MAXIMILIAN
MUSASHI
POLAND 2014

The Swiderians...../Poland And Its People/

In 1987 American historian Mary Settegast, in a compelling book entitled Plato Prehistorian, wrote about the imagined impact a global catastrophe would have had on human populations at the end of the last glacial age.

 

Not only did she uncover evidence of widescale bloodshed and violence across Europe and western Asia at this time, but she also noticed the footprints (see Fig. 16) of a very specific group of reindeer hunters reaching all the way from the Carpathian Mountains in Central Europe across to the Crimean Mountains, north of the Black Sea in what is today the Ukraine, a distance of some 850 miles (1,400 kilometers).

 

This easterly migration she saw as hunting groups exploring foreign territories, looking to exploit new resources now that the precious reindeer herds had disappeared into the arctic regions far to the north.

 

These reindeer hunters are known as the Swiderians, after the "type site" where their cultural traits were first recognized at Swidry Wielkie in Otwock, near Warsaw, in Poland.

 

Not only were they an advanced hunting society, with a unique stone tool technology, but the Swiderians also established sophisticated mining operations, some of the only accepted examples from the Paleolithic age, within the Swietokrzyskie (Holy Cross) Mountains of central Poland. Here they extracted "exotic" forms of flint, as well as hematite, used as ochre.

 

Long distance trading routes were established to transport stone tools and pre-form cores across hundreds of miles. Thus there is little question that the Swiderians were among the first miners anywhere in the world.

 

More importantly, they walked the earth both during and in the aftermath of the proposed Younger Dryas impact event.

Among the stone tools and projectile points found at Göbekli Tepe are many made from obsidian originating from both Bingöl Mountain and Lake Van.

 

Both in style and the manner of production they bear close similarities to the toolkit of the Swiderians, who are known to have reached as far east as the Caucasus Mountains, where they would have come up against indigenous peoples, most likely members of another advanced society known as the Zarzians, who almost certainly controlled the local obsidian trade at this time.

 

It seems likely that Swiderian groups continued southward, reaching eventually the obsidian find sites around Bingöl Mountain and Lake Van.

 

This would have brought them within easy reach of the late Palaeolithic and early Neolithic communities of southeast Anatolia (even Klaus Schmidt himself has compared the hunting strategies of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic peoples of southeast Anatolia with those of the Swiderians of the East European Plain).

 

Upper Paleolithic Ancestors

The advanced tool making skills and mining capabilities of the Swiderians, whose hunting strategies Schmidt has himself compared with those of the earliest Neolithic communities of southeast Anatolia, have been connected with those of the Solutreans (see Fig. 17), one of the most mysterious cultures of the Upper Paleolithic age.

 

They thrived in Western Europe between ca. 25,000-16,500 years ago, and developed an extraordinary stone blade technology. They were also responsible for some of the earliest ice age art in Western Europe, including the bison and birdman fresco in France’s Lascaux Cave.

 

The Solutreans came, most likely, from Central Europe, and were connected to another advanced population - that of the Eastern Gravettians, who thrived in highly advanced settlements in both Central Europe and between 30,000 and 20,000 BC.

Neanderthal Hybrids

Anthropological evidence suggests that at least some Swiderians were of striking appearance.

 

They were tall, with large, dolichocephalic (that is, elongated) heads, long faces, high cheekbones, and strong jaws. Very likely, they derived not only from the Cro-Magnons, the earliest anatomically modern humans to enter Europe some forty-three thousand years ago, but also from another human type known to have existed in Central Europe around twenty-five thousand years ago.

Named as "Brünn Man" by anthropologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evidence of their existence was first noted among human remains found at a Gravettian site unearthed in 1891 at Brünn, modern Brno, in Moravia, the modern Czech Republic.

 

Other examples were found in 1894 alongside wolf skulls at another Gravettian site unearthed at Predmostí, also in Moravia.

 

The Brünn type humans were tall with large, elongated skulls, long faces, strong brow ridges, and other striking features. Anthropologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found firm evidence that the Solutreans were linked to the Brünn population.

 

Moreover, that these suspected ancestors of the Solutreans had migrated to Central Europe from the Russian Plain, where advanced Gravettian settlements have been unearthed, some of which have produced human remains comparable with those of the Brünn type.

 

If the Swiderians did derive physiological traits from the Brünn population, then it is possible that both gained at least part of their unique physiognomy and technical skills from the Neanderthals, humanity’s closest cousins, whose communities lingered on in Eastern Europe until around 30,000 to 40,000 years ago.

 

In fact, Swiderian physiognomy was linked with the concept of Neanderthal hybrids as early as 1956, following the discovery of two human crania, one in Lithuania and another in Central Russia, which show Neanderthal-hybrid traits, and yet are attributable to the Swiderian population.

 

Further confirmation has come from the discovery of skeletal remains belonging to a Post-Swiderian culture, which have been compared with those of the Brünn population, who were themselves most probably Neanderthal-human hybrids.

 

 

The Ruling Elite

It is proposed that having assumed control of the obsidian trade in eastern Anatolia, the incoming Swiderian groups became the ruling elite responsible for the creation of Göbekli Tepe.

 

Is it the memory of their great ancestors, who might have included Solutreans, Gravettians and even Neanderthal-human hybrids, that is enshrined in the twelvefold rings of T-shaped pillars found in key enclosures?

 

It was the Swiderian elite who most likely introduced the manner in which the hunter-gatherer populations of southeast Anatolia could alleviate their catastrophobia, the fear of further cataclysms in the wake of the Younger Dryas impact event.

 

These individuals, and their descendants, probably controlled and managed the various phases of building activity at Göbekli Tepe, something that led eventually to the introduction of animal husbandry and agriculture across the region, marking the earliest stages of the Neolithic revolution.

http://worldheritage.org/articles/Swiderian

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/arqueologia/gobekli_tepe08.htm
http://www.apmagazine.info/index.php/component/content/article?id=537
http://bialczynski.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/are-the-pre-slavic-peoples-the-pre-indo-europeans/


Swiderian culture, also published in English literature as Sviderian and Swederian, is the name of Final Palaeolithic cultural complexes in Poland and the surrounding areas. The type-site is Świdry Wielkie, in Otwock. The Swiderian is recognized as a distinctive culture that developed on the sand dunes left behind by the retreating glaciers. Rimantiene (1996) considered the relationship between Swiderian and Solutrean "outstanding, though also indirect", in contrast with the Bromme-Ahrensburg complex (Lyngby culture), for which she introduced the term "Baltic Magdalenian" for generalizing all other North European Late Paleolithic culture groups that have a common origin in Aurignacian