Original subtitles

4 ,000 years ago, the last Stone Age hunter -gatherers are living on the

coastlines of Europe.

Now they will disappear from the human journey.

Warriors are taking possession of the land.

For this child, these are the creatures of a dream.

She has never seen a horse.

She's never heard of a wagon with wheels.

The strangers make an offering to the ocean.

The arrow is tipped with bronze.

But their most powerful weapon is not metal.

It's an idea.

They have a chief and they do what they are told.

Now they cover Europe with a new society.

It will create our world with all its glory and its horror.

The end of the Stone Age hunter -gatherers started 3 ,000 years earlier,

away in the Middle East.

The Jordan Valley is one of the driest places on Earth.

Here, 6 ,000 years ago, was the extraordinary town of Tulalit Rasul.

This one area...

was the birthplace of key ideas that would eventually take Western

beyond the Stone Age.

What made the way of life in this area so special?

And why was it so creative?

The Rasoolians had placed themselves directly on a major trade route.

It linked two great emerging powers.

the Sumerians on the Euphrates, and the Egyptians on the Nile.

Rakul and its world is a lifetime's passion for archaeologist Stephen Burke.

He's been digging the Jordan Valley for the last 20 years.

He's looking for evidence of something very unusual, a complex Stone Age

economy.

What we have here is what seems pretty likely to be an olive plantation.

And, I mean, the excavations showed us the remains of houses, storerooms,

grindstones, and an analysis of the material from the area, pretty clearly

of it or more is the remains of olives, smashed up olive pips, pieces of

olive...

and what it seems to be fairly clearly is an olive oil processing station, or

indeed an olive processing station, and we're probably looking at a grove here

of olives all the way up the side of the hill.

Burke believed the cultivation of olives was the crucial spark for growth.

Once, a network of olive groves and fields for crops spread out many

from Rasool across the hills and into the valley.

We could say that these people are the first grade horticulturalists.

Not only are they developing olive, they're developing date and they're

developing fig. These are the first great tree farmers in history.

These pioneering orchardists kept the town going for 1 ,500 years of

and trade.

And they left large amounts of rubbish.

It's all Burke and his team needs to reconstruct their way of life.

At its peak, Rasool was home to thousands of people.

This was a big town for the time.

To visitors, it must have been the height of sophistication.

Its crowded streets bustled with life and new colour, a place of energy and

ideas.

Imports came from as far away as Yemen in the south and Afghanistan in the

Sensual luxuries like perfume and lapis lazuli.

You could show people your wealth.

This was a place where you could get ahead, become a person of means.

The goods leaving Rasul were the mass -produced staple commodities.

like olives, salt and lentils.

Olive oil was squeezed for all it was worth, used for everything from cooking

lighting the lamps at night.

It was the liquid gold of the Middle East.

We're talking hundreds of litres of oil.

We're not talking little thimblefuls, we're not talking tiny vesselfuls, we're

talking industrial -sized vats of oil.

All this locally produced oil and grain somehow had to be packaged.

It was the Rasoolians who came up with the answer.

It was brilliant, and everyone would use it.

They created the mass -produced clay pot.

dried in a fire.

From beautifully decorated homeware to crudely made storage jars.

Some were a metre and a half tall.

These artefacts are typical of the Rasoolian culture.

And this range of artefacts encapsulates several of the key points of this new

culture and the new way of...

acting economically.

They understood the importance of converting raw materials into high

products, like milk into butter.

For the first time, we start to see significant use of dairying, and this

churn is one of the things for producing butter and labne.

The whole point of it is it's a key secondary product. Instead of just

the cows and eating the sheep... they get a secondary product out of them,

particularly into old age. In other words, these things are an added bonus.

Trade was at the centre of this new way of life.

They grew to sell.

They used sheep for meat and milk and then learnt to process the profitable

wool.

One of the accidental bonuses of changing from linen...

to wool is that wool holds colour, wool holds dye.

For the first time, you develop a society that differentiates itself

the way it dresses.

And of course, the more elaborate dyes are extremely costly.

And if you're rich, in a society that is pre -literate, the best way to

differentiate yourself is through the clothes you wear, your physical

appearance.

This is a competitive society, fashionable and status conscious.

People were calling attention to themselves as individuals.

Rasool survived on trading food, but this trade depended on some form of

preservation.

The answer was rare and valuable.

Salt.

Salt is a commodity that is very, very costly. It's the white gold of

prehistory. And at Rasool, you have the largest deposits of salt in the entire

southern Levant, right on the doorstep.

