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When the Ice Age retreated the glaciers that covered half of North America and Eurasia, melted and flooded the lands underneath. "Uirala" refers to the flooded lands, and the conversion of former reindeer peoples moving around on foot, to boat peoples moving around in the flooded lands. These projects bring forward accumulated information from archeology, climatology, geography, etc. with a specific focus on the development of the boat-oriented way of life that began south of the glaciers, and then spread around the northern world


    The world of science is inspired to dig up data that contains information about the past, and had become good at it, but interpreting the information is another thing, that requires a mind that can see all the possibilities and find the most probable one.
    The discoveries made by science have by now overtaken the rate at which thinkers can bring together all the accumulated information, and draw a picture of what happened in the past. Scientists are specialized and narrowly focussed. They can describe in detail differences in stone tools between two peoples, but are not able or else interested in telescoping out and looking at the large picture.
    The following pages are the result of my investigation of what science has found, but looking at it from space, to get an overview of what happened in the human past, mainly in Europe. I however am oriented to the lands and peoples who occupied the lands released from under the Ice Age glaciers.  
     There is now far more information than was available only a century ago. But  who is looking at this information and interpreting it? I was surpised to discover just how much information can be found about the prehistoric past, if you look for it in scientific papers - now readily available on the internet. There are maps and pictures too. But it takes a creative person to process the accumulated information and discover the general story it tells about the past. We restricted the reconstruction to the rise of boat peoples to deal with the flooded lands, because it appeared it had been overlooked. Traditionally books have simply referred to these people as 'hunter-gatherers' without grasping the fact that developing a boat oriented way of life was as great an innovation in humankind as the development of horseback riding. Both suddenly made peoples extremely mobiles and premitted them to spread further than they could have, if humans had remained pedestrians moving slowly on foot on solid ground.
    Archeology has found evidence of the emergence of the boat peoples in Europe in southern Scandinavia, when the reindeer tundra of northern continental Europe was disappearing. Archeologists called these new boat-oriented hunter gatherers the "Maglemose Culture". They appear to have arisen out of the "Ahrensburg Culture" reindeer hunters of what is now Germany/     They rapidly expanded through the marshes, such as those of the south Baltic coast. They may even have spread south via the Vistula marshes, and up the lower Danube, going through all marshy lowlands that offered passage for their dugout canoes. Boat peoples also developed in the vicinity of Poland, perhaps from a combination of "Maglemose Culture" and "Swiderian Culture". The latter were reindeer people. The result was that the boat-oriented hunter-gatherers took an interest in animals of the sea such as seals and whales (as suggested by their large harpoons). Archeology has called this development the "Kunda Culture" which too expanded east, but further north, reaching not just the Ural Mountains area, but also the White Sea. The White Sea group had to develop skin boats because the trees large enough for seagoing dugouts were not available. (Only smaller trees for single-person dugouts).
    Rock carvings show that theres White Sea boat peoples with large skin boats hunted whales, using methods that were found in the 17th century still practiced by Greenland Inuit. As you will see, I wondered if languages of surviving arctic aboriginal peoples contain words that can go back to the Baltic "Kunda Culture", and I looked for words similar in form and meaning to words in Finnic languages (mainly Finnish and Estonian) and found some remarkable coincidences. It appears that a specialized whale-hunting people developed who followed whales south along coasts.
    What emerged was the appearance of a second major migration of humans around the world. While the first one went by land, this one went by water. One branch went through rivers and marshes. The other branch went by seacoasts. Out of both arose long distance traders in Europe, and the next investigation I pursued was to see if the "Veneti" peoples mentioned in ancient texts in many parts of the ancient world, were colonies of long distance traders north of the Mediterranean, at a time when the Mediterranean had seagoing traders speaking either Greek or Phoenician.
    I did not expect at the beginning of this "UIRLALA" pursuit around 2002, for the investigative journey to go further than the rise of the boat peoples in the flooded lands south of the glaciers around 12,000-10,000 years ago. But soon I was discovering something not discovered before - the spread of Finnic-speaking aboriginal whaling people around the arctic seas and down some coasts, and the northern European boat peoples exploiting opportunities to carry goods long distances for the emerging farming peoples who were tied to their settlements, and welcomed the former nomadic hunter-gatherers to the role of carrying wares up and down major European rivers. The name that developed "Veneti", actually is identical to "VENEDE" which is genitive plural of "VENE" meaning 'boat', hence meaning 'people of the boats'.

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  2018 (c) A. Pääbo.


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author: A.Paabo, Box 478, Apsley, Ont., Canada

 

2017 (c) A. Pääbo.