I know people always find the gold [member] fascinating but to me, the most fascinating and important has always been the first stratification of society that's seen in the Varna culture. I don't know if anyone can underestimate the importance of this particular find. Thank you for the interesting video 👍
I discovered the Danube cultures about 3 years ago. Mind. Blown. Earliest appearance of the Yin-Yang symbol! So much more! Please tell us more about Lepinski Vir, Vinca-Turdas, Cucteni-Trypillian....
@danJG217 you are already here. You need to be able to navigate the wep in order to find the best info, and ofter read other leanguages than English as the information is not yet published in EN. Anyway if you type "old europe" in Google, can be a good start for you.
As a geologist Gold seems perfectly logical, it is one the few metals that is so unreactive it can be found in it's native state. No complex extraction. No mining necessary depending on where you are. It is very soft to beat out and make things from. It's nice and shiny, does not tarnish, if it is too pure it can wear thin. Copper, Tin, Bronze, Iron all are much harder to extract and work with.
You hinted on something, i.e., their not regarding gold in the same way as money. Why should they, just because we do? I live in the Klondike that had the world's largest gold rush in 1898, as some of the richest concentrations of placer gold were here. But, it's been here for a very long time, as have the natives - something around 25,000 years. They had no use for gold! I know a story where a woman as a girl used to toss the yellow rocks into a river as they looked pretty when sinking. The son of that woman is still alive here today! As a soft metal, it was easy to form, so useful for jewellery, but its intrinsic value to the community may have been completely different to the way we treat it today. Still a cool find though!
It's an intriguing idea, and perhaps you are correct. However, it would just as easy to state that the shells were a non-gold representation of the gold cache. That is something seen during the last 1,000+ years. Humans have been "expert geologist" since the earliest days of toolmaking, which seems to stretch back to as early as 1M years ago. We probably have been working gold and other metals found in earth deposits for tens of thousands of years. Point being, gold would have been known about and probably held in very high regard for a very very long time. I have a feeling that even large deposits would not have been disregarded. Just my thoughts. I could be wrong.
Great show. Another example that shows the importance of water to early trade routes and settlements. Also great to hear you include the Black Sea area in your future plans. I think it is another important area for our early history.
Extraordinary! I get the feeling that the skills required to fashion the gold as well as the pottery and the flint are what distinguished and were valued in that culture...a culture of artisans as differentiated from a warrior or building culture, etc.
A bulgarian professor recently said somthing about lots of ancient buildings bured deeper - more than 20-30 meters under the ground. I can tell you one thing - the bulgarian history is very-very long (more than 8000 years) and because of that it is very uncomfortable politically, very well hidden and part of it is stolen by many european and asian countries. So, if the truth comes out those countries are gone - left without history i mean and also they should accept that their origin is bulgarian. Which explains why nobody can't tell where are bulgarians come from and falsely claiming we are turks, mongols and so on....
isn`t there that flood theory for the black sea about around this time period - the area had constant tectonic movements... are there where building found below water ? if you look a map there is a clear shape of a former coastline all around the black sea. what are you thoughts ? crap or worth digging /diving into it
Maybe these Varna folks saw gold in a similar way to pre-Columbian Americans. Though the Americans valued gold it was not a form of currency. It was pretty and useful for adornement but nothing to fight and die over.
My lingering question regarding this was the where and how of the mining of such quantities of gold. Also note that the dates are pretty soon after the Black Sea Inundation. Is the cemetery on high ground as perceived by a culture that had seen its 'cities' drowned?
There have been excavations at mines not very far from Varna near Stara Zagora. It is believed that some of the metal comes from there. I have also heard speculation that it comes from the mines from another area in Bulgaria, a little bit further south.
Bulgaria has a vast ammount of amazing archaeological sites, which, unfortunately, are not being properly excavated due to poor financing. Also because of the sheer corruption a lot of articats are sadly being sold to the black market. Shame really...
Isn't Varna the place with the tiny gold bead, supposedly the oldest man made gold artifact in the world? From memory i believe it was beaten flat and then curled round to form the bead. Where does this fit in the Varna timeline and were there other associated finds? Ace channel btw.
When considering what did people wear what was the weather like? People are often shown half naked even in supposedly just post glacial europe when they were more likely to be dressed more like traditional Innuit people.
