http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== < Main Page Chapter 8 The First Farmers in Europe It used to be thought that agriculture crossed into Europe in a great gift parcel which contained all the ingredients of Anatolian farming. It was as though a giant had carried it across the Aegean Sea and unpacked all the goodies on a Greek site. Nowadays this wholesale transferral no longer looks viable. For one thing there is a site at Argissa Magula in Greece in whose lowest farming levels, dating from before 8000BCE, which although it might have been thought to be close in type to Anatolian sites where pottery was made, there was no pottery. For another thing, pigs and cattle were domesticated in Greece before they were in Anatolia but we know that goats were brought into Europe from the Middle East around 7,500 years ago and spread rapidly across the Continent. By tracing the animals' mitochrondial DNA which is passed down in cells through generations from mother to offspring, scientists have shown that goats differ much less genetically between continents than cattle, sheep or pigs. This suggests that goats were transported more extensively in the past, allowing the genetic material from different populations to intermingle. DNA analysis of 7000-year-old goat bones from caves in Baume d'Oullen in southwestern France revealed high genetic diversity from two goat lineages stemming from the Near East. The researchers said that this indicates that genetic mixing in goats occurred with the first waves of Neolithic farmers around 7,500 years ago. Similarly, grain was first grown in the Middle East and baskets of it are likely to have been taken across the Aegean Sea together with domesticated sheep and goats. A few Anatolian-style objects like seals, figurines and baked-clay lip plugs are also found in some sites in Greece. The crops grown on both sides of the Aegean Sea include the commonest wheat, emmer, together with einkorn wheat, various types of barley, oats, millet, vetch, peas, and lentils. From there the knowledge and practice of agriculture was spread across Europe in the comparatively short period of 3000 years, from 7000BCE to 4000BCE. Two processes could have been involved in this movement: the colonization of new habitats by populations of agriculturalists and the adoption of the new settled life-style by the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who were being influenced by the incomers. This movement is given credence by the fact that the domesticates that were the basis of the new technology - sheep/goat, barley and wheat - only existed in their wild form in the Near East. Their presence in different areas in Europe, either singly or together, is taken as evidence of the arrival of agriculture. However, DNA samples taken from 24 skeletons from a first farming site in central Europe around 7,500 years ago does not match the DNA of modern people living in the same area. (Forster). This suggests that although these first farmers brought agriculture to Europe they did not displace the original populations and that their contribution to the genetic make-up of modern Europeans was small and the result of only a minor migration of agricultural innovators. On this basis, we are forced to the conclusion that our Mesolithic ancestors were highly adaptable and readily learnt new life-skills from the few migrants from the east. Argissa-Magula was a tell-village beside the River Pinios in Greece in which the earliest settlers did not use pottery. The people apparently lived in rectangular mud-and-timber houses, grew wheat, barley, flax and perhaps millet and imported obsidian for making tools from the island of Melos which for two thousand years had supplied the material to all the lands bordering the Aegean Sea as well as to Crete to the south. The later levels of the site belong to the Sesklo culture, the name given to the sequence of agricultural societies in Greece and named after Sesklo, an excavated site in Thessaly. It is part of a broadly-similar cultural grouping which includes the site at Anzabegovo in Greece which has produced a corrected radiocarbon date of c7150BCE. Further north the earliest Neolithic culture of the western Balkans is described as Starcevo-Ko"ro"s-Cris, a complex of societies living on tell sites in the south of its range but flat sites further north and sharing a common culture that came to an end c5800BCE.. Houses are similar with stone foundations and wooden superstructures, three varieties of wheat, barley, peas and lentils were grown while sheep, cattle, pigs and dogs were domesticated. Figurines, like those in Turkey, and tools were made out of the local jasper, quartz, opalite and serpentine-jadeite. The Starcevo-Körös-Cris culture was succeeded over much of continental Greece by the late Neolithic Vinca culture with sites like Vinca, on the river Danube which was a tell site and other sites like that at Selevac in the Serbian Morava Valley which was a flat site. Copper artefacts suggest the earliest metallurgy in Europe with Radna Glava the earliest copper mine. Excavations at Vinça have produced a date of c5280BCE for the earliest contexts above the Starcevo layers. The site represents a settled farming community but one of its most characteristic features is black-burnished pottery with incised decoration which seems to have been widely used in the region. At a 120-hectare site at Plocnik in southern Serbia a Neolithic site of some sophistication has been found, occupied between 5400 and 4700BC. The site has yielded clay figurines (for pictures, see the website at www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/news content.asp?aid=90163), houses with stoves and evidence that the occupants slept on woollen mats and fur, made clothes of wool, flax and leather, kept animals and exploited local hot springs for bathing. Evidence for metal working came in the form of a sophisticated metal workshop of some 25 square metres, with walls built out of wood coated with clay. The furnace, built on the outside of the room, featured earthern pipe-like vents with hundreds of tiny holes in them and a prototype chimney to ensure that air went into the furnace to feed the fire and smoke came out safely. Metal tools, including a copper chisel and a two-headed hammer and an axe were found alongside stone implements. Excavated layers in the great tell of Karanovo in eastern Bulgaria yielded carbonised emmer, einkorn, lentils, vetch, barley and bones of sheep while the houses continue to be rectangular and built of mud-brick. The site is notable for its stratified sequence which runs from the bottom initial layers containing the earliest Neolithic evidence north of Greece through the Starcevo-Körös culture and the Vinca culture layers and finally ends at the top with the early Bronze Age, an overall height of 12 metres of deposit. Farming was also being practised in the Mediterranean area. The famous site