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You hear a lot of talk about the Neolithic Revolution--the gradual adoption and spread of agriculture, animal husbandry and town life by our prehistoric European ancestors--but the most important epoch in the course of civilization goes largely unnoticed in the history books. That was the abrupt shift from matriarchy and worship of the Great Goddess to the warrior-based governments and language stocks of the steppe-dwelling Indo-Aryan barbarians who invaded Old Europe beginning in the late fourth millennium BCE.

The roots of Europe's original female-oriented religion are lost in the mists of the early Stone Age, and may even precede the arrival of "modern humans" in Europe and be part of the heritage of Neanderthals. This substratum of a long-lasting peaceful hunter-gatherer society organized around the religion of the Great Goddess absorbed the spreading practice of agriculture from the Middle East beginning in the fifth millennium and reached its apogee of development in a pure form in the fourth millennium.

The cult of the Great Goddess, depicted here in an enthroned version with flanking felines from Çatal Hüyük, an 8,000-year-old shrine in present-day Turkey (p. 107), was the lifelong object of study by Lithuanian-American archeologist Marija Gimbutas, whose most influential book is The Language of the Goddess (London:  Thames & Hudson, 2006). 

The axe fell on this ancient civilization--quite literally--around 3000 BCE. As confirmed in Jane McIntosh's Handbook to Life in Prehistoric Europe (New York:  Facts on File, 2006), there was a clear line of demarcation between old and new Europe, from the Balkans to Britain, Spain and Scandinavia. The archeological record tells the story of a sweeping and abrupt end to things. The first metal weapons appear in the graves of elite males along with hoards of gold and jewels. Axes previously used to clear forests for agriculture are now battle-axes. Burials are single rather than family and clan-oriented. Whole villages were massacred and depopulated. Fortifications grew as violence escalated. The horse, venerated as just one of the totem animals of the Goddess since the early Stone Age, becomes the symbol of the warrior, along with the chariot and boat. Rock art features ithyphallic warriors wielding weapons or shooting arrows at each other. The transition can also be seen in the establishment of the Pharaohs in Egypt about 3500 BCE.

The invaders brought their male pantheon of war gods, Indo-European languages, aristocratic forms of government and Central Asian/Caucasian genes. The goddess cult underwent radical male adaptations, surviving in out-of-the-way places like Crete and Brittany. 

So, rather than one transformation, European civilization first went through a Neolithic Revolution, then conversion to warrior-dominated patriarchal societies. It can be postulated that the matriarchal societies eagerly adopted agriculture but exhausted soils, destroyed vital forests and became weaker and smaller-bodied due to a changed diet, falling prey around 3000 BCE to the barbarian warriors of the steppe, who found the accumulation of wealth and unprotected agrarian settlements of Old Europe easy pickings. Climate change could have been a contributing factor.

James Joyce called history "the nightmare from which one cannot wake." If we take a long view of human events, this nightmare began about five thousand years ago. Other-worldly religions like Christianity introduced a further element of alienation and turning away from the sources of life. Before that, people were happily alive, awake, in tune with nature and celebrated life under the auspices of matriarchy.

Assailants with bows and arrows attack

a fortified Neolithic settlement in Furfooze,

France, who defend themselves by hurling

stones and raising clubs. Reconstruction

from Louis Figuier, Primitive Man (London: 

Chatto and Windus, 1876). 

Jewelry from the Grotte du Renne "reindeer cave" at Arcy-sur-Cure in Central France has long been assigned to Neanderthals, helping rehabilitate them in the picture paleontologists paint of early mankind. But these artifacts have now been questioned thanks to a redating of the lowest levels of the cave, where Neanderthals were presumed active. According to Science Magazine vol. 330, no. 6003, p. 439) in October 2010,

In the new study, a team led by dating expert Thomas Higham of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom reports 31 new radiocarbon dates from the Grotte du Renne using novel methods designed to avoid contamination. The dates, obtained on materials such as bone tools and ornaments made of animal teeth, paint a disturbing picture: While upper layers attributed to modern humans clock in at no older than 35,000 years, artifacts from the Châtelperronian levels range from 21,000 years old, when Neandertals were long extinct, to 49,000 years old, before the Châtelperronian began. About one-third of the dates were outside the expected range.

What we don't understand is the dichotomy between "modern humans" and Neanderthals to begin with. If the dating was mixed (contaminated) how can paleontologists be sure, since "modern humans" and Neanderthals were mixed themselves according to all proven genetic analyses. These retests seem to be splitting hairs to prove or disprove pet theories that no longer apply.