Several comments suggesting gold was just pretty rather than wealth deserve thought. It is soft, as is silver. Useless for weapons or tools for example. (Especially for cutting mistletoe 😂) I learnt silver smithing at night school in a local school. We also learnt to work gold. (Basic stuff like a ring or bracelet). The heat from a butane torch is all that is needed plus a steady hand. The skill is in the detail of jewelry and other items. I think making pots takes longer to learn.and smelting copper etc is far more impressive a skill.
I think you're right. it was certainly a traded item at the time and we vastly underestimate the importance and value that it would have had for them. M.
Thank you for the fascinating discussion. At the risk of speculation I'd say ostensibly that the golden sheath would infer the personal power of their king. All that gold wasn't made into abstract religious things, but worn by one man, like a living god. Varna seems to be a quite different world from old hunter-gatherer Europe, like Gravettian culture and their Venus figurines.
Thank you for this really interesting conversation. For the last 6 years, as a job, I've taken care of a remote "off grid" summer home during the winter months in northeast US. After a learning curve the first couple of years, I came to value the basics for those months. Clean water, storable food, tools, basic med kit, firewood, and warm clothes all became more way more valuable to me than any bling. That being said, I also found that I would really think about what book, music, movie, football game, or learning I would enjoy after the workday was done and I came to value that somewhat more than basics. So, in my experience, because of the limited options they had at that time, I would suggest that these burials were not just the high priests and keepers of the culture, but also the rock stars, Brad Pitts, Mr. Beasts, sports stars, teachers, and top authors all wrapped up in one. I believe that's why they had so much glitter and pomp and were so revered in death ceremonies.
Fascinating as always, I’m glad I discovered your channel. As a long time lover of archaeology I was always caught up in more recent archaeology but we tend to forget that fascinating human history stretches back tens of thousands of years before the run of the mill Egyptian, greek, roman periods we are hung up on.
Has anybody tested the clay heads to see if human ashes could have been mixed into the clay? Or possibly it gets cooked in the fire for the body? Just curious 11:41
Fertility Rituals and Ceremonies at Spring time was a very important aspect of annual progression at these times, and continues today as well so to me, that is when such items had an important Religious significance and Role to play. No Different really to what Coronations, Crowns and such continue to be Symbolically Represented today as well. also even in Songs with Words like "From a Jack to a King, From Loneliness to a Wedding Ring" it's all still there still bubbling away under the surface isn't it ? 🤔👍🤣
Varna was a lot more wider spread, based on pottery the name is Gumelnița-Karanovo culture, occupied all of modern Bulgaria and Southern Romania, was contemporary with Cucuteni-Tripolie buildings: there were ditches and palisades tell: they were not pulling buildings down and building on top, buildings were abandoned and the space filled in with trash; also the Gumelnita-Karanovo tells in Romania were in the middle of the swaps of the Danube, quite isolated from dry land
The elongated skulls in Peru have had DNA analysed, and they come from Black Sea area originally. Reference Brian Forster's videos. So I am not surprised, but only more convinced.
Interesting stuff - comparable (date wise) sites in Pyatigorsk across the black sea - not sure there was any gold there but there were the eponymous elongated skulls - is it because its been in the Russian sphere of influence that we dont know more about the black sea area? - there seems to be a lot of stuff in Russian online but English translations are few and far between
Yes, politics- international, where the divide was almost unsurmountable for Bulgarian scientists but also the Soviet Union wanted to dominate in absolutely everything so they would actively or through fear of "insulting the Russians" suppressed a lot of good science. There was also a lot of bad science, again because of political /ideological reasons. There was a lot of archaeology destroyed or mislabeled for political reasons, a lot of hush-hush. There were problems of funding at the end of the communist regimes too. Even today, the amount of incredible archaeology in the area, which has no funding to be even guarded against pillagers, is barely paid any attention because it's not Summer or Egypt. There's a REAL push against the importance of the region around the Black sea (the Balkans, Ukraine, etc.) That's just a quick summary of why. You can imagine the details of what is not possible to write in a simple RU-vid comment by the sheer size of the topic.
