This time I would like to go back to the time before the pyramids were built in Egypt. About 1000 years before the Cheops pyramid was built in the area of today's Kujawy, the funnel-shaped culture was formed, the first one that not only used what was given by the surrounding nature but learned to transform nature so that it could better meet their needs. It was an indigenous agricultural culture belonging to the Stone Age. They inhabited practically the entire area of today's Poland. Although it was a settled culture, from time to time they moved their headquarters to another place. They could cultivate both sandy and fertile loess lands. They lived in small multi-family settlements of several or a dozen or so families. The houses were built on piles driven into the ground, on which the roofs were supported, and the walls were light, made of branches sealed with clay.
They grew several types of wheat, barley, and oats. Plants were grown for economic purposes, such as example, linen from which fabrics were woven, and for healing magic, such as poppy seeds. For the storage of the products of this plant, special vessels with a macaque-shaped orifice were used. The magical meaning of this plant can be proved by the fact that such vessels are found in tombs. They were engaged in breeding cattle, there were two species, large cattle from aurochs and smaller short-horned cattle. Both of these species were smaller than the cows we know today. Pigs were another farm animal. Goats and sheep complete the list of farm animals. People were also accompanied by dogs, but the domestication of this animal took place already in the Paleolithic and these animals were supported by humans in hunting. Hunting was also a certain extension of the meat diet, but for these people, it was not the basis of food.
An invention that allowed them to expand their farmland was the plow and harnessing castrated bulls to it. Using the strength of animals for training purposes enabled them to transport heavy elements (e.g. stones), thanks to which the oldest monuments of building culture in our land, tombs, and earth, and stone temples called megaliths could be created. The so-called Kuyavian megaliths. These were earth embankments, even more than 100 m long, with enormous stones on the sides, in the front, higher part there was a "chapel", and behind it, under the layer of earth, the body of one or more people significant enough for a given group that the society for him it undertook such extensive construction work. An interesting fact may be the tomb no. 5 Wietrzychowice, where 2 bodies were placed, about 50 and about 35 years old man, the skull of the younger bore the signs of an effective trepanation with traces of bone tissue reconstruction.
The chapels in the front part with the entrance marked with the missing stone of the casing had to play important sacred roles, as they were kept in good technical condition, renovated, and rebuilt for a longer period of time (100-200 years). Thus, these buildings, apart from the function of a tomb, an important person, also performed a sacred function. An additional function indicated by archaeologists could be a defensive function, intended to indicate to wandering groups that there lives a well-organized community that is able to defend its lands and creates a magical psychological line, because in the old beliefs the magical influence of a given place, a given building had a great psychological impact.
Who were these people genetically?
I am not aware of any studies that would show the presence of the R1a haplogroup considered to be Slavic, rather they should be assigned to the R1b haplogroup previously noted in our lands, known as the Celtic haplogroup. The Slavic haplogroup, namely R1a-M417, was documented in Kujawy in a slightly later dated (3100-2600 BCE), spherical amphora culture, also in agriculture. Kujawy is indicated as the place where the first settlement site may arise after the arrival of the R1a-M417 haplogroup mutation from Asia. The emergence of this mutation, by genetic methods, is estimated at 4000 BC.
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