It is particularly nonsensical to say, as the archeologist Randall White of New York University said, "This key site should be disqualified from the debate over [Neanderthal] symbolism." The debate over Neanderthals' symbolic intellectual and communicative capacities has already been settled to 99% of the scientific world's satisfaction. It is a non-issue. Paintings, jewelry and art from over 32 Neanderthal grave sites and camps settled it several years ago, and since the Neanderthal genome was sequenced in draft form earlier this year it has been demonstrated that they had the same or similar intellectual genes as "modern humans." In fact, their brains were bigger, so if anything they had a greater capacity to conceptualize the world.

We wish archeologists and science writers would work on their own symbolic thinking a bit and let the bones of tired myths and ethnocentric fallacies rest in peace. And pu-lease spell the word wrongly right. It's N-e-a-n-d-e-r-t-h-a-l. Neandertal is purist and is not going to become popular. Trust us.

Next thing you know they're going to be talking about the Visigots and Ostrogots.

Jewish I is described as "the most common of the three markers . . . its frequency highest in Poles, Russians, Germans, Hungarians, Romanians and Slavic peoples who intermarried with Ashkenazi Jews. It also appears in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Moroccan Jews (Sephardim)." This means it is a marker of general European admixture. But where is it most common, and where did the European Jews it identifies originate? Where were they concentrated in earliest times?

Statistical searches in ENFSI provide some tantalizing answers. Jewish I is found at a relatively high frequency throughout Europe but at elevated levels in Poland, Portugal and Belgium. It is lowest in Italy and Finland.

This would suggest that Jewish ancestry and intermarriage was common in countries where the population still carries this admixture marker.

Jewish II is characterized as the "strongest" marker, correlating very often with Ashkenazi Jewish parentage, especially in its double allele form (two checks under parents' columns on an 18 Marker Ethnic Panel or Jewish DNA Ancestry report). This description is validated by ENFSI results for 22 countries of Europe, where its strongest showings are in Czechoslovakia, Croatia and Slovenia (all Central European Slavic populations).

Its lowest frequency occurs in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, countries with few Ashkenazi Jews today. There are no data for Hungary in ENFSI since it does not belong to the European Union. Czech is the closest population in geography and historical composition. Likewise, there are no data for Slovakia, the southern part of the former Czechoslovakia, as Slovakia chose not to participate in ENFSI.

In Czechoslovakia, nearly 1 in 26 people carry Jewish II in its double allelic form, suggesting both parents were Jewish. The lowest frequency of Jewish II occurs in Scotland, where only 1 in 65 have it.

Note that even though most Ashkenazi Jews spoke Yiddish, a Germanic dialect, they were not necessarily German in origin. More likely they belonged to the Slavic peoples. Yiddish is not linguistically descended from Rhinish or Low German but a High German language of convenience adopted by Slavic-speaking Jews during Germany's medieval Drang nach Osten (Push to the East). Germany itself was considered a predominantly Slavic nation by geographers until the nineteenth century, when it was first unified under the Prussian monarchy.

The reason Jewish II is not detected at a higher level in today's German population is because of the ethnic cleansing and genocide committed by the Nazi government in the Second World War. For various reasons, Czechoslovakia and Hungary's Jewish populations, many of them assimilated Jews, survived better than Germany's.

The best book about German Jewry is probably The Pity of It All, A History of Jews in Germany, 1743-1933, by Amos Elon (Macmillan, 2002), although the author's approach to Jewish ethnicity is Zionist and doctrinaire.

Jewish DNA is full of controversies and the journalist Jon Entine shies away from none of them in this bestselling compendium. Interesting for our readers may be to note where he falls out on some of the more vexed issues after taking the trouble to interview genetic news makers such as Karl Skorecki ("Genes of Old Testament Priests") and Father William Sanchez, the cause celebre for New Mexico crypto-Jews.



Is there a Jewish "race"? That is probably not the right word, but yes, writes Entine, there is definitely a Jewish ethnicity that has been been preserved in exile from the beginnings of Judaism in the Middle East over 3,000 years ago. Even Ashkenazi Jews are, genetically speaking, more similar to themselves and Middle Easterners than they are to Czechs, Poles and other Central and East European neighboring populations.

Is the Bible a true and accurate history of the Jews? No, for one thing, events in the Old Testament are corroborated by only a handful of contemporary records, including one Egyptian document and one Assyrian proclamation. The early books were rewritten several times, most famously by the Patriarch scribe Ezra. The Jews returning from Babylonian Exile burnished the existing scriptures and introduced political themes that put the Northern Kingdom in a bad light. The word "Jew" was not actually used of the inhabitants of ancient Israel until around 520 B.C.E., when the "battered capital city, Jerusalem, surrounded by a scattering of towns" (p. 107) was called Yehud, the Aramaic name of a new province in the Persian Empire. 

