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00:06A plateau in Moldova. Over 6,000 years ago, it was the scene of an astonishing chapter
00:14in human history. An international archaeology team discovered traces of a mega site at this
00:23site, a prehistoric settlement for several thousand inhabitants. Its history will radically
00:33change the concept of Europe's first cities.
00:53Kiel archaeologist Johannes MĂĽller has been researching the Trinka Plateau together with
00:59German, Moldovan and Ukrainian team members for five years. It lies north of the Black
01:08Sea, between the Daniepa in the east and the Carpathian Mountains in the west.
01:18Something crazy happened here. 6,000 years ago, large crowds of people gathered here on 25
01:24hectares to form the first city. And built a mega site. That's what they call
01:32a settlement of this size. The former inhabitants belonged to the so-called Tripoli societies,
01:40a Neolithic farming culture. There was obviously such an experiment in being free and equal.
01:50They were normal farmers. They were normal people who had herds, who drove cattle, who joined
01:57together here. As if from nowhere, 6,000 years ago, a flourishing metropolis with 3,000 people emerged.
02:09But only 400 years later, they burned down their houses and moved on. The archaeology team
02:18will find a surprising explanation for this. The remains of the burnt houses lie 30 cm below the surface.
02:32There, the research team finds a floor and discovers the remains of ceramic vessels and bones.
02:41Ludmila Shatilo and Johannes MĂĽller examine the soil more closely. The archaeologist is particularly interested in one spot.
02:50It seems that it's kind of a leveling of the floor and perhaps some renovation phase or something like that.
02:57I think we have it from time to time on Tripoli. If you use a house for several years, sometimes
03:03it's necessary to repair it.
03:12A second team is working at the other end of the mega site. Robert Hoffman prepares the measuring device for
03:19geomagnetics.
03:20The sensors detect anything that is magnetic, such as iron, but also fired clay bricks or ceramics.
03:35Instead of laboriously digging holes, Robert Hoffman and Vitaly Boerlaku can quickly get an overview of the 35-hectare site.
03:46It lies outside the mega site. The researchers hope to find the remains of fireplaces or ovens. This would mean
03:55that there were also houses there.
04:00Now let's see what's here. A yawning void.
04:12You can see a lot of scrap metal, especially in the lower area, and otherwise you can see certain structures
04:17that come from the geology.
04:20But otherwise, it's empty.
04:24The team is disappointed. There were no houses outside the town.
04:31The group investigating the trench that once surrounded the mega site has more luck.
04:38Miha Videko from the University of Kiev and Gennady Sirbu from the University of Cisinau are digging together with colleagues
04:47from Kiel.
04:47They discovered that the trench had been filled in. New houses were then built on top of it.
04:54Little by little, like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, the picture of Europe's first major city comes together.
05:04It was a big system which covered many thousands of square kilometers from Dnieper to Carpathians.
05:11It was a big land which was divided between different tribes, between different chiefdoms.
05:16So they did it, and they managed it over 1,000 years.
05:21So I was surprised how long. It's a very long history of mega sites.
05:25From the start, from the beginning until the end, it's around 1,000 years.
05:31Relatively, it comes from the Middle Ages to our days. It's the same age.
05:38Archaeology teams have so far discovered three mega sites in Moldova.
05:43They are among the smaller cities.
05:47Significantly larger ones were found in the southwestern part of Russia,
05:51and in what is now Ukraine.
05:53One of them, Maidanetske.
05:57This metropolis was built 6,000 years ago in a forest steppe of ash, oak and elm trees.
06:04A good place to build a city.
06:06There was an abundance of wood for the houses and to fire the ovens.
06:14The remains of Maidanetske are now hidden under fields.
06:18At one time, 15,000 people lived here.
06:24Ukrainian and German research teams have been digging here for years.
06:30The mega settlement was first discovered by Soviet researchers,
06:34but it took decades for them to realise the significance of this discovery.