We'd have loved to have speculated on that topic too! At a guess - I'd say in a small, tight community there would be no incentive to steal. You couldn't have worn it, you couldn't have exchanged it ... you couldn't have enriched yourself by acquiring it because everyone knew who it really belonged to! M.
@@ThePrehistoryGuys That makes sense. That problem still exists today. I'd been approaching it from how/when the cemetery was forgotten, particularly as the settlement doesn't appear to have moved. Yours is more worked through.
Evidence of other materials being used as currency is not evidence that gold wasn't used as currency. From Rome to near modern times copper and silver coins could circulate at the same time as gold ones. Gold jewelry as a compact and portable form of wealth does not rule out the possibility that you'd pay for a fish or a loaf of bread something worth far less than the gold object that might have bought a fishing boat or a wheatfield.
I think one of the major finds in grave 43 were the jadeite axes. There are a number of them in the grave. This is a huge part of the Neolithic culture in Europe and makes a great story. Same jadeite axes are found everywhere in Neolithic Europe, including British Isles and they all come from the same place in the Alps.
We may attribute a value to these gold ornaments they may not have had to the culture that made them. If there was a lode rich in neat gold that could easily be hammered into ornaments that could have sparked a fashion at the time. However, beyond an agreement to its rarity and desirability, gold is fairly good for nothing but bling. The lack of value attribution at the time may actually the reason why the graves were not robbed.
I do not think it had no value but no particular value or enough to rob a grave for. It is like burying people with Italian lire. They once were legal tender but when Italy adopted the Euro it did not anymore. In a society where copper is the valuable metal, gold is just costume jewelry until its value is defined. If there is a longish time between the valuation of gold and these burials their location and/or contents may be forgotten.
Since gold wouldn't really have been known as more rare than silver at that point as they had nothing to compare it to, wouldn't this just be a case of having enough gold for a complete 'set'? I can't see how at that point in history gold was held at the same relative value as we have for it now. We've built up this mystery cult around gold, I'm skeptical it's always been that way.
the green carved ornament stones remind me of the ring necklace found in the denisova cave in kazakhistan...were the varna people probably descendants of the neanderthal,denisova lieage which later might have lead to the rich step culture?
Old Europe start 1000-2000 years before Lepenski Vir-Starcevo-Vincha(Serbia). Almost 200 setlments and some of them has 10000 citiziens. First metalurgy(copper, cinarabit) in the world, salt, trade, cheramic. First calendar in the world, first script. One big diferent of Varna culture that there is not war almost few thousends years before. This is mother centric culture. This culture disapear after genocide of Yamnaja horde moving. After that we can find armors on cemetry cites.
C'mon guys! I knew all about this, years! No, I mean YEEEAAARRRSSS AGOOOOO! Wow, and I am SO NOT book learned, it would make your heads spin! I know, IMPOSSIBLE to believe.
Yep, do you think there was ever a time when everyone in the world could say my grandfather was a super boat builder. Dont think granpa Noah didn't expound on gifts Gid gave to make it possible.
Craftsmanship is reassuring in a culture with gold penis sheaths. I bought a bike rack last week & none of the burrs had been removed. Varna would have collapsed sooner with metalwork like that.
There is the Black Sea deluge hypothesis. Maybe the Mesopotamian farmers went North to the Black (Sea) Lake and then from the Danube River to Europe. The Varna Culture is very close to the Danube River and very old.
You do some great digging in your shows, but you get some things wrong and miss some vital parts out. Bulgaria has several megaliths, pyramids that have never yet been excavated. What's called the Bulgarian Atlantis has been discovered off the Bulgarian coast, that they say probably date back earlier than the Egyptian pyramids (according to academia's timeline narrative) I think we can conclude that there was indeed a civilisation at the time of the Varna Man. The sea level was much lower during that time, i imagine the build up of populations would have occurred along the coastline, and now under water. They were clearly working a lot of gold. Would they have done that in a pre-civilisation time?
you can guarantee it was Matriarchal and I wouldn't be surprised if a man stole her adornment jewelry, we slavs and balkans know the truth of our ancient people
Eh, keep digging and I’m sure you’ll find a site that has even more gold. It’s so hard to make any kind of interpretation of what the amount of gold might mean at this site when another site just as old, that we haven’t found yet, could have even more gold. So idk how much importance to really place on this site.
