About 8,000 years ago, over a period of perhaps 200 years, artists that lived at Lepenski Vir - a settlement on the banks of the Danube - carved about 100 sandstone boulders with faces and abstract designs. Archaeologists say the heads seem to be a mixture of human and fish features, accounting for their strangeness.
     The pools in this part of the Danube were long a home to sturgeon and other large fish that sustained human life; perhaps a fishing people imagined their souls migrating into fish after death. And many of these sculptures were kept in strange trapezoidal dwellings, with hard limestone floors. In some cases the dead lay buried under the homes. So the sculptures might have represented ancestors.
     Lepenski Vir was first inhabited more than 12,000 years ago and off and on over thousands of years. Archaeologists excavated it from 1965-70. Dr. Dusan Boric, a fellow at Columbia University's Italian Academy for Advanced Studies, said Lepenski Vir is more important than ever for research. Studies of ancient DNA that trace patterns of human migration into Europe, chemical analyses of bones and pottery, and continuing archaeological studies of burial practices place the site at the very moment when farmers from the Near East began to migrate into Southeastern Europe and met the hunters and gatherers who lived there at the time.
     Researchers still debate the precise dating of different settlements at Lepenski Vir and nearby sites, but agree on the essential fact that the sites capture a record of the meeting and mixing of two cultures and peoples.
     David Reich, an expert in ancient human DNA and human migration at Harvard, has drawn DNA from bones at Lepenski Vir. "It is a mother lode of material," Dr. Reich said. In a recent paper, he and other scientists drew DNA from four individuals at Lepenski Vir. Two were identifiable as Near Eastern farmers. And studies of the chemistry of their bones show that they had not grown up at Lepenski Vir, but were migrants from elsewhere. Another had a mixed hunter-gatherer/farmer heritage and had eaten a diet of fish. Another had hunter-gatherer heritage. The skeleton with mixed heritage was from 6070 BCE, the farmers were dated as 6200-5600 BCE, and the hunter-gatherer probably earlier than the others.
     Another indication of the merging of two cultures is a change in burial practices. Throughout Europe, the Mesolithic foragers laid a body down stretched out. The migrant farmers from the Near East brought another way of treating death, setting the body in a crouched or fetal position. Both practices are found at Lepenski Vir. And when the burial practices are combined with DNA profiles, the picture is richer still. Some of the dead of Near Eastern heritage are buried in the way of the foragers. And others of foraging heritage are buried in the way of the farmers.
     The farmers also brought their animals. There are bones from at least one dog, which may someday help illuminate the muddled picture of dog domestication, which now seems to have occurred separately in Asia and Europe.
     As to the faces, fishing was important on the Danube before farmers came and continued long afterward. Pottery that was used for cooking grains elsewhere in Europe was used for preparation of fish at Lepenski Vir. And the strange faces appear nowhere else. In neighboring settlements, also of fishing people, also where farmers came and met and married foragers, there are some sculptures with designs like those found on the Lepenski Vir stone heads, but none of the nearby sculptures have faces. The farmers did not bring them with them. The hunter-gatherers did not make them before the farmers came. They did not spread to the rest of Europe.

Edited from The New York Times (20 August 2019)