at Knossos in Crete was already settled by farmers in c6000BCE. In Central Italy and eastern Spain the earliest Neolithic dates so far centre around 5300BCE. Further north, in central and northern Europe, on a wide swathe of mainly loess soils stretching from Poland to Holland are a number of agricultural communities which are lumped together as the Linear Band Pottery culture. At the moment it is thought that it derived from the Körös culture. A radiocarbon date for an oak well framework of 5067-5055BCE in the Rhineland associated with early linear band pottery gives a date for the beginning of the Western European Neolithic. This simple peasant culture was a long-lasting way of life that developed from an early uniformity over a vast area to later regionalisation which enabled the knowledge of agriculture to spread as far as the Rhineland by shortly before 5000BCE. Grain was grown and animals reared in a fashion that was more or less uniform over a wide area from Poland to Paris. The name Linear Band Pottery is derived from the ribbons of parallel lines used to decorate the hemispherical bowls and globular jars that are the commonest pottery forms. However, in the eastern part of the region is found the fine, painted Balkan-style pottery derived from cultures further east. Towards the west, settlements no longer remained rooted to the same spot long enough for tells to develop, although in some cases sites were resettled several times after intervals of years. Many of the post-framed and mud-walled houses were very large, particularly in the Netherlands where some structures could be up to 30m long and 8m wide. They were divided internally into either two or three rooms. Subsidary buildings were small enough to enclose a single room. But some industrial and, probably, some commercial activities were already evident in places. In Central Poland the production of the most important material for tools and weapons - flint - was carried on at Krzemionki from 3900 to 1600BCE mainly for making axeheads used for clearing new farmlands and they were being distributed over an area of up to 600km. In warm weather the flint was mined in shallow surface excavations up to two metres deep and four or five metres wide but in winter in underground tunnels eight to nine metres supported by pillars of limestone slabs and rubble. Apart from temporary camps, the miners had no adjacent accommodation because of the lack of water which was only supplied by rainfall. Elsewhere, a variety of longhouses provided accommodation for both humans and animals and perhaps working spaces as well. In Poland buildings were trapezoidal while at the other end of the region at the site of Langweiler in Germany, the houses were divided into three rooms with a byre to the north, a storage loft to the south and a living-space in the middle. Across the English Channel, varieties of longhouses appear in England, Scotland and Wales during the early Neolithic Cattle were a common domestic animal by this time; it has been suggested that people could have used them for dairy produce as early as 5400BCE, but off the loess soils sheep and goats were more usual. As far as food is concerned, recent research shows that milk-processing was taking place in Romania, Hungary and Switzerland 8,000 years ago for making fresh goats' cheese, farmers, cheese and sour cream. In graves, spondylus shells from the Mediterranean and obsidian quarried in Hungary show that on some areas some sort of long-distance trade/exchange was taking place. Two cemeteries have been excavated at each end of the region at Vedrovice in Moravia where the burial place was associated with a settlement of the early sixth millennium and later on at the other end, at Elsloo in the Netherlands, where 113 burials contained the shells, polished axeheads and adzes, pottery and implements of flint. Another, further south, at Genevray in Haute-Savoie, contained more than 150 graves dated mainly to between 4500 and 3300BCE, Some are burials in normal graves, others are stonelined cists, big enough, in many cases, to be described as small vaults with lids at ground level, containing several individuals and these may have been family vaults. In the graves were stone, bone and shell trinkets. What is important about this cemetery is that it suggests a trend towards the multiple burial in much more imposing stone sepulchres that are characteristic of megalithic tombs elsewhere.. The use of spondylus shells for making bracelets continues into a later phase in central and southern Germany, the Netherlands and eastern France. This phase is characterised by the culture described as Rössen after a cemetery near Meuseberg in central Germany. In the past the phase was described as late-Danubian and the settlements were often established villages sometimes surrounded by a palisade as at Inden in Holland (c4700-4500BCE) and Cuiry-lčs-Chaudardes in the Aisne valley (c4600-3350BCE). Further south, in a belt stretching from France into Italy is a culture referred to as Chasseen in which the people grew beans, vetches, pulses and cereals and kept domesticated animals alongside the hunting that still played a part in their food-producing activities. The Chasseen culture is first recognised in southern France about 4000BC but later it spread north into the Midi and into Switzerland. In northern and western areas of continental Europe the most striking pottery types were the drinking vessels which are described as funnel-necked beakers and collared flasks, perhaps making up a set that is often found in tombs. This pottery tradition was succeeded by or perhaps developed into one which is characterised by pots with decorative cord impressions used by people who are variously described as belonging to either the Corded Ware or the Single Grave culture. They were widely spread over an area stretching from southern Scandinavia and eastern France eastwards to central Russia and appears around 2900BCE. One German settlement site has been identified on the Federsee with long houses and smaller buildings but apart from that the evidence comes from burials, probably under tumuli, in flat graves or multiple burials in pits. The most common artefacts are the battle-axes, known also as shaft-hole axes, and the stone daggers, constructed to resemble copper examples. Subsequent to but alongside this tradition in some areas is that of the Bell Beaker, a widespread phenomenon with a common form of pottery whose makers followed the Corded Ware tradition as far as ceramic decoration and form was concerned and the Single Grave tradition with their single inhumations under round barrows for burial rites. This Bell Beaker Complex of features is common over a large part of Europe and in it appear at different times flint daggers in some areas, copper artefacts in others and gold ornaments elsewhere in the period ending 1800/1700BCE. Effective Farming [LINK] main page [LINK] Communal Tombs [LINK]