06:42They dig in small sites with few houses and they think that they explode.
06:48All in it is, it's typical, but it's very hard to recognise that, for example,
06:54houses at this site and when there is other trench, then existed in one time.
07:01And with Maidanetske it was the same, because it was discovered in the 20s.
07:05So, 100 years ago, it was known, okay, but on archaeological map were,
07:10excuse me, seven sites.
07:12It depends on which archaeologists come from which site or they discovered a new settlement.
07:19But only in the 70s archaeologists opened the possibility to put it together and get one picture.
07:29This discovery is a sensation.
07:32The first farmers were already living in large cities 6,000 years ago.
07:37And not just in small hamlets or villages with no more than 200 inhabitants.
07:46And there is something else that goes beyond the researchers' worldview.
07:51They find out that Europe's first metropolises developed quite differently than they had assumed.
08:02The mega sites do not sprawl uncontrollably because the population is increasing.
08:08The arrangement of the houses reveals that these towns were planned first and then built.
08:18The mega sites were obviously attractive.
08:21People flocked from all directions to live there.
08:29There must have been something that was attractive and designed.
08:35So there must have been a message, so to speak.
08:40A mega site.
08:43There's something going on, I can develop there or my family can develop there.
08:48I can come together with other people from different areas.
08:53And something seems to be developing economically that makes my life easier.
09:01What was the secret of the mega sites?
09:04The researchers find the answer when they examine the houses.
09:11There was more than one population group that managed this place.
09:16And there was no hierarchy.
09:20We can see that in the pottery.
09:24There were no social differences in the settlement.
09:28We found houses where there was a certain type of pottery.
09:33And then other houses where there was a different type of pottery.
09:37In other words, there were different groups living in the same place.
09:42But with a different way of thinking and living.
09:50It was a metropolis in which all people were equal.
09:55This also surprised the researchers.
09:58They were convinced that there were poor families and rich ones with influence and power.
10:04And that this must have led to tensions.
10:13But during the excavations of various mega sites, the archeology teams discovered that there was no violence, no struggle for
10:21property.
10:22The houses were equally furnished.
10:24And no one was richer than their neighbor.
10:34The Kiel University in northern Germany.
10:39It took three excavations to explore the huge area on which the Medanetsky mega site stood, using geomagnetics.
10:50The burnt clay bricks have left clear traces.
10:55We benefit from the fact that the settlement was burnt down as a whole because the houses were fixed in
11:00the ground as magnetic remnants.
11:03And, above all, we can also find them with our measuring devices, that is, the magnetometers.
11:09Not only can we find them, we can virtually create an entire city map.
11:13So we can see exactly where which houses are and how big they are.
11:19The mega site was built in stages.
11:21First, the founding families planned the ring corridor, along which their houses stood.
11:27This ring road that runs around the entire settlement was the starting point, so to speak.
11:34And it was somehow marked out, and then a few houses were built around it, and over time it became
11:39more and more densely populated.
11:42Until the metropolis covered an area of around 200 hectares, nine rings of houses surrounded the central square, which remained
11:51undeveloped.
11:54The first houses were built far apart from each other.
11:59The gaps were then used by children and grandchildren.
12:04At its peak, there were almost three and a half thousand houses, with up to 20,000 residents.
12:13How did people live in their city?
12:16They have not left us any paintings that tell us about them.
12:19But they did leave us small clay models of their houses, animals and transport sledges.
12:31The Kiel team also includes graphic designer Suzanne Bayer.
12:37She uses the information she receives to bring Maidanetske back to life.
12:51I start with the landscape, because I have to feel my way towards the idea, towards this visualization.
13:00What it might have looked like, how a large housing estate can fit into a landscape.
13:06Where did the estate stand?
13:08Is there a river?
13:09Did the settlement nestle harmoniously there?
13:12Were there forests?
13:14And I start with this landscape and compose, so to speak, until at some point there is the big okay.
