Long lasting alliance

First components of the alliance

On one side - the hunter-gatherers, roaming the forests and highlands, with seasonal interested in large rivers for seasonal fishing and transport.

On the other side - the first wave of Middle-easterners bringing the neolithic revolution in the region - farmers moving in and taking in use the fertile plains near the river beds of Danube and major tributaries.

As the burial places in the Danube gorges reveal "a picture of peaceful coexistence" side by side for many generations, meaning that they traded rather than fought, exchanging goods, genes and ideas. Farmers needed HG knowledge of nature in the region and survival skills when weather damaged crops. HG needed to supplement their diet in the winter and new blood for their small communities.

When next farmer waves came, fighting for good farming grounds was inevitable, pushing westward the descendants of previous wave. But by then those farmers closer to the HG communities would go upriver hiding and adapting to farm smaller fields between high mountains. These would become the nuclei of a population that found a way to stay in this region no matter what, using a combination of farming and HG strategies.

Later to the party 

The component needed for this population to fare through millennia, until today in the region, was by that time on the move with other waves of people: pastoralists. Fast moving in search of greener pastures, pastoralist meant trouble for stable farmer communities. But for that mixture of farmers and HG living in the highlands, herding came to replace dwindling game. One particular tamed animal fitted well with their way of life: the sheep. Able to graze on high altitude lush grasses in the summer and walk even hundreds of kilometers to winter near the farms. The skill set forged by the early farmers and HG alliance made sheep herding and farming of the fields hidden between the mountains into a way of life lasting to this day in this region, the transhumance. The high mobility of sheep herds allowed for long distance trade and gene exchange so that remote communities from the mountains were connected to each other into a strong common culture throughout the region.

Wave after wave

When new masses of people were moving in, their first target were the fields near large rivers. Earlier settlers were either pushed away to the west or upriver toward the mountains. In time the older a population was in the region closer to the mountains they were. 

Such a stratification can be seen by analyzing river and locality names between southern Carpathian Mountains and the Danube: most names are non Slavic and older than the arival of slavic speaking  populations, but few major rivers watering the Danube plain got Slavic names to this day, like Prahova, Ialomitza, Dambovitza (citations needed).

Going back to population interactions, depending on their numbers, culture and weapon technology the incoming waves were more or less able to wage war to settle. Once settled in, trade, ideas and intermarriage were taking place with upriver neighbors. In centuries they were becoming locals and in turn their time would come to feel pressure from south and east. They faced same options of going up on Danube into middle of Europe or go closer to the mountains. But the later was possible only if they were accepted by the descendants of the early farmers - HG - pastoralist alliance. They had strongholds up in the mountains, easily defendable and a network of support from their kin throughout the region.

In millennia this network of support perpetuated a continuous blood line with additions from those incoming waves, that had the chance to stay longer in this region, with its members transmitting from a generation to the next the survival values that enabled their descendants thrive here to this day. 

I gave e hint in this post on how I think information was passed on, but  I'll come back to it.

A deluge

Here goes the story, yes it is a story until more meat is put on to the bones.
Currently it's based more on hints and circumstantial evidence.
But allow me to go back to telling the story.

Hunter-gatherers had the region to themselves during the Ice Age. By the end of it, life as they knew it changed dramatically. Mega-fauna gradually died out and weather had oscillations between extremely dry and very wet. As ice caps melted, vast amounts of water made the level of global ocean rise and Mediterranean Sea slowly reclaimed territories from Balkan peninsula.

According to Columbia University geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman, local population must have witnessed a catastrophic event.
During the last Ice Age the Black Sea was cut off from Mediterranean and became a standalone lake a fraction in surface to what we see today and at about 100 m lower level. When the global ocean level reached the height of Bosphorus, it simply discharged with the force of hundreds Niagara falls.
Was that even transmitted from generation to generation for millennia and finally recorded by Assyrian tablets and the Bible? It would be another example of powerful messages faring through ages to reach to us.
But this was just the avant-premiere of another flood in the region, a flood of people.

