Pillars Latte Stones of Guam and Mariana Islands Were Temples of Astronomy Astrology and Ancestor Worship Star Navigation by Polynesian Catamaran Outrigger Captains Like Precession Mapping Scheme of Atlanteans with Maui’s Tanawa Antikythera Mechanism and Celtic Cross Archaeometers Used for Geometry of Atlas’ Scheme to Master Ocean Travel
The ancient atlantean columns which held up the roofs of the archaic temples of the bronze age world were the namesake of Atlas, the map man, as was the Atlantic ocean, Atlantis (Aztlan), and the word for water in spanish, african berber, and hebrew, atl, as in
Some of the atlantean ruins have been discovered on the seafloor, such as off north Bimini island, Alexandria, Egypt, and Nan Madol of Pohnpei island, Micronesia, which indicates that they were built during the Ice Age, to then have been submerged when the sea level rose when the Ice Age ended; bronze age buildings consumed by the sea, when also, vast swaths of prime pasture and forest land became the deserts of the world, with the greatly decreased precipitation when the Ice Age ended (see category Catastrophic Climate Change).
Some of the atlantean columns submerged off Nan Madol, of the ancient city called Khanihmweiso, are still upright, rising up from the bottom to 20 feet, encrusted with much coral growth through 3,500 years, and with bulbous heads on the top, much like the atlantean columns found onshore on Guam, Tinian, and Rota islands, called Latte Stones, erected by the ancient navigators of the Pacific, who utilized the same method as Atlas, measuring precession with instruments such as Maui’s Tanawa and the Celtic Cross (archaeometer), to locate positions on earth, like a global positioning system, but according to the slow wobble of the earth’s axis.
German villagers share DNA with cavemen
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 15/07/2008
Local people in a small German village share the same rare DNA pattern as the bones of cavemen who lived in the area 3,000 years ago.
The Bronze Age remains were discovered by archaeologists in the Lichtensteinhohle cave in the foothills of the Harz Mountains in Lower Saxony, near the village of Nienstedt in 1994.
The bones of 40 people were shielded from the elements by calcium deposits that formed a protective skin around the skeletons.
All the remains turned out to be from the same family group who had a distinctive - and rare - DNA pattern.
When people in the local area were tested with saliva swabs, two nearby residents turned out to have the same distinctive genetic characteristic.
Manfred Huchthausen, a 58-year-old teacher, and Uwe Lange, a 48-year-old surveyer, now believe they are even more local than either of them thought.
"We used to play in these caves as kids," said Mr Lange. "If I'd known that there were 3,000-year-old relatives buried there I wouldn't have set foot in the place."