13:26Hello, Suzanne.
13:27Hello.
13:32I tried to make a few reconstructions of the house with the raised platform, the vestibule, the main room and
13:37the round roof.
13:40Here's the roof. It's round on the house.
13:43Exactly. We know from the house models that the roofs were round.
13:48Interesting.
13:51The team finds two different types of houses in the megasites.
13:56People lived in the smaller ones.
14:02These houses were two-storey.
14:04Work tools were stored on the ground floor.
14:09On the second floor there was a large living room and bedroom with a fireplace and a domed stove for
14:15cooking.
14:19Painted vessels and provisions stood on a bench on the long side.
14:24The only wealth of the house that was on display.
14:31The large buildings between the residential buildings puzzle the researchers.
14:36They call them megastructures.
14:40Did clan chiefs and their families live in them?
14:45But fines from the halls prove that nobody lived here.
14:49Well, what did they do there?
14:52They made decisions.
14:55But they also met there every day.
14:58They ate certain surpluses together.
15:02But also carried out certain activities such as textile production.
15:10That was the biggest surprise.
15:136,000 years ago, farmers and cattle breeders lived in a democratic community and met regularly in meeting houses.
15:24The attraction of these first cities, or these megasites, was to lead a life in which you do many things
15:30together in a large community.
15:35In other words, no longer going out into the fields as an individual farmer in the smaller settlements.
15:44But the communal organization of field work.
15:49The communal organization of livestock farming.
15:54The communal organization of the decision-making processes that take place in these settlements.
15:59Which was not necessarily the case before.
16:05Where did the people who moved to the megasites come from?
16:09One answer can be found in southeastern Romania.
16:13In Sultana.
16:22It is the area of the lower Danube.
16:266,000 years ago, there were many Neolithic settlements along the lakes and rivers.
16:37They were built on mounds, known as tells.
16:41The Kiel archaeology team is taking a closer look at one of them.
16:46It will reveal the eventful and dramatic history of its inhabitants.
16:57When the tell was built on, it was significantly larger.
17:02In the meantime, almost half of the hill has disappeared due to erosion.
17:06In the settlement's heyday, there were up to 20 houses on the tell.
17:12Around 100 people lived in them.
17:15Measurements show that the houses had a floor area of 50 to 70 square meters.
17:24At the foot of the tell, the researchers discover the outline of a huge building.
17:31At 45 by 15 meters, it is the largest they find.
17:38What was it built for?
17:44Robert Hoffman and Lara van der Schuwer hope to use geomagnetics to find out how the house was constructed.
17:53And that they can deduce from this what it was used for.
18:03And they do indeed receive valuable information.
18:13It looks as if there are two rooms here.
18:15Basically a kind of anti-room and a somewhat more massive main room.
18:18And, well, the rear area is obviously somehow obscured by some kind of interference.
18:26It was a meeting hall, and it indicates that in these societies in southeastern Europe,
18:32especially on the lower Danube, a social change was obviously underway.
18:39From initially relatively cooperatively and communally organized groups,
18:43to which this house also belongs, as a meeting house to a society that is obviously more socially stratified.
18:53Where this tell, this settlement mound, emerges, which indicates that people also want to be seen in their surroundings,
19:01and where social differences manifest themselves, which then represent a strong contrast,
19:07after several generations, to what was previously known.
19:13When the people moved to the tell, they abandoned the meeting house and never entered it again.
19:21The archaeologists are yet to find out what the consequences of this were.
19:33With geomagnetics, the team can only determine what it looks like directly below the surface.
19:42Current measurements are required to find remains at a depth of 2 to 4 metres.
19:51OK, I'll start the measurement now.
19:55But they find no remains that would make an excavation worthwhile.
20:07The area of the lower Danube was fertile.
20:10The farmers who settled here cleared the riparian forests to make room for their villages,
20:16their fields and their livestock.
20:20The tells, therefore, contain much of what people left behind when they left.