Changing weather patterns put a lot of stress on herbivores, that were migrating along ancestral routes following the cycles of precipitation. Their numbers dwindled and their routes became unpredictable to the despair of hunters. 
These environment changes put human ingenuity to the test and as a result in several places in the world, a revolution started in the form of agriculture, dubbed the Neolithic Revolution, and agriculture in the Fertile Crescent deeply impacted our region.
Agriculture produced more food than ever before and a sudden population growth. By then communities could grow to thousands of people, like Çatalhöyük neolithic town, and competition for farmland and pastures started. More and more people were looking for places to do what they learned: grow crops and drive herds.

"Centres of origin and spread of agriculture" by Joey Roe

Recent genetic research shows the tremendous success of Middle Easterners in colonizing the world armed with this new technology, the agriculture. 
More to that soon.

Restart. But how?

Life in the Funnel (Balkan - Dinaric - Carpathian region) was good until the next migrant wave came in. Often, it meant you had to leave home to the mercy of fire, fleeing with a handbag and your family.

What would you want to relay to next generations and how would you make sure the message isn't lost?

The message my grandparents passed to me was: Learn, because what you know cannot be taken away from you! (in the context of the totalitarian communist regime, it was extremely meaningful, in a family that experienced NKVD and deportation to Siberia).

I think this is a key message and part of the BDC common culture.

Learning to build what they need with very little resources, simplicity and ingenuity are essential for survival in these conditions.

Another part that insured  the message wasn't lost is art that encoded important information, including family and tribe history, into clothing and house utensils. And of course in music, dance and rituals.

Let me give a relevant example: the Carpathian traditional shirt (ie in Romanian) encodes family and local community history in patterns and colors.

Coding is done by girls (for themselves) and women (for boys and men) and decoding is done by every member of the community as part of social life.

It is handy to have the back-up copy of the life saving information on the clothes you're wearing, next time you hear "Honey, the Vandals are coming!".

And finally, I think that humor is also part of the local culture. No, I really do.

Survival value

Allow me to go back to the description of the region:

Balkan - Dinaric - Carpathian region is at the crossroad of two ancient (and current) migration routes: East / West - directly from Asia over the Pontic–Caspian steppe, a grassland stretching from the Danube Delta to the Ural Mountains; South / North - from Middle East over Marmara Sea.

The Danube provided a highway towards the center of Europe and the high mountain ranges of the Balkans and Dinarics on the right/south bank and Carpathians on the left/north bank directed the traffic toward north-west.

So it's a funnel for migrations, but let's think about how life was in this funnel?

Nature is generous here: green valleys, mountains full of game: salt, gold and ores, large plain in the middle watered by the Danube and tributaries full of fish.
Land of running milk and honey, isn't it? But not for long because there was (and is) a long queue at the entrance.

When I look back at the history of my family, I see that every generation has witnessed war, every second generation has been through a major war which made them run, and it changed borders, rules and administration language.

The only certitude in the funnel was for millennia that almost every generation will go through an event that would make them move, losing belongings, bringing new language, new rules, new religion.

We have seen that some chose to stay here, by living and hiding in the mountains when invaders came. Which meant they often had to restart from scratch.

What would you want to relay to next generations and how would you make sure the message isn't lost?

Evidence for a specific culture of BDC region

In order to have a culture that is transmitted over millennia some conditions have to be met:

• Continuous living, see here ;
• Contains information with high value for survival;
• Transcends spoken language;

I present here an example of a ritual still performed today in several places on the south-eastern side of the Carpathian Mountains, that according to Discovery Channel is also performed in the Dinaric Alps (content source needed). 

A piece of news caught my attention this year with a striking image about a traditional New Year bear dance.

