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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 66

ICEMAN

The World in 3300 B.C.


In the Iceman's day, Europe was a quiet agricultural backwater.
The action was in Egypt and Mesopotamia, where civilization
was beginning to flourish.

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK -- With reporting by Andrea Dorfman/New
York and Marlin Levin/Jerusalem, with other bureaus


    Think of the Iceman as a sort of prehistoric Daniel Boone:
a leather-clad outdoorsman, equipped with the Stone Age
equivalent of a bowie knife and plenty of mountain know-how. Now
imagine the reception the roughhewn pioneer might have got if
he had shown up, coonskin cap and all, to greet the erudite
Thomas Jefferson at Philadelphia's Second Continental Congress
-- or if he had strode into the elegant court of Louis XV to
mingle with the bewigged nobles of France.

    That sort of culture clash -- mountain man meets high
society -- would have happened had Iceman ventured to meet his
contemporaries on other continents. While the Alpine mountaineer
and his people were foraging for berries and perhaps herding
sheep or cattle, the Sumerians in what is now Iraq were already
living in cities, drinking beer, keeping time with a primitive
clock and transporting goods with their new invention: the
wheel. Furthermore, they could record these deeds in the world's
first written language. Along the Lower Nile, Egyptians were
beginning to construct monumental buildings and decorate stone
palettes and other objects with hieroglyphs; craftsmen worked
skillfully with copper and silver. In China and Mesopotamia
merchants were keeping track of their accounts with primitive
numbering systems. In the southwestern Pacific, islanders were
sailing double-hulled canoes, having mastered the rudiments of
offshore navigation.

    By the Iceman's day, much of the world had made the
transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic society -- from the Old
to the Late Stone Age -- a change that University of Frankfurt
prehistorian Jens Luning calls "the revolutionary event in human
history." It marked the transition from subsistence hunting and
gathering to agriculture and the domestication of animals; the
stockpiling of food; extensive use of copper; the manufacture
of increasingly sophisticated tools and pottery. A dependable
food supply in turn led to a population explosion: by about 4000
B.C. there were an estimated 86.5 million people on earth, about
eight times as many as there had been 2,000 years earlier.

    But like all other major upheavals in human society,
including the Industrial Revolution, the Neolithic period
arrived in different places at different times. The Iceman and
his European brethren were hardly at the forefront of
civilization.


    Europe

    By 3300 B.C., Europe was already relatively crowded. Farm
villages had spread from the fertile plains and river valleys
of Central Europe toward northern Germany and Denmark, and south
to the foothills of the Alps. Herdsmen like the Iceman, on the
lookout for new pastures, began to move to higher ground. On the
rims of lakes and marshes, settlers built wooden homes, some on
stilts, and cultivated barley and peas. Communities of 50 to 200
people dotted the shores of Lake Constance and a number of Swiss
lakes, with central buildings for social functions. These
villagers evidently traveled across the Alps; parsley and
peppermint from the Mediterranean region have been found in some
of their Neolithic dwellings. In exchange, they may have offered
daintily fashioned white stone "pearls" of Alpine limestone,
which have shown up in neighboring regions.

    Down in the lowlands of France and Germany, the
inhabitants' spiritual and social life was sufficiently
developed so that they indulged in such time-consuming projects
as the construction of burial mounds and complexes of standing
stones. Some 500 years before Stonehenge, predecessors of the
Celts near Locmariaquer in Brittany may have used the 385-ton
stone Grand Menhir, now toppled and broken, for astronomical
observations. The neatly aligned rows of standing stones at
nearby Carnac may have served a similar purpose. Civil
engineering existed around this time as well: researchers have
found remnants of 5,000-year-old wooden trackways, used as roads
through the marshes of southwestern England.

    On the Continent's southern flank, villages on the Aegean
islands were busily trading olive oil, wine and pottery with the
Greek mainland and Crete. In Crete fashionable women sported
ankle-length dresses, with necklines low enough to make Madonna
blush. (The art of weaving originated more than a millennium
earlier.) And in the Balkans metallurgists were hard at work
crafting elaborate tools of lead, copper and iron and
spectacular ornaments of gold.


    Middle and Near East

    While the Neolithic period was just flowering in Europe,
it had long since come and gone in the Middle and Near East,
and a transitional epoch, known as the Chalcolithic (copper and
stone) period was approaching its zenith. The first
Chalcolithic culture appeared suddenly -- and mysteriously --
in the Near East in about 4000 B.C. and quickly spread toward
the Indus River basin and the Mediterranean.

