The World in 3300 B.C.

• Share

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.