Alecsandra Raluca Dragoi's image taken in Comanesti, Romania, won 2015 National Geographic Traveller UK’s photo competition 

The way I see this ritual, it has to do with the Master of the Beasts, as Mircea Eliade, in the trilogy History of Religious Ideas, describes a central figure in hunter-gatherer beliefs. The story behind this ritual is that the Master of the Beasts takes control of the most powerful animal (in this region the bear) to transfer his might to the community that he visits once a year.

For me, this is an example of ritual that spiritually connects us to the hunter-gatherers who lived here 10 millennia ago.

I will search for more examples, perhaps from current religious practices, that perpetuate much older rituals through syncretism.

Your suggestions are much appreciated.

Evidence for continuous living in the BDC region

Same families continuously living in the Balkan - Dinaric - Carpathian region?

Like any good investigation, we turn to the white coats for DNA analysis.
Well structured information about genetic composition of European countries can be found on eupedia.com. I really like their motto: "At Eupedia we consider that the knowledge of history is essential to understand the complex ethnic, cultural and linguistic patchwork of the modern world."

One Y DNA haplogroup is relevant for this discussion, namely I2 because, according to the same website: 
"I2 is thought to have originated during the Late Paleolithic, around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum, some 22,000 years ago. The first scenario is that I2 originated in Europe. When the ice sheets started receding to the north from 20,000 to 12,000 years ago, the I2 hunter-gatherers re-expanded from their refugium".

Present day distribution of  I2a subgroup is striking:

I present you Evidence #1
Male population in BDC region is related to the hunter-gatherers that were in this region 20 millennia ago. In the center of the Dinaric Alps, every second man has this Y DNA marker, while in the Southern Carpathian Mountains, one in four men has it.

See the percentage for your country, the tables are available here: Distribution of European Y-chromosome DNA (Y-DNA) haplogroups by region in percentage

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What fabric?

I previously described a geographic region, which I named Balkan - Dinaric - Carpathian region, and how it acted both as a barrier and a bridge for population waves poring into Europe from Middle East and Asia.

Since the Neanderthals this area was never uninhabited. Even during the last Ice Age, this region was free of the ice sheets (except for high altitude glaciers) and a safe haven for the hunter-gatherers that used to live further north. 

Every population wave that chose to settle in the region, had to deal with the next wave. Usually new comers had better technology (agriculture versus gathering, bronze versus stone etc) and had the upper hand when competing for space with existing inhabitants. Under the pressure of incoming new waves, previews ones moved up the Danube into Central Europe and further on.

I believe that holds true for most of the incoming populations, with the exception of the ones that took advantage of the mountain ranges, enclosing this region, to resist being driven off.

Moreover I believe that the fabric uniting this entire region is the culture of the people that continuously lived here from the last Ice Age to this day.

You will immediately ask me to prove such a far fetched claim, but bare with me for a moment. I know I can't present the smoldering gun to the jury (or the atlatl with the fingerprints of a forefather, in this case), but there is plenty  circumstantial evidence that I will try to present to you.

There are several types of evidence the we can debate upon: 

• Genetic markers of the hunter-gatherers, that weathered the last Ice Age in the Balkans, and the distribution of these markers in the BDC region;
• Present day traditions throughout the region involving rituals that might have originated thousands of years ago and need direct oral transmission to be explained;
• Personal experience and family history, not much of an evidence, but the storyteller is allowed a personal touch.

The fabric that unites the region

What region?

It is quite difficult to define a unitary region in South East Europe with so many fault lines, left behind by former empires, with so many different languages and denominations. My point is that deep below these differences are lots of reasons for unity in the form of shared history, culture and ancestry.

I will try to use geography and its influence on human behavior, instead of looking to ever changing political boundaries. 

It has been done before by the German geographer August Zeune, credited with the Balkan Peninsula concept (in Goea 1808, as cited by Maria Todorova in Imagining the Balkans, Oxford University Press, 2009), meaning the region south of the Balkan Mountains. Now it means more than that, as Encyclopedia Britannica article shows.

