This is the title of an article that was published by the Dutch publishing house Volkskrant in August 2019. A sensational statement was made by Dutch scientists involved in the study of ancient burials.
Veluwe is an area in the province of Herderland with a total area of 91,200 hectares. Leiden-based archaeologist Quentin Bourgeois, exploring the region with his team using modern technology, has discovered many new burial mounds.
It used to be thought that there are 500-750 burial mounds in the Veluwe. The bourgeois found out that their number reaches 2000, and this is not the final result, which they have achieved since May 2019. The appearance of the mounds dates back to about 2800-1000 BC. And they were created by migrants who came here from the Russian steppes.
The study sheds completely unexpected light on who the distant ancestors were. "In Veluwe, we actually find traces of the emergence of society as we know it today," says Bourgeois. … These people probably spoke the Proto-Indo-European language from which our Indo-European languages originate."
University of Groningen scientist Stein Arnoldussen calls this research "meaningful and leading." He believes that "the bourgeois breathes new life into the field of research, which until then was marking time."
Prehistoric mound near Speulde (Speulde / Ermelo municipality).
Shadows of the Dead
Promotional video:
According to Bourgeois, one person rests in each mound. First, a body pit was dug with a burial room, in which gifts were left: an earthen bowl, a blade, a stone hammer-ax, a flint ax, and sometimes amber beads. Then the hill fell. But not everyone got such a monumental grave. Most likely, important people from a family or community are buried in them.
Basically, the remains are a "shadow of the body" - a residual trace in the sand, but there are also bone remains. “Forensic geneticists who have studied them for several years were able to extract the remains of DNA. This international study is fundamentally changing the perception of the prehistoric inhabitants of this part of the world.
Scientists claim that 75% of the current population of Europe is genetically descended from immigrants from modern Russia and Ukraine. In 2015, we learned that 3 thousand years before the birth of Christ, there was a major wave of population migration from the Russian steppes to Western Europe."
Burial gifts and rituals also correspond to prehistoric Russian and Ukrainian: men are buried on the right side, facing west; women on the left, facing east. “Near Moscow, you will find graves that are almost identical to those in Veluwe,” says Bourgeois.
“The question remains, why did these steppe peoples, along with herds of livestock, moved to the west: because of diseases? We found traces of the plague bacteria in the plaque of these migrants. The found mounds are just the tip of the iceberg: after all, most of them have disappeared over the centuries passed. The bourgeois comes to the conclusion that, among other things, based on the availability of agricultural and pasture land, of course, tens of thousands of inhabitants lived here, and perhaps even hundreds of thousands. This made the Veluwe a very densely populated area at the time.
Gefotografeerd door: Elroy Spelbos.
Laser beams
The fact that many mounds have been discovered recently is due to the emergence of new images and a large number of labor. The management received detailed images taken with laser beams from aircraft. They register height differences on the ground, regardless of the variety of vegetation.
In collaboration with Herderland Heritage, in May Bourgeois launched Erfgoedgezocht.nl, a so-called civic science project. Hundreds of volunteers viewed laser photographs on the Internet. Fifteen people look at each photograph to arrive at the correct judgment. If they find something, the layman's find is first checked by archaeologists. “The result exceeds my wildest expectations,” says Bourgeois. - Almost 240,000 images have already been viewed. This means that we already have a third of the visual material available."
Thus, to date, about a thousand mounds have been discovered. "They are arranged in long rows, just like in the province of Drenthe, Denmark, Poland and Ukraine." At Epe, a series of hills 6 kilometers long was found, with a mound every few hundred meters; and it looks like these hills will continue for another 4 kilometers.
Bourgeois loves to ponder the ideas that led to the construction of the mounds. Of course, they are memorials to the dead. But they also formed signs: you can see from one mound to another to find your way. Perhaps the mound makers hoped that the ancestors would thus protect your journey. Even if you go all the way to Western Europe.
Author: Simona Dutch
