After the First World War, that confidence was harder to feel. The decisive role of the United States in ending the war — and the growing power of Hollywood movies and jazz music since then — had brought a new cultural juggernaut onto the world stage. Feeling pinched between the US and Hollywood to the west, and Soviet communism to the east, some intellectuals set out to define and distinguish Europe, revising that old idea for a new and threatening age.
Christendom referred to a physical and spiritual space contrasted to that of the Muslim Turk. Based on pride in western science, reason and technology, this vision of Europe as the seat of civilisation, the epitome of human progress, flourished in the 19th century.
The war proved that although modern civilisation, in the sense of technological progress, might have been born in Europe, the US and the USSR had advanced in these fields at least as far as the old world.
European culture, in contrast to crass American and Soviet materialism, was idealist and anti-materialist, defined especially by literature and the arts. If Europe has a culture, is there a European nation? Who gets to decide which works of art are representative of European culture?
Must the continent be homogenised to foster a unified European culture? Some of these questions are again relevant today, amid the newly intense conflict between Europeanist and nationalist visions of what Europe and its culture or cultures really are.
To answer them, it helps to remember that ancient verities are few. The old world is defined by relatively new ideas. Computing and artificial intelligence. Algorithms associating appearance and criminality have a dark past. Catherine Stinson. Childhood and adolescence. For a child, being carefree is intrinsic to a well-lived life. Luara Ferracioli. Meaning and the good life. Sooner or later we all face death.
The researchers found that the earliest farmers in Germany were closely related to Near Eastern and Anatolian people, suggesting that the agricultural revolution did indeed bring migrations of people into Europe who replaced early hunter-gatherers. Instead, about 5, to 4, years ago, the genetic profile changes radically, suggesting that some mysterious event led to a huge turnover in the population that made up Europe.
The culture, which may have been responsible for erecting some of the megaliths at Stonehenge , is named for its distinctive bell-shaped ceramics and its rich grave goods.
The culture also played a role in the expansion of Celtic languages along the coast. Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter tiaghose.
Original article on LiveScience. Tia is the assistant managing editor and was previously a senior writer for Live Science. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Wired. She holds a master's in bioengineering from the University of Washington, a graduate certificate in science writing from UC Santa Cruz and a bachelor's in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.
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