Chapter 135: I — The Old Europe Hunters

After F emerged from the CF split, F did What CT had done before it: F branched. And branched. Again. And again. The great generative grid Of the human genealogical tree branched and stanched And continued to branch, at every generation, As the migrating peoples spread further east and north And west across Eurasia. Within a few thousand Years of the CF split, F had put forth Several major sub-clades. One of them was called IJK. And within IJK, the next split was IJ Versus K. And within IJ, the split was I versus J. It is the I we follow today. Haplogroup I. The lineage that walked into Europe first. Not the first Human beings in Europe—the Neanderthals had held the ground For hundreds of thousands of years, and the first wave of Homo sapiens Had already been in Europe for a while, walking around The Neanderthal strongholds, sometimes interbreeding, Sometimes competing, sometimes simply coexisting. But I Is the lineage that settled. I is the haplogroup that, feeding On the reindeer and the mammoth, stayed, and did not try To turn back. I is the European hunter-gatherer. I Is the one who painted at Lascaux, and at Altamira, And at Chauvet—or at least, is a good candidate for the who Of those long and profound cave-painting epochs. The tiara And crown of the hunter-gatherer culture of Europe sat On the I-carrying heads. I was there when the ice Sheets covered most of the continent. I survived the bat- Tle of the glacial maximum, the terrible vice Of the twenty-thousand-years-ago deep freeze, by retreating Into the southern refugia: Iberia, the Italian peninsula, The Balkans. There, in the ice-age pocket of the meeting Of the milder southern climates, the population clinical- Ly bottlenecked and survived. And when the ice retreated, I came back out and repopulated the continent. The streaming Northward migration of the I-carrying hunters, the completed Occupation of the post-glacial Europe, is the dreaming Of the old European lineage. This is the continent Before agriculture. Before cities. Before the written word. Before Stonehenge. Before the Indo-European languages consent To enter the continent—all of that is later. The deferred And patient hunter-gatherer life, which I embodies, runs For thousands of years before any of that arrives. I is the continent's first settled sons. I is the landscape's oldest and most patient archives. And I did not disappear. I is still here. In Sweden, Norway, Denmark—the Nordic countries carry high Frequencies of I. In the Balkans—Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia—the frequencies are also high. The dry And mountainous sub-branches of I are scattered across The southern and northern European margins. I held on Through the subsequent waves of migration. The Neolithic farmers Came (haplogroup G). I was pushed to the peripheries, but not gone. The Indo-European steppe riders came (haplogroup R). The armors Of the new arrivals overlaid, but did not replace, the older I populations. The old Europe went under the soil, but did not vanish. The modern European is a layered person—I at the bolder Base, G at the second layer, R at the top, and the admixture Varies region by region. In the Balkans, I is still Dominant. In Scandinavia, I is strong. In Western Europe, I is a minority but present. In Eastern Europe, I still fills A substantial slot. The old Europe lives. The hunters, the hero And heroine figures of the pre-Neolithic stone age, did not end. They became the substrate on which later migrations laid. The old Europe is still in the European body. The old Europe's trend Was to hold on. The Venus of Willendorf, the small-breasted maid And figurine of the fertility cult, the mother-goddess figurine That Marija Gimbutas identified with the pre-IE culture of the continent, Was likely made by the hands of the I-carrying hunter-gatherers. The seen And carried iconography of the pre-agricultural old Europe, the ancient Religion of the cave-paintings and the small goddess figurines, Sits in the register of the I haplogroup. And when the farmers came, I did not simply die out. I retreated Into the mountains, into the forests, into the fishing villages of the Coastlines that the farmers did not want. The hunter-gatherer lifeways continued In the peripheries while the farming villages spread across the plains. The Adaptation was gradual and long. In some places, I fully adopted agriculture And stayed put as the land changed uses. In others, I remained hunter- Gatherer for thousands of years longer. The Mesolithic peoples of the fixture And holding pockets of Europe kept the hunting way alive long after the blunter And more dominant Neolithic had taken the fields. The Scandinavian Hunter-gatherers were still I at the time the Yamnaya arrived. The hunter-lineage was tenacious. It was the deep European Substrate, the one that had survived the ice age and had contrived To survive the agricultural revolution and even the steppe invasion, Though it was displaced from dominance by the time these waves finished. But it is still here. I is still here. The Nordic basin, Croatian villages, the Sardinian highlanders—all still carry I. The sun Still rises on descendants of the hunter-gatherers of the old Europe. The plan And inheritance of the Magdalenian and Gravettian cultures, the Aurignacian Paintings at Chauvet, the Gravettian figurines—these are still Carried in the blood of certain European populations. The ancient Is still living. The old Europe has not ended. The hunting-and-gathering fulfilment Has been converted, under pressure, into farming-and-herding, into city-building, Into modernity—but the Y-chromosomal signature of the first settled populations Of the continent remains intact in the bodies of many millions of modern Europeans. The thrilling And patient continuity of I across thirty or forty thousand years Of habitation in the same continent is the longest relationship between a people And a land in the European story. The French are new. The Germans are new. The Romans were new. The I-carrying European is old. The steeple Of the oldest European's presence is the deepest in the cathedral Of the European body. The chapter honors them. The old Europeans. The first hunters. The painters of the cathedral Of Lascaux, the makers of the Venus figurines, the dem And defiant survivors of the glacial maximum, the patient re- Occupiers of the post-ice continent, the substrate under every- Thing that came later. Haplogroup I is the ID card Of old Europe. The hunter-gatherer's long patient regard Toward the land he lived on. The deep relationship to the Forest and the river and the cave. The animism of the deep European past. And when, in a few chapters, we come to The Cucuteni-Trypillia civilization, which was partly the sleep And continuation of the pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer traditions Into a semi-settled form, we will see I again. Cucuteni-Trypillia Was the old Europe's answer to the farming revolution. Its positions And paintings and cities, built of wood and clay, its pervasive Female iconography, its peaceful and apparently un-hierarchical Society—these were the old Europe's elaboration of what the farmers Had offered, made in the key of the old Europe's own magical Register. And the Yamnaya, when they came, would be the harmers Of this particular flowering. But we are not there yet. For now, I. The old Europe. The hunter. The mother- Goddess carver. The cave-painter. The survivor of the ice's threat And retreat. The patient background lineage. The brother And sister and uncle of every European who still Carries the ancient signature. The old Y. The old land. The one who was here before. The hold of the will To endure. The keeping hand. Haplogroup I. Old Europe. Stand. The rest of the continent's story is layered on top. But I Is the bottom. And the bottom, in a continent, is what the top Descends into when the top has finished. The high And visible layers come and go. The bottom does not stop. The cave is still in the limestone. The painting is still on the wall. The goddess is still in the ochre. And the Y is still in the men of the north, Men of the Balkans, men of Sardinia, whose bodies carry the call Of the deep European past, whose own mothers' great-great-grandfathers set forth To the ice-age cave to paint the horse and the bison and the bull. The continent remembers. The haplogroup is the memory. The full And patient continuity of I is the body's longest word.