20:28Lara van der Schuur and Robert Hoffman discover a kind of sieve in one of the former houses.
20:38Here's the bottom edge.
20:41That's probably for making cheese.
20:43To make cheese?
20:46They put a cloth in and then the whey.
20:50Yes, OK.
20:52I think we've cleared it here.
20:54Yes, let's see.
20:55That might be enough.
20:59Very nice.
21:08People who lived over 6,000 years ago left behind small clay models of their everyday lives.
21:15They probably placed them in a special place in their house.
21:26Romanian archaeologist Theo Ignat and Johannes MĂĽller want to take a look at finds from the tells in the Altenita
21:34Museum.
21:38The reconstruction of the dwellings is astonishing.
21:42They are very similar to those in the megasites.
21:46Apparently, the inhabitants of the Tell settlement took their culture with them when they left.
21:51Nice museum here and all the different files from Gummelnitsa.
21:55I think especially here the...
21:57The flints, yeah.
21:58The flints, yes.
22:00And especially here there's very long blades.
22:03I mean, they have been very prestigious also in the different burials, but I wonder how they had been produced.
22:11These long blades, they were produced by pressure.
22:16So, they used this kind of long stick with an antler point and they pressed with their chest on the
22:26blade cores just to take these out.
22:30Because the remnants here show that it's pressure made.
22:33Mm-hmm.
22:35We got this very, very interesting axis here produced in Gummelnitsa from this material.
22:40We find similar axis in northern Germany, for example.
22:44But about a thousand years later.
22:47So, probably some kind of innovation which took place here was transferred to Poland and to other areas of Europe.
22:56Yeah.
22:57As Neolithic people moved on north in northern Europe, they brought the technology with them.
23:02Or you got the networks, also the communication networks.
23:06Were the craftsmen and farmers who lived here doing well economically?
23:11If so, why did they leave the Tell?
23:16Stefan Dreibrott wants to explore the deeper layers of the hill.
23:20What he already knows, the first houses were built in 4350 BC.
23:28If a house collapsed, a new one was built on top of it.
23:32This is how the Tell slowly grew in height.
23:36With the borehole, Stefan Dreibrott can gain an overview of several hundred years,
23:41without having to remove the mound layer by layer.
23:51The people were skilful and innovative.
23:54They were among the first societies to succeed in processing copper.
24:06Stefan Dreibrott decodes the information contained in the drill core in the laboratory.
24:18After opening the core, a part of the Tell's history lies open before him.
24:24On the one hand, there are the houses that are stuck in here.
24:28So you can see a burnt house in this core here.
24:32The floor underneath with shells at the base,
24:35and then this reducing dark burnt material here.
24:38Which was probably the floor, and this is just a collapsed house.
24:42And remains of the burnt clay of the walls when the house collapsed.
24:50Collapsed here, and more or less deposited here in this layer.
24:56And then later the next settlement layer came on top,
24:59because people built the next house.
25:01So there are not only burnt houses, there are also unburnt houses.
25:05And in the upper area we see something here,
25:07that we must of course also somehow find in a settlement.
25:11An area that could possibly represent something like a prehistoric latrine.
25:16Because this discoloration here in the upper area,
25:19is relatively typical for urine accumulation.
25:22Of course it could also have something to do with animals.
25:25Animal or human, you can't say for sure.
25:27You'd need ADNA analyses for that.
25:40Stefan Dreibrott finds the remains of a palisade in another drill core.
25:46It was built right at the beginning, when people moved onto the tell.
25:51This is also shown by the cut that the archaeology team dug four meters deep into the ground.
25:59Did they have to protect themselves from attacks from the neighbouring hill?
26:03Or did nomads roam the land in search of prey?
26:10On the tell, Johannes MĂĽller and his team examine a house from the time when people left the area.
26:20They find the remains of house walls and clay pots.
26:24The few remains of the former inhabitants tell Johannes MĂĽller what happened.