The wasteland around Rasool ran down to the salt -rich waters of the Dead Sea.

The beaches were already an ancient salt mine.

Salt... made possible the mass preserving of foods like olives and

Now, they could be traded hundreds of kilometers to new markets.

With donkeys, they could send large, heavy loads to their partners as far

as Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Once you produce industrial quantities of goods, you have to keep track of

For the first time, people aren't dealing with small amounts of material

they're producing within their household for use by their household. They're

producing large numbers of goods.

Amazingly, they ran their whole economy with no money and no written numbers.

When you're trying to work out how These commodities are to be moved around, and

who is to get them? The beginning of record keeping is symbolic.

For a measure of grain, you developed a small symbol.

For a measure of sheep, you developed a symbol of sheep.

These first tokens are small clay counters, if you will.

And the earliest records from what we can tell are records of... Combinations

these tokens kept together, slapped together in a ball of clay and sealed

the stamp seal of one of the signifying authorities.

When the goods have been delivered, the contract is checked by cracking open the

clay balls.

This is the precursor to the bureaucratic systems of later ages.

The invention of these tokens laid the very first tentative foundations for

written language.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this way of life was a location.

How did they survive in the middle of a desert?

Everything in the Middle East is about water.

All agriculture exists only because of requirements of water. The key issue in

the South Jordan Valley, where Tlaloc Rasul is located, is that there is very

little rainfall.

To live, flourish and develop a major complicated society in this part of the

world, you had to add water.

The only way you could add water was through irrigation.

The Rasulians were extraordinary pioneers.

Faced with a hostile environment, they did not surrender.

Instead, they changed it.

They built a whole network of irrigation channels, crafted to follow the slope

of the hills.

It was an enormous imaginative achievement.

These canals are many kilometres long.

This is not something that ten men and a dog do. This is something that

hundreds, if not thousands of people would have had to do.

For the first time ever, the Rasoolians brought everyone together on a single

large project.

It's commonly thought that the pyramids are the first great evidence for complex

society. But at Rasool, 2 ,000 years before the pyramids, we have clear

of organised society.

In Egypt, the great emphasis is on irrigation, as though it was unique to

We have the same evidence for irrigation.

Probably more extensive if it comes to that. Probably 1 ,000 years earlier than

they have in Egypt.

The system must have been controlled by local leaders, an elite of families

enriched by trade.

Thousands of workers had to be organised in a peaceful society.

There's no evidence of armies or squads of slaves.

So how did the leaders inspire the ordinary people to follow their plan?

The answer is painted on a wall.

This fresco is now called the Star of Rasul.

It was found on the wall of a family shrine.

This motif appears nowhere else.

A central star, glowing with colour.

Groups of masked figures with imaginary heads.

It's a Stone Age dream.

Using the Rasoolian art, Stephen Burke formed a picture of the town's social

order.

It was held together by religion.

And this religion had a social purpose.

The priests begin to set themselves off as something special, something elite.

These people tell you what the gods want done.

And of course, if they're in the service... of the great priestly

great agricultural families. These are the people that allow society to be run

in the way that the powerful families dictate.

What we're seeing, effectively, is the transition from personal gods to state

gods, from the god of your home, the god of your clan, to the god of your city.

In a nutshell... What we think goes on is that people are able to be mobilised

by their leaders because they believe that the gods sanction it, the gods will

it, indeed the gods demand it.

Water. was the centre of their lives and their faith.

Perhaps the star was a vision of order, where worshippers came together as a

society.

They were united in faith.

Far away in Europe, the Stone Age farmers were now part of the landscape.

Here, on the Atlantic fringe, the vast natural world was full of mystery.

People's religion reached out to the elements.

The sun, moon and stars that shone on the life -giving earth and water.

They were awed by birth and death.

and the changing seasons.

There were no organized elites.

They lived together in small communities.

Their beliefs sprang from the meeting of incoming farmers and local hunter

-gatherers.

These people built a grand project.

Over 2 ,000 years they erected massive standing stones in forest clearings

across Europe.

Some monuments took generations to construct.

Later, another wave of incoming farmers brought in different beliefs.

They smashed the great stones down, turning them into underground burial

chambers.

Here, each person was laid to rest with the bones of their ancestors.

They were part of the whole, united in death.

It's the creation of another world inside a little hill, it's almost like

fairies, where you bury your ancestors.

And the ancestors are in a different world and often you approach them

long passage. And this is why these things are often called passage graves

passage tombs.

Sometimes the passage is aligned on a shaft of sunlight of the rising

sun at a particular time. time of year, one of the solstices.