    In Mesopotamia the fertile land between the Tigris and
Euphrates, the Chalcolithic people were building the first large
city-states -- Uruk, Ur and Eridu Larsa -- in what is now
southern Iraq. All grew to be thriving and fiercely competitive
commercial centers. City life was centered around a ziggurat,
or temple, that served as both a place of worship and a
storehouse for surplus food. For the first time people were
divided into several distinct social classes according to status
and occupation.

    In the surrounding countryside, newly developed irrigation
systems nourished the barley, wheat, flax and other crops that
fed the growing cities. Period drawings from Sumer, part of
Mesopotamia, provide the earliest known evidence of wheels --
essentially wooden planks rounded at the ends and fitted
together in a circle -- which were used on ox-drawn carts and,
later, chariots. Sailing ships embarked on distant trading
missions. By 3000 B.C., the world's first written language,
cuneiform, had appeared on small clay tablets, replacing the
strings of marked clay tokens that merchants had previously used
to keep track of their transactions. And at least one familiar
superstition was established: when the Sumerians spilled salt,
they would throw a pinch over one shoulder to ward off bad luck.

    As transportation improved, thanks to the wheel, sailing
ships and the domestication of donkeys, connections between
far-flung villages and towns expanded dramatically. A
flourishing international trade developed in copper ore, gold,
ivory, grain, olive oil, wine and other wares. Explains
anthropologist Brian Fagan of the University of California at
Santa Barbara: "This was the beginning of a global economy."

    One of Mesopotamia's trading partners was the Chalcolithic
people in what is now Israel -- a peaceful group who built
houses of stone and planned their towns and streets in an
orderly fashion. "They had excellent knowledge of animal
behavior and of botany," says Israeli botanist Daniel Zohary,
and had managed to domesticate and improve wild grapes, olives,
dates and figs, which they traded throughout the region. Their
elaborately designed churns were used to make a kind of yogurt
and possibly for brewing beer.

    Chalcolithic smiths had determined that naturally
occurring arsenic-laced copper was shinier and easier to work
than the unalloyed metal. The discovery contributed to the
extraordinary beauty of their ceremonial objects, jewelry and
vessels, exemplified by the Judean desert treasures -- a cache
of objects found in a cave in 1961. "Their art was versatile,
so beautiful, so different from anything that came before or
after," says Miriam Tadmor, senior curator at Jerusalem's Israel
Museum. Indeed, in the opinion of her colleague Osnat Misch,
"the culture of the later Bronze Age was inferior
aesthetically."


    Africa

    Northern Africa was a somewhat wetter place five
millenniums ago, and the land was fertile in a broad swath on
either side of the Nile. Many Egyptians still lived in huts made
of papyrus or mud; raised wheat, barley and livestock; and paid
homage to the local chiefs. Within just a few hundred years the
Pharaoh Narmer would forge the entire area into the great
Egyptian Empire. But recent scholarship shows that local
chiefdoms were already coalescing into larger kingdoms, as they
were in the neighboring land of Nubia, just upriver. As in
Europe, a stable food supply created a population boom and with
it the need for a more centralized government.

    The lives of Egyptians were closely tied to the Nile's
annual flood cycle, and they were acutely aware of its influence
on agriculture. They erected huge monolithic statues
representing the god Min -- who symbolized fertility and the
harvest -- and period tombs inevitably contain pottery, jars of
wine and beer or platters of food. People were often buried with
items related to their occupation: hunters with spearheads,
political leaders with symbols of office.

    Some scholars believe that during this period Egyptian
flintworking techniques reached a level that was never
surpassed. Like the Sumerians to the east, the Egyptians
developed a writing system, though their hieroglyphs were
pictorial rather than sound-based. They also invented
rudimentary arithmetic and accounting systems. "It was a simple
culture compared to what came later," says Kent Weeks, an
Egyptologist at American University in Cairo. "But the quality
of the work and variety of raw materials show it was in fact a
fairly complex and sophisticated society."

    The Egyptians were far ahead of anyone else in Africa, but
the 4th millennium B.C. was a crucial time for the rest of the
continent as well. The climate started to get progressively
dryer, and the Sahara expanded into a vast desert. Nomadic
tribes that herded cattle, sheep and goats on the fringes of the
Sahara and the Sahel and in the Sudan were forced southward to
the Central African savannas, where they gradually displaced
hunter-gatherers who had dominated the area for thousands of
years. Only in southern Africa, where farming was difficult, did
the Stone Age hunter-gatherers and fishermen continue to hold
their own. In caves and rock shelters of the Kalahari, remote
ancestors of the San (Bushmen) left their mark in the form of
magnificent paintings of animals and hunting scenes.