26:33This house was abandoned at a certain time and stood open as a ruin and was then rebuilt and then
26:40collapsed again after it was abandoned.
26:45It was probably rather poorly furnished, a rather poor family who lived in this house, who abandoned it.
26:55This house then collapsed, causing the first wall to collapse,
27:01so that today we can excavate it lying practically horizontally.
27:09The house was provisionally repaired once and then finally abandoned.
27:14The team finds fewer and fewer bones from farm animals in the waste pits, but more from wild animals.
27:24When problems arise, you fall back on a greater variety of food and you try to achieve this by gathering
27:32wild fruits or by hunting more.
27:37And no longer being dependent on just one source of food, namely agriculture.
27:44That's something that happened here around 4,150 BC and that actually shows us the end of this settlement mound
27:51and this settlement here.
27:58Data from climate research shows that nature changed at this time.
28:03Droughts increased and harvests failed.
28:09And this widened the social gap in society.
28:13Those who were poor became even poorer.
28:18This is shown by the burial grounds behind the old meeting house.
28:23Romanian teams have excavated part of it.
28:27They not only found the remains of the people of the time, but also their grave goods.
28:33Some apparently possessed nothing of value.
28:37Others, however, have been richly endowed for the afterlife, with valuable gold jewellery.
28:47People lived on the tell for around 200 years.
28:51When they moved to the hill and gave up their meeting house, an elite had already formed.
28:59When the harvests got worse, a momentous decision was made.
29:09They had connections to the grass steppes and forest steppes north of the Black Sea, which are in principle only
29:15300 kilometers away.
29:19And knew the so-called Tripolia societies there, in which there was also a certain development, but interestingly, an exactly
29:26opposite one.
29:31The people packed their belongings and reached the megasites in present-day Moldova or Ukraine, after seven to ten days'
29:40march.
29:41There was fertile soil and good harvests.
29:45And the new arrivals belonged to a society that offered everyone equal opportunities.
29:56One of the megasites they passed could have been Trinca in Moldova.
30:05Down in the gorge, archaeobotanists from Kiel are preparing the sludge.
30:11They use the clear water from a spring.
30:22Weepke Kiel and Sara KrĂĽbeck need clean water, in which no plant parts are floating.
30:29That's why they wrap the pump with a tightly woven cloth.
30:36The archaeobotanists are examining samples taken from the floor of the burnt-down house.
30:43They hope to find fruits and seeds that are several thousand years old.
30:52We have a dry soil area here.
30:54That is, we have a soil substrate that is well aerated, where plant residues are actually broken down by microorganisms
31:02and are not preserved.
31:04That is the principle of the compost heap.
31:06And that is, of course, bad for archaeobotany.
31:10These are poor preservation conditions.
31:12We only get material that has been altered in some way, that has been chemically modified in this dry soil.
31:18And that is the material that has come into contact with fire.
31:22There are many activities in the settlement that are associated with fire.
31:27Like boiling or roasting grain that charrs due to excessive heat.
31:35And we assume that the charred material is lighter than water and floats.
31:42So we now use the gold panning method and pour the floating light material through a sieve.
31:52In which everything that is charred remains.
31:57Wiebke Kierlis hopes to find remnants of what people once grew and ate.
32:03There was certainly more than just grain on their menu.
32:09One blow. Another. That will have to do.
32:14The strained contents are then dried.
32:18Good.
32:24We basically look into people's cooking pots. That's what we want to do.
32:29And we have a lot of spelt wheat in the Tripolia culture.
32:32That's emma and einkorn. They come from the field.
32:35And when you thresh them, they're still in the packaging unit.
32:39So they are tightly packed in the husks.
32:41So you can store them well.
32:43They are protected from fungal infestation and are easy to store.
32:50Wiebke hopes to find remnants of the old wheat species in these samples.
32:58They are analysed in keel.
33:06The researcher sifts out the samples so as not to lose track.