Do the Samaritans retain the closest genetic resemblance to Abraham's descendants? Here is what Entine writes:

The scientists speculate that not only are today's Samaritans likely descended from the Israelites, they may be the ancestral remnants of a breakaway group of Jewish priests that did not go into exile when the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom in 721 B.C.E. Instead, these Cohanim may well have stayed, "but married Assyrian and female exiles relocated from other conquered lands, which was a typical Assyrian policy to obliterate national identities." It may just be that the tiny clan of Samaritans are a rare surviving branch of the ancient Israelites.

Among Entine's sources are Batsheva Bonne-Tamir, an Israeli geneticist who began studying Samaritan DNA when the population had dwindled to only a few families in the 1950s. Other authorities interviewed include: 

Karen Avraham (deafness in Jews), Doron Behar (Jewish founding mothers), Neil Bradman (Lemba Jews), Luca Luigi Cavalli-Sforza (Stanford's grand old man of DNA), Jared Diamond, David Goldstein (Jewish diseases), Michael Hammer (Y chromosomes), Mary-Claire King (disease studies), Jonathan Marks (critic), Tudor Parfitt (African and Indian Jews) and Mark Thomas (Cohanim).

What happened to the ten Lost Tribes? Entine adopts a wry and caustic attitude toward this subject, beginning his chapter "Wandering Tribes" with a piece on the Worldwide Church of God, a Pasadena, California sect founded by an ex-advertising agent, Herbert W. Armstrong, in the early 1930s. Armstrong was a proponent of British-Israelism, the belief that England is the heir to ancient Israel, the tribe of Ephraim having settled in Britain and the word "British" being derived from the ancient Hebrew word beriyth, which means covenant. "When Armstrong died in 1986, the WWCG claimed more than 150,000 members and an annual budget of $130 million" (p. 130). 

Are Ashkenazi Jews really Khazars (i.e. non-Semitic)? Their genetic mix contains some Turkic elements from the Khazars, but even the Khazars were not 100% Turkic. Entine does not believe in the mass conversion portrayed in works such as Judah Halevi's medieval account The Kuzari: A Book of Argument in Defense of a Despised Religion. Following the author Kevin Brook ("not a formally trained historian but an impressively self-taught scholar...creator of the Web site khazaria.com," p. 199), Entine says "the number of Khazarian Jews probably numbered no more than 30,000 out of a total population of 100,000, including a few thousand nobles and royalty" (p. 201).

Do you have to have a Jewish mother to be Jewish? Entine investigates this ruling very thoroughly and shows that Judaism was spread primarily by men with Middle Eastern roots who married local women of non-Semitic ancestry who converted to the husband's religion. The Jewish mother criterion came about in rabbinical times under the influence of Roman law. In Biblical times, Jewishness always came from a Jewish father. 

Is there an "intelligence gene" among Ashkenazi Jews? Yes, it emerged in the age of the ghetto when survival selected for males who could earn a livelihood with their wits rather than hands or bodies.

Having touched on these questions, I would like to point out that many of the solutions are rather superficial. Entine's research is not very deep or wide ranging. Nowhere in the chapter on mass conversions does he speak about the Babylonian principality of Narbonne in the South of France during Carolingian times. His treatment of Sephardic Jews is meager. There are other limitations in the scope of the work, but in general, Abraham's Children is to be recommended as a solid, reliable, seemingly effortless account of a subject on which blood, sweat and tears have been spilled on every page in the past. That is no small feat.

We predicted as much:  anthropologists are beginning to have a more positive attitude toward the role of Neanderthals in human prehistory. According to an article in today's Washington Post, "Scientists are broadly rethinking the nature, skills and demise of the Neanderthals of Europe and Asia, steadily finding more ways that they were substantially like us and different from the limited, unchanging and ultimately doomed inferiors most commonly described in the past."

The article by Marc Kaufman is titled "Anthropologists Adopt a More Favorable View of Neanderthals," and appeared in the October 4, 2010 edition of the newspaper.

Earlier research this year noted that Europeans have, on average, 1-4% Neanderthal genes. That began the wheels of scientific thinking rolling. "Our picture of Neanderthals is likely to change radically now that we know they were among ancestors of ours, not a dead-end, primitive race," we wrote in the blog post "Most Humans Part Neanderthal" on May 12. DNA Consultants introduced its Neanderthal Index in June.