What That Exploded Dam Reveals About The First "Humans."
What That Exploded Dam Reveals About The First "Humans."
Russia blowing up Ukraine’s Khakovka Dam in June 2023 has had several unforeseen consequences.
The best preserved Sredni Stog culture archaeological site was located on an island that had been flooded to make the reservoir.
Archaeologists had saved the artefacts from a dig before the area was flooded by the Soviets.
That site, now likely to be revealed as the waters recede is the reference site for the Sredni Stog culture. This means that whenever other archaeological sites are dug up and their place in the chronology is determined, artefacts from them are compared to this previously submerged sites’ artefacts.
Through this process the most famous Sredni Stog site of all - Dereivka- was dated. Dereivka is about 80km north of the reference Sredni Stog site. I’ve visited the promontory into the Dniepr river north of Dnipro city on which Dereivka site rests.
At Dereivka archaeologists found the earliest example of what would become Corded Wear pottery anywhere, as well as some of the earliest remains of a domesticated horse on earth. Fire altars as well as the remains of sacrificed animals and bodies buried with ochre can be understood as our first evidence of a package of rites that would evolve, through migrations, into ancient Iran and India’s as well as other cultures’ religious practices.
See for example:
Because of other artefacts at Dereivka’s comparison with those of the reference Sredni Stog site now likely to be revealed after Russia blew the dam, we know both sites were occupied by people whose descendants would join with Yamnaya one thousand years later to create the Indo-European family of languages, culture and religions.
The American archaeologist and linguist Marija Guimbetas was the first person to assemble a migration chronology from hundreds of cultures and archaeological sites across the continent of Europe. Her hypothesis about the homeland of the first Indo-European language speakers anywhere on earth was formulated in the 1960s.
Since that time a number of archaeological and scientific innovations have proven Giumbetas’s hypothesis. Most recently, peer-reviewed studies of ancient DNA published in the world’s foremost scientific journals have demonstrated the presence of DNA originating in this region in the entire Indo-European cultural zone from Ireland to India.
Very recent advances in molecular biology, as published in peer-reviewed journals, now confirm the western Steppe ancestry of all of these immigrants. Since 2015 Bronze Age samples of ancient DNA that exhibit the Bronze Age-associated Y chromosome lineage R1b-M269 has been strongly linked with Steppe incursion into Central Europe (Nature, 2015).
The area around this de-submerged island is where the Dnieper Rapids used to flow before the Soviets destroyed this natural phenomenon to build its dams.
The essence in all Indo-European religions of the passage into the afterlife has been deduced by distilling all known early Indo-European religious texts. Bruce Lincoln, an American specialist in Indo-European religion, achieved this remarkable feat and set it out:
“The picture that emerges is as follows. On the way to the otherworld, souls of the dead had to cross a river, the waters of which washed away all of their memories. These memories were not destroyed, however, but were carried by the river's water to a spring, where they bubbled up and were drunk by certain highly favored individuals, who became inspired and infused with supernatural wisdom as a result of the drink.”
Lincoln doesn’t go as far as to locate the geographical space where this Cosmologem was first established.
Given what we now know about how Indo-European language and religion originated in the area affected by the explosion of the dam by the Russians, it’s now possible to assert with a reasonable degree of certainty that an idea that later evolved into other Indo-European cultures’ descendant religions - Greek, Iran, India, for example - was first formulated by Sredni Stog-Yamnaya humans in this area of the Dniepr river.
A further unexpected consequence of Russia’s destruction of the dam has emerged over the past few days.
Having turned an impassable sea into a swamp, Ruschist Nazi dam exploders now realise they may have solved a short-term problem (their fear of a Ukrainian assault across the dam) by creating a bigger medium-term problem.
This would not be the first example of how short-sighted breaches of the laws of war by Ruschist Nazis in Ukraine backfire spectacularly. Last year Ruschists gassed themselves in Rubizhne Luhansk. They forgot to check to check the wind direction. They thought that blowing up gas storage would kill Ukrainians.
Now, Ruschist Nazis from the swamps of Muscovy forgot that in summer the Ukrainian swamp they created will dry.
And 100km of what was impassable sea/river will become easily traversed by Ukrainian defenders.
The photograph at the top of this section is taken from a place that I've often visited: Nikopol. I've looked across what was like sea bay from there to the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. Long before the Soviets created Khakovska Reservoir this part of Ukraine has been a civilisational fault line.
Russia Blew The Dam, and all they got from it was a war crimes investigation, billions of dead sentient beings, a €50b extra bill for their stay in Ukraine, and a few lousy weeks of swamp.
The word “human” was first used in proto Indo-European / Ancient Ukrainian language to describe our species. But that is another story which is being told in