33:17Pieces of charcoal and rodent ankles get stuck in the large mesh sieve.
33:23Grains and larger seeds remain in this sieve.
33:27And in the fine sieve, grass seeds and wild herbs such as goosefoot.
33:34Fine fraction, although, no.
33:37Here's another piece of hazelnut shell.
33:44And then I have here.
33:46Oh, that looks like a pea sample to me.
33:48I have here.
33:53Wiebke and her colleague Frank have found peas in every Tripolia settlement so far.
34:02An indication that these legumes were frequently eaten.
34:09We understand that they had a very complex system for growing cereals and peas.
34:13We know that they very probably cultivated them within these large settlements, where there were also open spaces, and in
34:21small garden-like areas, which is relatively easy for us to understand, especially for peas.
34:27We can see from isotope analyses that we carried out on the charred peas, that a very high proportion of
34:34nitrogen is incorporated.
34:36And for us, this is an indication that people used to fertilize, that they already knew how to collect animal
34:43dung and apply it to the land in order to increase yields.
34:48The people's diet was simple.
34:51Although they kept livestock in the mega-settlements, their diet was mainly vegetarian.
34:57Their meals consisted mostly of grain and peas.
35:04They then also produced proteins with which they could supplement their grain very well.
35:09So there were no deficiency symptoms, because cereals and peas contain different proteins, different amino acids, which are also essential
35:16and complement each other.
35:21Tripoli societies are innovative.
35:23They are melting pots.
35:26People come from different regions, they bring their knowledge and experience with them, and exchange ideas.
35:32And they are probably the first to fertilize their fields.
35:40We can see that the increase in population in these settlements is accompanied by the invention of new forms of
35:46agriculture,
35:49I would say mega-subsistence farming, which makes it possible to provide for the 15,000 people living in Majdanetska
35:58around 3,800 BC.
36:06Some fields were right next to the mega-site.
36:09Most, however, were up to five kilometers away.
36:12The people also found a solution for this.
36:16Sledges that they could use at any time of year.
36:27Yevonij Slezaryev is the keel team's flint expert.
36:31All important tools were made from this material, from knives and arrowheads to axes.
36:41Anyone who wants to process flint needs special knowledge and a lot of experience.
36:47We have already settlements which are strictly specialized on flint tools production or flint blank productions.
36:58And then they were exchanging those blanks for other goods.
37:04The people of the mega-settlements were therefore connected to each other via extensive trade routes and exchanged goods.
37:12There is an idea that grown-up men once a year would go to the sources in order to get
37:18those flints for the whole year of living on the settlement.
37:22And all of those men would come back and they would have to store it and then the knowledge which
37:27you have to carry on with you and then you have to transfer it to your son.
37:40The open-air museum in Ukraine gives an impression of everyday life in the early metropolises.
37:50The local archaeologist, Vladislav Ciebanjuk, who is excavating in Majdanetska, together with the keel team, is repairing the walls of
38:00the rebuilt Tripoli houses.
38:05And just like over 6,000 years ago, everyone comes together to help.
38:13The muddy clay soil is mixed with litter.
38:21The framework of the house consisted of wooden beams.
38:24For the walls, however, a wickerwork of thin branches and clay was used.
38:33And just like back then, the houses are painted in bright colors.
38:37From the excavations, they know which colors and motifs the inhabitants of the former cities liked.
38:53The researchers are able to get a precise picture of the former metropolis.
38:58Only one thing is strange, they find no graves.
39:02And that means there are no valuable clues that could help solve the big mystery.
39:07Why did people leave their cities?
39:14They didn't bury their dead according to rules.
39:17We simply don't have any cremation sites.
39:20We don't have normal graves.
39:23We don't have individual burial sites.
39:28This box contains the only human remains found during excavations.
39:34They lay in and next to a burnt-down house.
39:38Katharina Fuchs hopes that the bones will tell her something about the people of that time.
