La Marmotta

Stepping out onto the riverbank, with his fellow travelers watching expectantly and the goats bleating querulously in the canoe behind him, the farmer must have felt a surge of relief. They had paddled 20 miles up the small river from the sea. They had been at sea for weeks or perhaps months before that. Now, stretching before them in this dry season, they saw the river's source, a large lake of clear, sweet water. The low hills around the lake were carpeted with oak and laurel, ash and alder—all the wood they could ever need. And right around the river, sloping gently down to the lakeshore, was a floodplain of silt and clay. The dirt felt lovely and rich in the farmer's fingers. This will do, he thought. Bring the goats ashore. Also the sheep, the large pots of seeds, the flint-bladed sickles and the greenstone axes, the women and children and dogs. The settlers unloaded the contents of what was perhaps a small flotilla of large dugout boats, and they proceeded to do what settlers do. They cleared away patches of shoreline and forest and planted them with wheat and barley. They built huts of wattle and daub, driving foot-thick oak posts seven feet into the ground, for they meant these homes to last. They had no intention of leaving. And that made the settlers quiet revolutionaries: the vanguard of what was arguably the greatest change human history has ever seen. The place is now called La Marmotta; it's a few hundred yards outside the village of Anguillara Sabazia, which is on Lake Bracciano, less than 20 miles northwest of Rome. The time was roughly 5700 B.C., early in the Neolithic Period, five millennia before the founding of Rome. By then, biologically modern humans had lived in Europe for tens of thousands of years. Many archaeologists would call them culturally modern as well, insofar as Lascaux and other painted caves show they were capable of symbolic expression. But another essential human characteristic was still missing in these people. They painted animals, but they did not tame them; they manipulated symbols but not the world. They lived wild, nomadic lives. Like animals, they hunted and foraged. Unlike us, they left the world as they found it. Europe thus remained mostly wild, primeval forest. The change, when it finally came, was so fast and deep it is called the Neolithic revolution. Around 11,000 years ago in the Near East, some people stopped roaming and began farming—domesticating wild plants and beasts, living in permanent settlements. By 9,000 years ago, or 7000 B.C., the revolution had arrived in Greece, and by 4000 B.C., it had spread across Europe into Britain and Scandinavia. Fly over Europe today and you see what the Neolithic revolution has wrought: The land is mostly farms, a tidy patchwork of dun, green, and ochre. On the whole continent, there are but a few tiny islands left of primeval forest. It is difficult to imagine a moment when the situation was reversed, and such farms as existed were islands on the edge of a vast sea of wilderness. That moment is what is preserved at La Marmotta. Since the sixth millennium B.C., as the climate has grown wetter, the water level in Lake Bracciano has risen more than 25 feet, and so the ruins of the Neolithic lakeshore village are now buried in bottom mud 400 yards offshore. For the past decade, a team of divers led by archaeologist Maria Antonietta Fugazzola Delpino, director of the Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography in Rome, has been uncovering those ruins. What Fugazzola's team has found is a large, rich village that was established, she thinks, by pilgrims who had come to central Italy from far away—from Greece or even the Near East. Their settlement survived for at least four centuries before it was abandoned, suddenly and mysteriously, in about 5230 B.C. "Nothing like this has been found in the Mediterranean before," Fugazzola says. "I believe it was a real colony. They arrived here by boat, with animals that were already domesticated and with a large collection of plants. And they found here an ideal place."