Neolithic Europe

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Image:Neolithic Expansion.gif

Image:European Middle Neolithic.gif Image:European Late Neolithic.gif Image:Old Europe.png

Neolithic Europe refers to the time between the Mesolithic and Bronze Age periods in Europe, roughly from 7000 BCE (the time of the first farming societies in Greece) to 1700 BCE (the beginning of the Bronze Age in northwest Europe). The duration of the Neolithic varies from place to place: in southeast Europe it is approximately 4000 years (i.e., 7000–3000 BCE); in northwest Europe it is just under 3000 years (ca. 4500–1700 BCE). Irrespective of specific chronology, many European Neolithic groups share basic characteristics such as living in small-scale, presumably egalitarian, family-based communities, subsisting on domestic plants and animals supplemented with the collection of wild plant foods and hunting, and producing hand-made pottery. There are also many differences, with for example some Neolithic communities in southeastern Europe living in heavily fortified settlements of 3,000-4,000 people (e.g., Sesklo in Greece) whereas Neolithic groups in England were small (possibly 50-100 people) and highly mobile cattle-herders.

The details of the origin, chronology, social organization, subsistence practices and ideology of the peoples of Neolithic Europe are obtained from archaeology. Since the 1970s population genetics has provided data on the population history of Neolithic Europe, including migration events and genetic relationships with peoples in Southwest Asia. Linguistics has contributed information on early European languages, in particular the relationship between Indo-European and Neolithic peoples. Many archaeologists believe that the expansion of Neolithic peoples from southwest Asia into Europe coincided with the introduction of Indo-European speakers, whereas many linguists prefer to see Indo-European languages introduced during the succeeding Bronze Age.

Contents

Origins

Food-producing societies first emerged in the Levantine region of southwest Asia in the early Holocene and developed into a number of regionally-distinctive cultures by the 8th millennium BCE. By 6500 BCE, food producing societies are evident in Greece, at Knossos, Franchthi Cave, and at a number of sites in Thessaly. Neolithic groups appear soon after in the Balkans and south-central Europe. The Neolithic cultures of southeastern Europe, i.e. the Balkans, Italy, the Aegean, show some continuity with groups in southwest Asia and Anatolia (e.g., Çatalhöyük). Some archaeologists and ethnographers refer to these cultures as Old Europe, and, with the background of the assumption that the Bronze age coincided with the immigration of Indo-European peoples, they are also called Pre-Indo-European cultures.

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza has summarized the study of prehistoric European population genetics and demographics in The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution (written with his son Francesco), and updated it in Genes, Peoples, and Languages.

Old Europe

The term "Old Europe" was introduced by Marija Gimbutas, in The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe: 6500–3500 B.C. (1974). Using evidence from pottery and sculpture, and combining the tools of archaeology, comparative mythology, linguistics, and, most controversially, folklore, Gimbutas invented a new interdisciplinary field, archaeomythology — (though it should be noted that Nicolae Densusianu, 1846–1911, used the same set of tools over a 40-year career to investigate the pre-historic times of Romania, as detailed in his book, Dacia Preistorica, published posthumously in 1913). Marija investigated the Neolithic period (which she termed "Old Europe") in order to understand cultural developments in settled village culture in the southern Balkans, which she characterized as peaceful and matrilineal, before the Indo-European influences which she broadly characterized as nomadic and patrilineal. She associated the Indo-European immigrants with the Bronze Age "Kurgan culture" that she identified.

Pre-Indo-European peoples

The earliest modern humans, or Homo sapiens sapiens - as opposed to Neanderthals - to enter Europe did so around 50,000 years ago, during a long period of particularly mild climate, during which Europe was relatively warm and food was plentiful. Some of the oldest works of art in the world, such as the cave paintings at Lascaux in southern France, date from shortly after this migration. The Neanderthals, the earliest Homo sapiens to occupy Europe, had already been there for about 150,000 years. The Neanderthals died out by about 30,000 years ago; being out-competed for resources by the recently immigrated modern humans is presumed to have been a major factor in their extinction. Although there has been much speculation that modern humans also interbred with Neanderthals, so that they did not truly go extinct but have descendants among us today, has been compellingly disproven by recent genetic analysis, which shows no trace of remnant Neanderthal genes in modern humans.

