The Settlement of Serbs on Balkans and the First State
Paleolithic
- second period of the Stone Age
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This chapter contains but a few pictures of the artifacts of the material culture of the Paleolithic people. They inhabited territories, which the Serbs would subsequently settle, and on them create their states and culture.
People first appeared in these spaces c. 40 millennia B.C. Their primer habitats were caves. Archeological excavations, particularly in the cave on the Jerinini hill on the spurs of the Crni Vrh in the villages of Gradac and Rsovace on Vencac, help us create their lifestyle. They lived in communities of about fifteen people, from one to three biological families, by hunting and fruit gathering. They made tools of flint-stone, and some implements from bones. People that inhabited caves stretching from the Slovacki Rudogorje to Banat made the same implements, thus is it presumed that the central Balkan region was linked culture-wise and population-wise with Banat and Transylvania from the 35th to the 25th millennia B.C.
Large climatic changes and fresh flora and fauna had vital influence on the life of pre-historic man. Extremely cold spells and the extinction of animals forced them to migrate.
Systematic scientific research on 14 sites in Djerdap has shown that man had lived in this area continually from the 11th to the 5th millennia B.C. It has been established that, in a temperate climate, settlements arose by the banks of the Danube - the Lepenski Vir (Lepen Whirl), Vlasac, Padina, Hajducka Vodenica, Ikona, Kladovska Skela and others. Better living conditions, richer soil for hunting and fishing was conducive to the population growth, which lead to the building of houses and villages.
In these settlements cult places were found, sacral objects and the first sculptures: fish-like human heads, fish, deer.
The bearers of the culture of the Lepen Whirl lived in two or four biological families. They lived by fruit gathering and hunting. However, there are grounds to assume that they grew plants and tamed animals, the precondition for the development of farming and stock raising in the latest period of the Stone Age.