So these are probably things where rituals take place, particularly at

critical times of year.

The ossuary is the place where the bones are kept, is a separate chamber

approached by this long passage.

People go in and they commune with the ancestors.

So you mustn't think of these just as a repository of bones. They are places of

active worship. In a sense, tomb is the wrong word to use.

And the rituals, I think, in many cases, are communicating directly with the

ancestors, probably by using hallucinatory...

devices and in these altered states of consciousness they thought that they

communicating directly with the spirits of their ancestors and a very powerful

set of circumstances you're in in total darkness at the end of a long tunnel

surrounded by their bones and getting stoned on whatever it is that you're

you're taking and this must have been an enormously powerful emotional

experience

braziers with holes in their sides for burning something that you inhaled, and

it wasn't just for the nice smell, it was almost certainly something that was

mind -altering substance.

To these people, individuality and death didn't matter.

It all came to an end, and there are no surviving

members of this tradition.

People just don't do it anymore.

It was a magnificent experiment, and then it was over.

Far away, in the Middle East, a revolution was starting, which would end

vision of community forever.

human identity would never be the same again.

In the Wadi Hanan in southern Jordan, green malachite was exposed by flash

flooding in a riverbed.

It's one of the sources of copper.

The thing that's fairly clear about malachite ore is that there was a lot of

around. In places like Wadi Fainan, it's one of the predominant rocks. Anyone

that made a fireplace in Wadi Fainan out of the green rock was going to realise

that this stuff melted at pretty low temperatures.

And it wouldn't take them too long to know how to fashion this melted stone

a variety of forms. And better still, you could do it over and over again.

The miners were inspired by the color.

They ground it into beads for jewelry without smelting it.

But they had customers from the other side of the Dead Sea who wanted huge

quantities.

They had a monopoly.

that is the people living in the Be 'er Sheva Valley, about 150 kilometers from

here over there, on metal production, i .e. they would send their miners, their

traders over here to procure the ore, to mine the ore, and then put it on the

donkeys and sort of schlep it back across the desert to the Be 'er Sheva

These traders had a secret.

The exact way of heating the ore to create something fabulous.

By superheating with blowpipes, they created the first true smelted metal.

Copper was used to make everything from ornaments to daggers.

Not only that.

it could be endlessly recast into other shapes.

We're actually finding copper objects abandoned, which is very strange.

Copper crucibles and the nozzles of bellows, which show us that they're

making those objects on that site. And they're a long way from any copper.

The nearest copper is over in the Wadi Arabah in Jordan.

the other side of the Dead Sea and the other side of the Wadi Araba.

And there we've got people who are apparently mining and smelting copper.

And there's hardly anybody living there to use the stuff. So presumably, again,

we've got networks.

And people living in southern Israel know how to get the materials they need

from people who live in what is today southern Jordan. And people in southern

Jordan who are sitting on the top of...

Metal resources know that there are people living over to the west of them

a long way away, several days' walk.

But there's a market, as we would say, in terms of our modern economics. They

know that there's people over there who want the stuff.

Smelted copper was the first metal, and very exotic.

It was a prime trade item, and the prime traders...

were the Rasulians.

They loved a chance to show off, and copper could be cast into such wonderful

shapes.

Occasionally, people hid away the kind of things that they were making, not

the odd act and chisel and mundane, trivial, everyday implements of that

but really special things.

There's a couple of sites where we now have the most extraordinary hordes,

extraordinary not just in the volume of metal and the quality of the technology,

but the quite extraordinary things that they were making. These are not everyday

objects. It's impossible to work out what kind of function these objects had.

They seem to be emblems and kind of symbolic things which were placed on

staff. And we have them simply because someone wrapped them all up in a reed.

and hid them away in a cave and never got back to collect them.

There's something desperate about this hoard.

It was dumped in a cave so deep it would be hidden for 6 ,000 years.

Rasul was in trouble.

Their powerful neighbours, Egypt and Mesopotamia, had developed massive

irrigation schemes of their own.

They had their own olives and salt.

Suddenly, they ceased trade with Rasul.

And this wonderfully complex culture disappeared within a hundred years.

Most of the most brilliant aspects of the Rasulian culture die with it.

The wall paintings and many of the more elaborate.

organisational features.

What seems to survive is the new specialised productive agricultural

Speculation has had it that what we see is the old elites wedded to the land and

wedded to the old religious values seem not to survive.

