The most gruesome archaeological site you haven't heard of

Herxheim is a typical German town in southwestern Germany. Beautiful timber frame buildings, a nice old church, and of course, a donor and pizza house. But Herxheim has something that your typical German town uh doesn't often have. An archaeological site so gruesome uh it would make Genghaskhan feel queasy.

[music] Sponsored by Kiwico. I must say I'm very disappointed in you all. My last video on the archaeology of war in the Neolithic was extremely popular. Uh, you disgust me.

I thought I was talking to chill Bob Ross types. Uh, no. On a serious note though, you you are correct. I do have to talk about these kinds of sites really because I probably can be guilty of romanticizing the past.

And you don't want to do that too much. You don't want to um, you know, play into the idea of the noble savage. you know that there was this mythical past where humans lived in harmony with nature and you know everything was perfect blah blah blah blah blah that's absolutely not the case of course uh we don't want to do that you have to look at the past honestly good and the bad consider these videos a warning not to travel back in time okay this is the this is the time travel awareness society time travel awareness service actually that's even better time travel awareness service it's like the FBI, but we stop you going back in time. If you are going to go back in time, though, don't go to Neolithic Herzheim.

The culture we're going to be talking about today is called the linear band coramic or LBK, the linear pottery culture in English. Uh because they made pottery with lots of nice [music] lines. It's very simple name. This culture lasted archaeologically for about a,000 years from sort of 5,500 B.CE to 4,500 B.CE.

So roughly 7,000 years ago, the people of the LBK were the first farmers of Central Europe, descending from farming communities that had sprung up in Anatolia, southern Greece, and were were spreading north into Europe. This culture spanned from sort of northern Serbia up into Germany, France, [music] Belgium, Netherlands, huge swath of territory. But within that land, they were kind of confined just to river banks to the loss lurse soil which provided them the most fertile land for their crops. These rivers really ...