Cyprus-Forum.com

[supporttheunderdog]

ove on over you Choriokotians as it now appears you are not the original Cyprus Civiiastion. The lastest Archeological research now indicates Cyprus had an early vilage building civiliastion as far back as 9500 BC!!!

http://www.cyprus-mail.com/cyprus/evide ... s/20110604

ARCHEOLOGISTS believe they have discovered evidence of the existence of sedentary villagers in Cyprus dating back to the ninth millennium BC.

According to the Department of Antiquities, excavations at the site of Klimonas in Ayios Tychonas in the Limassol District have revealed the remains of a partially subterranean circular building, and the findings indicate that there were sedentary villagers in Cyprus, very similar to those of the late Pre-Pottery Neolithic A in the Levant.

This year's investigations, carried out by the French Archaeological Mission, have revealed the remains of an impressive, partially subterranean circular building, approximately 10 metres. in diameter, which is very similar to the large communal buildings that have been excavated in several villages dated to the second half of the earliest phase of the Neolithic in the Northern Levant (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, PPNA; from 9500 to 8500 BC), which have been interpreted as buildings for meeting and common storage.

Stone tools, faunal remains and radiocarbon dating have confirmed that the building at Klimonas dates to the first half of the 9th millennium.

[Sotos]

Humans evolved more than 50.000 years ago in Africa so given how close Africa is to Cyprus probably people came before that also...

[bill cobbett]

A couple of things that still sets Choirokitia apart is the scale of the site and the length of its occupancy.

So these Klimonians have a long way to go to match it.

[insan]

ove on over you Choriokotians as it now appears you are not the original Cyprus Civiiastion. The lastest Archeological research now indicates Cyprus had an early vilage building civiliastion as far back as 9500 BC!!!

http://www.cyprus-mail.com/cyprus/evide ... s/20110604

ARCHEOLOGISTS believe they have discovered evidence of the existence of sedentary villagers in Cyprus dating back to the ninth millennium BC.

According to the Department of Antiquities, excavations at the site of Klimonas in Ayios Tychonas in the Limassol District have revealed the remains of a partially subterranean circular building, and the findings indicate that there were sedentary villagers in Cyprus, very similar to those of the late Pre-Pottery Neolithic A in the Levant.

This year's investigations, carried out by the French Archaeological Mission, have revealed the remains of an impressive, partially subterranean circular building, approximately 10 metres. in diameter, which is very similar to the large communal buildings that have been excavated in several villages dated to the second half of the earliest phase of the Neolithic in the Northern Levant (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, PPNA; from 9500 to 8500 BC), which have been interpreted as buildings for meeting and common storage.

Stone tools, faunal remains and radiocarbon dating have confirmed that the building at Klimonas dates to the first half of the 9th millennium.

Putting the colonization of Cyprus into contextby Trevor Watkins | Papers by Trevor

The Neolithic Revolution: New Perspectives on Southwest Asia in Light of Recent Discoveries on Cyprus, eds. E. Peltenburg & A. Wasse Oxford: Oxbow Books, 23-34.
There is a danger that we assume – as many did before – that the earliest sites that we know represent the colonization of the island. The purpose of the paper is to consider the question of the colonization of Cyprus but in a broader context than that of the recent archaeological discoveries on the island. Occurring in the final Pleistocene (if we include the Akrotiri site in the story) or the early Holocene, the colonization of Cyprus represents an early example of the expansion of modern humans to colonise the last remaining unpopulated lands, the previously uninhabited islands. The worldwide evidence is that this colonization was carried out by complex, sedentary or semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers as well as by simple farmers. Especially within southwest Asia, and particularly within the Levantine corridor, hunter-gatherers of the epi-palaeolithic period adopted new subsistence and settlement strategies. These hunter-gatherers are in principle candidates to be the first colonists of Cyprus as much as early farmers. Their strategy involved reliance on broad-spectrum hunting and harvests of seeds that imply storage, and the stored food supplies imply reduced mobility to the point of sedentary, year-round occupation of village sites. On the one hand, this new mode of hunter-gatherer life implies a different kind of relationship between human groups and the environment within which they acquired their subsistence. On the other hand, it also involves profound changes in the social group, both in its size, its social organization its social relations, and in the cognitive and psychological consequences for the individual. These societies were scarcely different in almost every way from the early farming societies. A hypothetical reconstruction is suggested in which the island was first colonised by complex hunter-gatherer groups at the end of the Pleistocene, who then maintained their network of exchanges and links with their mainland cousins until these were progressively eroded or abandoned in the seventh and sixth millennia BC.

http://edinburgh.academia.edu/TrevorWat ... to_context


The end of the the Pleistocene is 11500 BC ain't it? The Neolithic settlement of Choirokoitia, occupied from the 7th to the 4th millennium B.C.

Anyway... who were/are these hunter gatherers?

Hunter Gatherers And The Golden Age Of Man

When I say hunter gatherers, you think nasty, brutish and short, and that's a misconception that's kept us in an exhausting race we can't win for 10,000 years.

They're actually generally well fed, have more time off, and better sex lives than most of us protestant work ethic fools.

The hamster wheel of our lives keeps us lunging for the dangling carrot, unaware that somewhere in a remote desert, in a land so desolate that our ancestors thought it unworthy of seizure, there are men and women with easily-filled stomachs napping and socializing as we spend our lives in toil.

Hunter gatherers still live largely-to the extend that we allow them -as they have since the dawn of man.

http://www.raw-food-health.net/HunterGatherers.html

It's important not to idealize these societies because they certainly have flaws. You also can't lump all hunter gatherers together as if they shared a monolythic culture, becuase there are considerably differences between them. Most do share these benefits to some extent, however:

Their work week is short enough to make us drool in envy.
They enjoy almost unbelievable egalitarianism
The religious gasp at their high levels of sexual freedom, experimentation, and enjoyment.
They're damn happy people, laughing freely way more than we do.
Outside a division of labor, women have total social equality with men.
They rarely resort to violence or war
Strong social safety nets in most of their societies support the disabled, old, and in many cases, even the lazy.
They usually live to be at least as old as we do
Their health is more robust than ours, and they're frequently immune to diseases ravaging their sedentary neighbors. Their social lives are rich, and they have the free time to indulge themselves.
With a few exceptions, their lifestyle lets them live in harmony with the earth, relying mostly on renewable resources, and keeping their numbers at a sustainable level.
Their senses appear many times sharper than their own, and many seem curiously immune to extremes of temperature.
Their strength often seems unbelievable.
They intelligently use their time to create more productive environments that needs little care.