39:46For us, it is unique to have bones from a Tripolia settlement.
39:51The first step is to identify each bone, lay it out and perhaps also look at the age and gender
39:57characteristics of the bone
39:58to find out how many individuals there actually are and what condition the bones are in.
40:05The first thing Katharina Fuchs notices, some bones are burnt, others are unburnt.
40:11Not all of them seem to have perished in the flames.
40:18Every single little bone can tell me something and every single little bone is valuable for that.
40:23It's a small bio-archive, so to speak.
40:32This is the lower part of an upper arm and I can see that it is an adult individual from
40:38whom this forearm originates,
40:39that it must have been quite a strong person because it has relatively strong muscle attachments down here
40:46and that there is no advanced joint wear yet, so it was probably not a very old person.
40:56Katharina Fuchs discovers that the bones belong to five adults and two children.
41:01It is quite possible that it was a family.
41:05But further investigations raise new questions.
41:09Here we have two fragments from two different skulls, one from the back of the head and one from the
41:15forehead,
41:15and both show injuries to the top of the skull.
41:18This means that violence has taken place here.
41:21You can see this relatively well through certain fracture lines and both injuries are above the brim of the hat
41:27rule,
41:28as they say in forensics, which means that it is very likely that it was actually the result of violence
41:35by another person,
41:36for example a blow to the head.
41:38And what is also important is that there are no signs of healing on either the one or the other
41:44injury.
41:45This means that the injuries are most likely fatal.
41:51Was there a fight? Was the house deliberately set on fire?
41:55What is surprising is that we have some human bones that are burnt, in this house apparently, and some of
42:01these bones are not burnt.
42:02There are different scenarios as to what could have happened.
42:05They may have died in a fire. It may have been a strange burial custom that we didn't know about
42:10before.
42:12Unfortunately, we can't know with 100% certainty.
42:18Perhaps the house burned down due to a fire that got out of control.
42:22That happened from time to time.
42:25But people also deliberately set fire to their homes and leave the city.
42:33Did they have to flee because they were attacked?
42:40It was not the equestrian peoples, that is an older theory, that these large settlements arrived here around 3,600,
42:473,500 BC from nomads.
42:54Especially from the steppe, the grass steppe north of the Black Sea,
43:00that were responsible for the decline of these settlements.
43:05This has not been confirmed, so it's still a mystery.
43:12Did the locals have to leave their town because the ever-growing population could no longer provide for itself?
43:20Because the fertilization of the fields was not sufficient?
43:24That's what Frank Schlotz is trying to find out.
43:27He is looking for evidence of crop failure in the grain and seed samples.
43:35It is quite possible that the fields were exhausted after several centuries of intensive farming.
43:42Perhaps the climate had also changed, resulting in failed harvests.
43:53From what we know, it doesn't look like it.
43:55The summers seemed to have been warm enough, there was enough rainfall,
43:58we have no evidence of droughts or winters that were too cold or anything like that.
44:04None of that.
44:05So they seem to have fared very well in the landscape.
44:08They deliberately chose these forest steppe areas where you have such a temperate climate.
44:14What happened then?
44:16Did an epidemic break out?
44:19Humans and animals lived closely together.
44:22A pathogen could have spread to the humans.
44:26The researchers focus.
44:29The plague.
44:30Is this the right lead?
44:31In Kiel, geneticist Ben Krauskiora is searching for pathogens in the skeletons of hunter-gatherers.
44:40Hello.
44:41Shall we take a sample for genetics?
44:43Yes.
44:44We have a nice molar here that's already loose, so a good choice.
44:47Perfect.
44:52So far we have been able to detect various pathogens in A-DNA analysis,
44:57including the hepatitis B virus, for example, which tends to cause chronic infections,
45:02but also later Yersinia pestis pathogens, which emerged from around 3,300 BC.
45:11A-DNA, this is the name given to genetic material that is over 100 years old.