Google Maps satellite view of the region

The region I'm referring to is larger region and contains:

1. Balkan Mountains and adjacent plains on both sides;
2. Dinaric Alps and Pindus Mountains and their adjacent plains (sometimes these mountain ranges are considered part of Balkan Mountain group);
3. Carpathian Mountains and adjacent plains on both sides.

For the lack of a better term I'll use the name Balkan - Dinaric - Carpathian Region or BDC on short.

BDC limits would be: 

• West: Adriatic Sea;
• South: Aegean Sea;
• East: Black Sea;
• North: The Alps and the Great European Plain.

This geographic unit had a major influence on how various waves of migration entered and dispersed in Europe from South and East. It has done so since modern humans came to claim Europe from Neanderthals. For that period see this article from Nature: Genome of 40,000-year-old jaw from Romania suggests humans interbred with Neanderthals in Europe.

Balkan - Dinaric - Carpathian region is at the crossroad of two ancient (and current) migration routes:

1. East to west - directly from Asia over the Pontic–Caspian steppe, a grassland stretching from the Danube Delta to Ural Mountains;
2. South to north - from Middle East over Marmara Sea;

Danube river provided a highway toward the center of Europe and the high mountain ranges of the Balkans and Dinarics on right/south bank and Carpathians on left/north bank directed the traffic toward north-west.

Few migrations that came to Europe mainly via BDC region: 

• Fertile Crescent population bringing agriculture;
• Early indo-european speakers;
• Celts, Goths, Huns ...

So the geography of BDC region impacted the incoming traffic, but how is that relevant for present day people and what about that unifying "fabric"? 

How about nurture?

Nurture impact on who I am

Through genes, nature gave me the potential to use intellectual capacity to earn a living. My family passed to me values and survival knowledge to help me develop this potential. All this proved to be essential as I grew up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.

Nurture is about environment

Upbringing conditions and education can help one develop his potential or totally mess it up.

Besides parental care, one important element of the environment for a child is mother tongue and when other languages are taught.  I recently read (citation needed) that the first language is deeply impacting the mind wiring and influences the way we think as adults.

In my case, mother tongue is Romanian, a Romance language, meaning its source is Latin. The presence of millions of Romance speakers in a sea o Slavic languages, in the middle of South East Europe, is a wonder but not the subject of this post. 

Hearing the stories of my grandparents, I realized that in this part of Europe mother tongue is a matter of chance. Mother tongue of grandchildren in areas like Dniester banks depended on how fast their grandparents could run during war. The parents of my father were faster than the Red Army in 1944, so I first spoke Romanian. The grandchildren of their siblings, that stayed there, had Russian as a first language. 

I understood the impact of Romanian on me when I learned other languages: it was easier to tackle other Romance languages like French. It also influences the way I use English, because I tend to employ more words than a native speaker would, building more intricate sentences.

But when I saw how much I share with my Russian speaking cousins living now near Dniester, I realized that language is an important part of me, but there is a deeper part of culture that unites me with my non-Romanian speaking family, like for example cuisine and sense of humor. 

Going back to family history, not all my ancestors, that I could identify, were Romanian natives, some were of Ukrainian and Polish origin on my father side and of Aromanian origin on my mother side. The later directly connects me with the multicultural Balkans, as Aromaninas are to be found all over there, from Greece to Serbia. This kind of movement of population and culture across Danube might explain common ritual meals like koliva, with recipes passed between generations, from the advent of agriculture in the Balkans 7000 years ago (my supposition though, any pros and cons are welcome).

Another piece of my family puzzle comes from my mother line, where some male ancestors came from Transylvania across the mountains. They were Romanian speakers avoiding being drafted by the Austrian Empire's Army. They were brought up in communities living along side with Saxon, Hungarian and Szekely communities. For them along with language, religious denomination was a matter of chance too.

A kind of conclusion

Contrary to nationalist and xenophobes views, I believe that people in this region share so much in terms of nature and nurture, something that transcends borders, language and religion.