The new elites, perhaps more wedded to the production of agricultural

and as has been speculated,

As the economy comes into stress, as the environment collapses, those people

that cleave to the old ideas that the gods could be made to provide a decent

landscape must have suffered when that landscape would not respond to repeated

offerings.

Rasool was one of the first great trading societies.

The survivors took their skills outwards.

showing how to live by trade rather than farming.

It was a dazzling idea which moved from the Middle East towards Europe.

At that time, Europeans were still living very simply.

They farmed together and grew only what they needed.

Individual ownership or achievement was not part of their culture. When they

died, they joined their ancestors in the communal burial chamber.

But then, a new, mysterious culture appeared across Europe, with a very

different kind of grave.

Two or three hundred years ago, when archaeologists first began to excavate,

some of the round burial mounds that are to be found in places like England or

Scotland or Scandinavia, they discovered a very characteristic set of grave

goods. There would be a body which was buried individually, unlike the

collective megalithic stone tombs that had preceded them. These burial mounds

had people interred as individuals with all the bones articulated and in place.

And they were buried with their own personal equipment.

They were buried, for example, with a drinking cup and with their fighting

equipment.

These graves were called, after their contents, the graves of the Beaker folk.

The Beaker people were the traders of Stone Age Europe.

Using packhorses, they brought a new set of ideas and precious objects.

that turned the place upside down.

They were able to trade, they were able to organise supplies of things, very

small quantities, we're not talking about bulk trade, but items that were

precious and were considered highly desirable and were traded over long

distances. and gave these people an entry into a wide range of other

The drinking cups perhaps suggest that there were new things to be drunk, and

it's a very plausible suggestion that what we're looking at is the first use

fermentation to make alcoholic drinks.

This is a very handsome example of one of these beakers, a relatively early

and you can see what it is. It's a tall drinking cup that would have held a

considerable quantity of liquid.

So you can imagine them being used rather like this, held in two hands, and

possibly parked around between the participants of a drinking ceremony.

The drinking cups suggest that there were new things to be drunk.

They made an early form of mead using honey for drinking rituals.

Fermentation was one of the ways of showing off your elite status along with

having your elite weaponry traded over long distances.

So they're all different ways of showing how you have access to things that

other people can't get.

And what we're really looking at is people who are rich enough to have

of sugar to provide fermented drinks.

So this is both a drinking vessel and also a symbol of power, a real symbol of

wealth and the ability to mobilize these rare, sweet substances which can be

fermented into something even more precious, that is, the intoxicating

substance, alcohol.

The Beaker people.

brought the spirit of change that shook the staid old Stone Age life.

They believed much more in the value of the individual.

They came as traders and stayed to farm, building their own characteristic

villages.

What's more, they brought the art of smelting, to the north.

They added a vital secret from Middle Eastern trading routes.

Mix some tin to copper and you get bronze.

This process was so important that smiths had the richest graves.

They were probably clan chiefs.

At the beginning of the Bronze Age, you can imagine that much of the

metalworking was actually undertaken by the chiefs themselves.

And we now see this as a rather sort of banal task that should be undertaken by

workmen or craftsmen, by sort of lower status people.

But if you think of it as the magical transformation of one thing into

then it's another way of showing off and demonstrating your power and your

status and securing your role in society.

And so it's therefore very characteristic.

that you find the moulds in rich graves, in the graves of the chiefs. So the

people who are in charge of society are in charge of the transformation of oars

into flashing daggers and weapons.

The Bronze Age consists in the introduction of edge weapons that you

make effectively in stone, daggers that increasingly get longer and longer and

become swords, spearheads that can be really effectively fixed on the end of a

long pole.

So the whole nature of armament was transformed by the introduction of a

effective working metal, bronze.

These weapons exude power.

They are rare and dangerous.

We are seeing the birth of a military elite with the power to get exactly what

they want.

Yet the weapons rarely show signs of use.

Perhaps they were purely ceremonial.

These leaders wore breastplates and decorative metal jewellery, again as

of their wealth.

And they had another power symbol, the mounted horse.

The pack animal was now being ridden.

The owners powered over everyone else.

They could move fast.

and cover huge distances.

Horses were expensive to keep.

A single horse eats more than a family.

Only the elite could afford to keep them.

This accumulation of symbols suggests they were preoccupied with power.

They were developing a new kind of society with leaders and followers.

The leaders dominated community life.

Most farmers who produced life's basic necessities were the followers.

This new social dynamic created its own momentum for change.

With their new wealth, the elite families could support specialized

They used materials like wood in more complex ways.