45:18To ensure that the result is not falsified, Ben has to take the sample in a clean room,
45:24where no modern DNA can contaminate the old DNA.
45:30The biochemist takes a sample from the tooth of a man who lived in northern Germany 5,000 years ago.
45:36In the meantime, he has searched for the plague pathogen in over 2,700 remains of the hunter-gatherers of
45:44that time.
45:47We have not yet found it, although we have examined many, many individuals from this period.
45:52Across Europe, it remained undiscovered until 3,300 years ago.
45:58Which does not mean that the plague did not exist back then.
46:01The pathogen probably developed from a soil bacterium and then infected rodents.
46:09How dangerous was the pathogen when it infected the first humans around 3,300 BC?
46:17To find out, the geneticists are examining the A-DNA of one of the first plague pathogens
46:22that they found in a human skeleton.
46:29To their surprise, the old pathogen is missing an important gene segment.
46:37This gene enables the bacterium to be transmitted from rodents to fleas and from fleas to humans.
46:44And this is probably the cascade that is necessary to trigger major pandemics in groups to lead to many deaths.
46:51Without this gene, the bacterium probably only has the possibility of jumping directly from rodent to human,
46:58or being transmitted directly from human to human.
47:01Which of course severely restricts the circle of infected people
47:05and is more likely to lead to individual cases than to a real pandemic.
47:115,000 years ago, the plague pathogen was not as dangerous as it was later in the Middle Ages.
47:17So there was no epidemic.
47:21Stefan Dreibrott is following up another lead.
47:24He has examined the charred remains of two houses.
47:27His aim is to find out how they burned down.
47:34To do this, he mixes clay and straw.
47:37The inhabitants of the megasites had covered their house walls with it.
47:45Archaeological research, especially from the Balkans, has long held the idea that prehistoric settlers buried their houses ritually
47:52and burned them in a standardized way.
47:56So it was interesting for us to reconstruct how the houses were actually burned.
48:03And above all, at what temperatures?
48:09Stefan Dreibrott simulates various firing scenarios by wrapping some of his clay pieces in aluminum foil.
48:17This allows less oxygen to reach the clay in the oven.
48:21After firing, the geoarchaeologist will compare the pieces of fired clay from the laboratory with those from the megasite and
48:29come to a clear conclusion.
48:35What we found is that the two houses we examined burned at significantly different temperatures,
48:40which obviously speaks against standardization.
48:47This also fits in with the new research findings of the archaeology team.
48:53People did not leave their town at the same time.
48:56It took 200 years for the last families to burn their homes and leave.
49:03The population has risen, risen, risen.
49:06At some point you have to change the means of communication in order to be able to manage.
49:11I think writing was necessary for this, it wasn't invented.
49:18Did they fail?
49:20Did the megasite end up being too big for everyone to know each other and make decisions together?
49:29The meeting houses give an indication of this.
49:32The small ones are abandoned.
49:38In the end, there is only one large meeting house in the megasite.
49:49Obviously they didn't agree with the fact that fewer and fewer people were making decisions for the entire estate.
49:56And then people were dissatisfied and left.
50:03So in this respect, you don't have to imagine the end of the large housing estate in such a way
50:08that they all packed their rucksacks and left at the same time,
50:11but that it was certainly a process that probably took place over a few generations.
50:21Even if the early farmers and cattle breeders failed because their cities became too big and a ruling elite emerged.
50:29The megasites of the Tripolia communities are a unique and fascinating example of how people can live together as equals
50:37in metropolitan areas.
50:42And even more, that everyone has access to the city's resources and can help decide their own fate.
50:55The surprising thing is that many of the hypotheses with which we went into the Tripolia research,
51:01which were actually relatively logical for us, have been refuted.
51:09Around 20 generations lived and worked in Europe's first major cities.
51:14They were innovative and successful.
51:20But then the cities became too big and people decided to stop bowing to the social and political changes and
51:27seek their fortune elsewhere.
51:48To be continued…