Late Neolithic, about 5000 years ago, at the dawn of civilization. Displaced by climate change, the human community survived the most significant technological "revolution" and conquered agriculture. In this age, humans are no longer the wandering hunters that they were during most of their evolution. They live in a permanent settlement, relatively safe, well-fed, and have learned the skills of growing grain and livestock. If they are settled in a god-given place like Lepenski vir, along the Danube, they eat a variety of food, fish, and are not sick or exposed to attacks.
People of this age possess various skills unknown in earlier eras. Clay potters produce a variety of containers in which to store food, primarily grains. They also master the processing of other materials. Dogs, domesticated sheep and goats run through their settlements. Children's cries are heard everywhere. Women give birth in closed dwellings, more protected and dedicated to childbirth. Children grow up in the best world for our species until then.
Millennia later, archaeologists will explore hundreds, thousands of Neolithic settlements across Europe, based on which we will get an almost idyllic picture of how men and women lived at that time. However, one significant disparity will appear, noticeable to anyone who looks at a map of excavations in a territory, such as the Western Balkans for example. Namely, it will turn out that archaeologists find dramatically more of these Neolithic sites than are discovered from the previous Mesolithic, as well as from earlier eras. This led archaeologists to a conclusion that is considered unquestionable in science - that in the Neolithic the human species experienced a demographic explosion, that in earlier eras man was at a population minimum and that the number of human individuals in this period jumped sharply, after which it grew unstoppably.
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN THE NEOLITH: Lepenski vir, illustration
This generally accepted hypothesis, derived from the jump in the number of archaeological sites, is explained by the improvement of living conditions, which is why the fertility of Neolithic women increased. However, what if it isn't? It turns out that modern science does not have a single biological study that confirms that there has been a jump in fertility. And no matter how important this question is for understanding human evolution, until this year no one has dealt with it in a way that could provide clear answers.
Although it sounds almost unbelievable, the first research that will answer the question of whether there is biological evidence for the growth of fertility in the Neolithic, of all places in the world, is being conducted in - Serbia. The BIRTH project, which investigates this question, ten days ago received the largest and most prestigious possible support that Europe can give to a scientific research. For this five-year research, the European Union will provide the entire 1,7 million euros won by Dr. Sofija Stefanović and her team from the Laboratory for Bioarchaeology, at the Department of Archeology of the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. They received this funding through a prestigious ERC grant for a project dealing with childbirth, mothers and babies in prehistoric times. "Now we still have to believe that it happened," said Dr. Stefanović after the news about this ERC grant in Serbia spread through the scientific community and domestic media.
FIRST ERC IN SERBIA: Although such grants have been awarded to European researchers for seven years, Dr. Stefanović and her team are the first scientists from Serbia who managed to win it. Unknown to the domestic public, the ERC is perhaps the most influential grant of the European Research Council (European Research Council) and represents the hardest core in the largest European science funding program to date, Horizon 2020.
The prestige is not without foundation because the European Research Council funds the best scientific projects which, in the most difficult competition in Europe, undergo a two-stage, rigorous control before committees of leading European scientists. Only scientists with an impeccable career and demonstrated excellence can receive such grants. At the same time, they are awarded unconditionally, but only for revolutionary scientific ideas, projects that open up something completely new and solve an old problem in a new way. Along with great scientific recognition, the ERC also offers researchers generous and stable funding to make their ideas come true - of the enormous 80 billion euros that will be distributed to European scientists, including scientists from Serbia, through Horizon, about 13 billion refers only to the ERC.
So far, Serbia has not had a representative in this club, and it is similar with the countries of the region - only Croatia managed to win an ERC grant. That is why, until ten days ago, the ERC was discussed among scientists in Serbia as an unattainable dream, an area of Horizon 2020 where scientific sharks circle and where we have nothing to look for. But now - for the first time in the history of Serbian science - the European Research Council has allocated funds for a scientific project from Belgrade, including it among the most excellent research projects in Europe.
After the news from Brussels that Sofije Stefanović's BIRTH won such a grant, a new era opened not only in the study of the Neolithic, but also the Republic of Serbia joined the group of countries that have a scientist with an ERC grant. Unaware that she has become a new scientific star after this news, Dr. Stefanović is happy because the project she manages now has the opportunity to decipher biological evidence about the evolution of fertility, i.e. fertility in prehistory.
THE QUESTION OF FERTILITY: With this grant, Sofija Stefanović and colleagues won 1,7 million for the research of a new approach in understanding the aforementioned Neolithic population growth in the period from 10.000 to 5000 BC in the Balkans. "It is a question that has been bothering me since my student days. It is well known that man spent his entire evolution at a demographic minimum and only experienced a demographic increase in the Neolithic," explains Dr. Stefanović, adding that this is perhaps the most important event in human evolution because "without demographic expansion in the Neolithic, there would be no civilization."
"How do we know that the evolution of fertility took place in this way?" asks Sofija Stefanović, explaining that there is only indirect evidence for the growth of fertility - everything we know rests on the fact that archaeologists have observed an increase in the number of sites and ceramic fragments in the Neolithic. . The BIRTH project will offer the first biological evidence of the evolution of fertility using a method that was practically under scientists' noses.
The new idea, which Dr. Stefanović and her team developed for a long time and defended before the ERC Committee for the Past, is that by examining the findings of human teeth from the prehistoric period and studying the so-called increment lines in dental cementum (each of which corresponds to one year of life), according to clinical studies, pregnancy can be determined - if it turns out that they are dark, thickened and mineralized. Stefanović points out that this technique has been used in forensics for a long time, and part of her team from the Laboratory for Biotechnology has been trained in the application of this method. "It is almost unbelievable that no one has applied this method to examine fertility in the Neolithic," says our scientist modestly.
Namely, the team from the Belgrade Laboratory for Bioarchaeology intends to examine female skeletons from the period from 10.000 to 5000 years ago, to look at their teeth and, by analyzing these incremental lines that indicate childbirth, establish how often they gave birth. After that, and all by studying the findings in the field of the Western Balkans, they will get birth statistics for Neolithic women and thus determine why the human population multiplied in this age.
Although they presented it at conferences and received enthusiastic support from numerous colleagues from around the world, Stefanović's story is that in recent years, she and her colleagues had doubts about whether to try their idea before the European Research Council. The idea was simply not in the spirit, perhaps better said in the fashion of projects that receive such grants, and the ballast was the fact that no one from Serbia received an ERC. But, determined to present the very topic that has been driving them for years, they tried, went through an intensive process, the most difficult of which was the interview before the ERC committee for the past. And in the end, they were rewarded for their persistence. "I hope that this can encourage many other colleagues from Serbia to try." To persevere in their idea," says Sofija Stefanović, adding that she and her colleagues are the happiest because now they have the opportunity to work on research at the forefront of science in the middle of Belgrade, realizing their idea.
