Paradise lost in the sand dunes of Dzūkija: people of the Stone Age in Lithuania, who are they?

We invite you to go back several tens of thousands of years to the past and, together with archaeologist G. Gudaitiene, who investigates the Stone Age to see what life was like at that time and to meet your ancestors, the first people to discover. the territory of Lithuania.

15 minutes The interviewed researcher emphasized that the data was available only for the period when the last glacier covering the territory of Lithuania was removed. Then, according to her, a landscape was formed, in which the traces of primitive peoples were found.

“After the glacier moved,” said the archaeologist, “the first individual groups of people came to Lithuania from the territories of present-day Germany and Poland. We decided this from the findings: the tools used by the first inhabitants of the Lithuania’s current territory are the same as those found in the countries mentioned above. Of course, it is speculated that people might have strayed here earlier, during warming periods, but the last glacier destroyed these traces. “

G. Gudaitienė said that the first communities came to our lands following the reindeer, who discovered new pasture here as the glacier receded. Therefore, a few thousand years ago, unique small groups of nomads appeared in present-day southern Lithuania. The interlocutor explained that this is a period in which we still cannot talk about sedentary life, so the people of that time used to visit seasonally; after a short stay in sandy Dzūkija, they continued traveling. According to the archaeologist, such wanderings lasted for several thousand years before the climate became even warmer and the Stone Age changed as a result. fashion. In general, the landscape, flora and fauna are also changing as the climate changes.