    Asia

    Like the rest of the world, Central Asia and East Asia
were experiencing a population boom, though the great Bronze
Age civilizations of India, Japan and China were at least a
millennium away. Nomadic hunters and fishermen appeared for the
first time along the shores of the Caspian and Aral seas and
Lake Baikal. On the Iranian plateau, farmed since at least the
6th millennium B.C., people lived in houses of sun-dried brick,
while craftsmen in the city of Anau used the potter's wheel to
turn out elaborately shaped and painted clay vessels. These
prehistoric Persians carried on trade with small villages in
what is now northern Pakistan.

    The ancestors of the Chinese had begun farming along the
Yellow River in the north as early as 7000 B.C. Excavations at
Banpo and other sites show that by the Iceman's day, farmers of
the Yangshao culture were living in semi underground circular
huts built of mud and timbers on terraces overlooking the
water. Communities were divided into living areas; large kilns,
which turned out distinctive painted pottery; and cemeteries.
The Yangshao buried goods with their dead, indicating a belief
in the afterlife, but the homogeneity of the buried objects
suggests that social classes had not yet appeared. Like the
other principal culture of that region and time, known as the
Longshan, the Yangshao kept pigs, sheep, chicken, buffalo and
oxen, and used finely crafted tools made from stone, bone and
wood.


    Australia and Oceania

    Superficially, at least, the Aboriginal people of
Australia would have struck the Alpine Iceman as primitive.
Their stone tools in 3300 B.C. were hardly different from those
used in past millenniums and, for that matter, in millenniums
to come, right up to the 20th century. Yet the Aborigines were
ingeniously adapted to their environment, and around Iceman's
time they took two important steps forward. The first was the
semidomestication of dingoes, wild dogs introduced from Asia and
employed mostly as social companions. Archaeologist Josephine
Flood believes that the dogs served as an object of affection
and a child substitute in a society that killed babies it could
not afford to feed (the dogs foraged for themselves; they were
probably also used for hunting). The second, and more profound,
breakthrough: for the first time, Australian Aborigines mounted
stone points onto shafts to form spears.

    On the nearby islands of the South Pacific, by contrast,
enterprising natives of the New Guinea highlands were clearing
forests and using irrigation to cultivate yams, bananas and taro
root. Coastal people were developing double-hulled ocean-going
canoes and mastering the rudiments of navigation, which led to
an explosion of interisland trade. The dominant traders, peoples
known to archaeologists as the Lapita, who lived in the Bismarck
archipelago, did a booming commerce in food, obsidian, seashells
and elaborately stamped pottery from island to island,
eventually venturing as far away as Fiji and Tonga.


    The Americas

    By some 12,000 years ago, toward the end of the last Ice
Age, small bands of Asian nomads began to cross the dry land
bridge that spanned what is now the Bering Strait, between
Siberia and Alaska. The migrations continued intermittently, and
when melting ice flooded the land bridge, they stopped. These
were the ancestors of the Sioux, Cherokee, Maya, Aztecs and all
other Native Americans, and when they first arrived, they were
hunter-gatherers like their Asian cousins.

    North American native cultures showed enormous diversity
by 3300 B.C. Among the oldest village sites ever found is the
Koster settlement, in the Illinois River Valley. Villagers there
were barely beginning to cultivate wild plants, relying mostly
on nuts, grasses, fish, deer and migrating waterfowl, while
people across Europe, Africa and Asia were already accomplished
farmers. But elsewhere in the U.S. Midwest, populations of
hunter-gatherers had staked out territories and built an
extensive trading network that dealt in copper, hematite,
seashells, jasper and other minerals. Fishing societies along
the Pacific Coast were also becoming more complex, as natives
took to the sea to hunt seals, whales and other marine mammals.

    Society was also growing more complex in Mexico and
Central America, but it was at its most elaborate in parts of
South America. Settlers in the Ayacucho region of the Andes had
domesticated guinea pigs and llamas by the time Iceman lived,
and farmed potatoes, squash, beans and corn. Along the coastal
desert of what is now northern Chile, the Chinchorro used woven
fishing nets and hooks made of cactus thorns, shell and bone to
harvest a rich diet from the sea. The Chinchorro, who were savvy
hunters, developed elaborate mummification techniques some 2,500
years before the Egyptians, probably as a sacrament in ancestor
worship. After removing internal organs and drying the cavf
mdavers, they stuffed the remains with feathers, grass, shell,
wool and earth. Then the bodies were covered with clay, fitted
out with wigs and propped up in family-like groups. The
Chinchorro then took care of their mummies, judging by evidence
of frequent repairs.

    Eventually, the Iceman's region and the rest of Europe
would catch up with other parts of the world. By 500 B.C.,
flourishing civilizations had sprung up in Greece, then Rome,
and soon spread throughout the Continent. But back when he was
plodding through the Alpine passes, the concept of a Eurocentric
view of civilization would have been laughable, especially to
the sophisticated societies that were thriving in Africa and
Asia.