TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/102692/10269932.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 17KB | 362 lines

                                                                                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