And they learned how to use the most imaginative innovation of all, the

Well, archaeologists are always being asked, when was the wheel invented?

And we can now give a rather precise answer that it was about 5 ,500 years

that it spread.

And these are very simple, solid wooden wheels.

often turning along with the axle that made an amazing creaking sound as it

moved slowly through the streets. So this is not a speed vehicle, but it is

first wheeled vehicle ever seen.

Like bronze, this invention came from the Middle East.

In a muddy landscape without roads, it transformed the movement of large loads.

Tray was beginning to move from Europe back to the Middle East.

It started from the seaweed on the beach of the Baltic Sea.

It contained the one thing that came from nowhere else and would go as far as

Egypt.

In the Bronze Age, you have the first example of a material that travelled all

the way from one sea to the other.

It must have been precious. It must have been lightweight.

It must have been precious in relation to its weight. And indeed it was. That

substance is amber.

Legend tells us a river of tears flowed at the beginning of time into the sea,

turning to amber.

The clear tears of the innocent and the dark red tainted by the evil and

corrupt.

It's the sap of fossilized pine forests.

They grew when the sea was dry land and glaciers filled the valleys.

Suppliers of copper and tin moved northwards and southwards to balance

trade. First of all came amber and later on all the other forest products.

The daily farming life of the community was bound by a network of sharing and

obligation.

Milk, grain and labour went back and forth.

In the give and take, the elites offered social organisation and protection.

Both safety and danger came from the armed warrior chief.

Communities expanded their farmlands and knowledge.

under the faint shadow of violence.

These farmers were now able to grow a breed of sheep which offered a touch of

luxury.

The fleece was different.

The open, straight fibres of earlier breeds were now curly and dense.

It is the wool we know today.

To use it, they developed the gentle craft of spinning.

Clothing could now be much warmer for this northern climate.

Customers wanted status, so spinners turned to the expert colour dyers.

They extracted their dyes from plants in the forest.

These people were healers, whose knowledge of remedies was the beginning

medicine.

The new soft wools were spun into luxury clothing.

Beyond the family, they could only be afforded by the wealthy.

The clothes were so loved, people wore them into the next world.

They were buried as individuals and took with them the symbols of their own

identity.

Their clothes and ornaments.

In these magnificent burials, discovered in Denmark, the dead were placed in oak

coffins hacked from whole tree trunks.

Some of the most spectacular individual burials that we know come from the

Bronze Age.

We have a sudden window on what life was like in Bronze Age Europe four

millennia ago.

And we see people buried in woolen clothing.

It's brown wool, it's very simple, in many ways it's rustic, but it's the

of sophistication, and probably only they as the leaders could afford to be

dressed entirely in woolen clothes.

And you see for the first time, in a way that we can only imagine in other

circumstances, what these people looked like and how they might have acted.

And we see some specific human motivations.

There is the chief buried with his long wooden scabbard and poking out of it the

top of a metal weapon.

And you pull it out, and it's not the sword that you expected, it's a little

dagger. And he's been buried there with the appropriate piece of weaponry, but

his family must have known it was only a little dagger.

The coffin was placed on stones above the ground.

These funerals of the powerful were elaborate ceremonies.

Later, a great mound of earth would be built as a tomb.

It was there in memory of a person whose name was expected to live on.

Right across Northern Europe, archaeologists have discovered

Many are guarded by Mother Goddess figures, important to the first farmers.

From the beginning of human habitation, people have made offerings.

Now the warriors added thousands of new objects.

Some of them show us they were seeing their spirit world in a new way.

Nature too was an expression of power.

The sun god rose each day, drawn proudly across the sky by the horse.

Across the Middle East, the chariots of the Hittites and Egyptians brought

warriors and kings.

The story of the first farmers ends with armies and the rise of the first

cities.

And in Europe, we see the first recorded images of violence.

The farmers were running out of available land.

There is evidence of boundary fences.

Stockaded villages were beginning to appear.

The last hunter gatherers collided with the warriors.

Their way of life disappeared forever.

And then, around 3 ,000 years ago, there was a dramatic increase in the use of

metals.

The Smiths discovered iron, which swept Europe.

It revolutionized farming with cheap, effective tools.

And it gave rise to great Iron Age civilizations.

It loosed the sword and the soldier on the world

All

of

this was made possible by the first farmers

They found a fertile landscape and learnt to build communities.

When the climate collapsed, they survived and invented farming.

They built thriving towns and developed the art of trade.

They took their story to Europe and transformed the northern world.

They invented weapons and leaders and paid the price.

They made humanity into what we are today.