“Not so easy for the Kurgan boys,” Cassie speculated. “Since they were all bachelors when they shipped out, they had to get wives from the local population.”
“Precisely,” Griffin nodded. “We’re back to bride abduction which we discussed earlier.”
“It may go a long way toward explaining the kind of misogyny that’s typical of patriarchal cultures,” Fred observed. “After all, if you slaughter a girl’s family and then expect her to cozy up to you, you’re always going to be sleeping with the enemy.”
“Not to mention the laborious problem of having to control a wife’s sexual activity in order to prove the offspring belonged to a particular overlord male,” Griffin added. “Most matristic cultures were sexually free. Even those that practiced monogamy often allowed for other sexual attachments. How could a Kurgan male know his own progeny except by forcing his wife, or wives, to remain sexually exclusive? A virtually impossible task which the overlords solved by severely curtailing the freedom of women to move about in society. Females were restricted to living in harems or under house arrest.”
“That’s pretty grim, but what’s it got to do with the extinct female overlords?” Cassie asked.
“Simple biology,” Fred answered. “A female warrior gives birth to maybe five children over the course of her lifetime. A male warrior who practices polygamy can father fifty to a hundred children over the course of his.”
“And don’t forget the gender bias that is beginning to form among the male overlords,” Griffin offered. “They are surrounded by foreign women who belong to the race of the conquered. These women are considered inferior and need to be controlled to guarantee paternity. Overlord men want sons to inherit their riches because sons can be taught to fight. Even though Kurgan women were good at defending themselves, the overlord men certainly aren’t going to teach their indigenous brides battle skills, or they might turn around and kill their husbands. As a consequence, females become sexual commodities, lineage is traced through the father, and we’re well on our way to patriarchal cultural norms. These male overlord cultures would eventually outnumber the overlord female territories and conquer them.”
“But didn’t they recognize they came from the same tribes as these female warriors?” Cassie objected.
Erik shrugged. “How could they know? It took thousands of years for all this to play out. In a space of three hundred years, how many African-Americans know what tribe their ancestors came from?”
“I see your point,” the pythia conceded.
“The new world order simply engulfed and eradicated everything that came before it,” Griffin said. “The current DNA evidence seems to bear out our theory. Mitochondrial DNA, which is obtained only from the mother, shows that the vast majority of female DNA in Europe is old European while a large amount of male DNA is Kurgan.”
“Then the mothers were mainly from the conquered people, and the fathers were overlords?” Cassie asked uncertainly. “How’s that possible?”
Erik laughed sardonically. “Simple. You kill all the men in a town you conquer, and you horde the available women. In a couple of generations, your DNA signature is all over the place.”
“Ten guys on horseback could do all this?” Cassie still couldn’t wrap her mind around the possibility.
“Think of them as prehistoric Hell’s Angels,” Erik commented. “Just like the modern version, those guys could tear up a small town in a matter of hours.”
“And the rest, as they say, is history,” Griffin summed up.
The group was silent for several minutes contemplating the implications until Stefan spoke up. “But that is why we are here, is it not? To tell the story that has been lost? I know that is why I am here.”
Erik swiveled in his seat to regard the trove keeper. “Which brings us full circle. Just exactly why are you here?”
“Pokażę ci, nie?” With a gleam in his eye, Stefan reached into his duffle bag and withdrew an object wrapped in cloth. “You will see now.” He furtively looked over his shoulder toward the lobby to make sure nobody else was around and then undid the wrapping to reveal a black stone knife with an antler handle.
Cassie had never seen anything like it before. She leaned over the table to study it for a moment. “What is that thing?”
Stefan grinned at her. With an arch look he replied, “Miss Cassie, I think maybe that is for you to tell me.”
Chapter 21 – Hope in Ruins
Daniel stood on a windswept hillside and gazed off into the distance. To his left, he saw the two peaks curved inward toward one another like a pair of horns. He was back at Karfi. This time it was mid-afternoon on a bright, hot day. Not a cloud marred the endless blue of a Mediterranean summer sky. The hill sloped downward to his right. Mounds of bleached rock jutted out of the scrubby undergrowth. The tholos tombs of the Minoans.
Leroy Hunt was seated with his back resting against one of them. He had tipped his cowboy hat over his eyes and was indulging in a mid-day nap. He called it a siesta. Though he had insisted on accompanying Daniel up to the mountain refuge, he had no intention of aiding him in any other capacity than as a lackadaisical bodyguard. Daniel was on his own.
The son of the diviner had asked Nikos to remain behind. The young Cretan convert had not been part of the expedition on their last visit to Karfi and was unaware of the events that had happened there. Daniel saw no reason for involving him now. The scion wished that he, too, were as blissfully ignorant of what lay beneath the earth on this seemingly peaceful mountainside.
He cast a furtive look toward Hunt who was already snoring quietly. Scanning the area around the ruined tombs, he attempted to identify
