The Oldest Europeans

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October 31, 2007

Halloween, a door to Paleolithic Times:

When people were just hunters and gatherers and women might have had an amazingly high status.

Halloween is a Celtic tradition. Who were the Celts? Just a few years ago there was a widely accepted vision, on account of their language. Linguists placed the Celts among the earliest Indo-European tribes that came to Europe from the East. They supposedly brought their Neolithic innovation?agriculture. The DNA revolution turned those stereotypes upside down. (As J.F. del Giorgio tells in "The Oldest Europeans: Who are we? Where do we come from? What made European women different?")

Geneticists pointed that Celts were practically identical to the Paleolithic, post-Glacial, pre-Indo-European population. Paleolithic European women seem to have had a surprisingly high status. They owned properties, were the only inheritors and arranged their brother's marriage. An Indo-European all-macho minority most probably took advantage of the peculiar, matrilineal, social structure of the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. They became the new, aristocratic male nobility and imposed their language.

Women retained a few of their rights only in the western fringe of Europe. Celtic women were famous by their independence, a token of their much higher status in the Paleolithic. Paleolithic traditions also survived much longer in that zone, as told in "The Oldest Europeans".

The Celts believed in sacred periods of the year, apt for change or reflection, among other things. One of them survived as Halloween. Curiously, as women's rights are on advance, Halloween keeps regaining popularity.

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