The Neanderthals' decline might also have been exacerbated by the worsening climate; the last ice age plunged Europe into a much colder and harsher environment, and covered much of the north of it with inhospitable glaciers. There is substantial genetic evidence that the Europeans of the time passed through a population bottleneck, in which the population severely declined over a long period of time, perhaps thousands of years, before finally rebounding after the peak of the ice age, around 17,000 years ago. There is also evidence that the humans had spread into northern Europe during the period of clement climate, but were forced entirely out of northern Europe during the height of the ice age, so that only those who migrated southward to the Iberian and Italian peninsulas and southeast Europe survived; it was these groups that then migrated northward again following the retreating glaciers to repopulate northern Europe and form the ancestors of the Pre-Indo-European peoples.

Modern European peoples derive about 72% of their genetic code from the Pre-Indo-Europeans on average. The Basques show a remarkable lack of genetic markers from other groups, prompting the conclusion that they are the closest of any present ethnic group to having completely Pre-Indo-European genes. Native speakers of Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic from the west coasts of Ireland and Scotland also come very close to the Basque/close to 100% Pre-Indo-European set of genetic markers. These two groups present useful data points in the study of correlation between genetic and linguistic heritage. Labels applying alternately to genetic or linguistic groups are often incorrectly conflated, including for example with Pre-Indo-European and Indo-European ethnic and linguistic groups. Sometimes, little to no correlation can be found between genetic and linguistic grouping. This is true, to take a non-European example, between the Sino-Tibetan and Hmong-Mien language groups in southern China, where no significant genetic differentiation correlates with the differentiation in language families, indicating ancestry that thoroughly mixed while maintaining separate language communities. On the other hand, Basques show a striking correlation between both genetic differentiation and linguistic differentiation from their neighbors, providing a compelling indication of a coherent population group that has remained effectively differentiated since prior to later in-migrations of coherent Indo-European groups. The Celtic groups in Ireland and Scotland lie somewhere in between. It is apparent that the Celtic-family language groups, which were the first Indo-Europeans to reach the British Isles, were able to replace the native languages with their own, without leaving much impact on the people's genetic markers. Later Indo-European-speaking immigrants to the British Isles associated with the Roman Empire and the Germanic language groups brought with them a more disparate genetic admixture, and absorbed much of the Celtic-speaking, genetically largely Pre-Indo-European people into their Latin and later Germanic speaking, more genetically varied population, while a geographically marginalized minority population preserved the coherently Celtic-speaking, highly-Pre-Indo-European-genetic combination from the previous admixture.

Many geographic names in the British Isles are recognized to be preserved remnants of the lost Pre-Indo-European languages, including London, Thames, and Liverpool.

According to the Kurgan model, Indo-European peoples arrived in the 4th millennium BC, across the plains north of the Black Sea. Their ultimate origins did not concern the culture of "Old Europe", although recent genetic studies apparently indicate broadly that they stem from among the human groups that had expanded over the previous several tens of thousands of years from southwestern and southern Asia into central Asia, and thence to the region north of the Black Sea from the east after the last ice age receded, sometime after about 17,000 years ago.

In historical times, some ethnonyms are believed to correspond to Pre-Indo-European peoples, assumed to be the descendants of the earlier Old European cultures: the Pelasgians, Minoans, Leleges, Iberians and Basques. Two of the three pre-Greek peoples of Sicily, the Sicans and the Elymians, may also have been pre-Indo-European. The status of the Etruscans is disputed, they are considered either Pre-Indo-European, or speakers of an Anatolian language. The term Pre-Indo-European is sometimes extended to refer to Asia Minor, Central Asia and India, in which case the Hurrians, Urartians, Dravidians and the Uralic peoples may also be counted among them.

The Basques of the Pyrenees are thought to be a surviving non-Indo-European remnant of a once more widespread Pre-Indo-European culture. Some theories consider the ancient Picts (q.v.) of what is now Scotland also to be Pre-Indo-European.

Pre-Indo-European languages

How many pre-IE languages existed is not known, nor whether the ancient names of peoples believed, then or now, to have descended from the pre-IE population referred to speakers of distinct languages. Marija Gimbutas, observing a unity of symbols marked especially on pots, but also on other objects, concluded to a possible single language (The Language of the Goddess, 1989) spoken in Old Europe. She thought that decipherment would have to wait for the discovery of bilingual texts.

The idea of a pre-IE language in the region precedes Gimbutas. It went by other names, such as "Pelasgian" or "Mediterranean." Apart from the pot marks, the main evidence concerning it (or them) is the names: toponyms, ethnonyms, etc., and roots in other languages believed to be derived from one or more prior languages, possibly unrelated. Reconstruction from the evidence is an accepted, though somewhat speculative, field of study.

For example, Sorin Paliga defined a possible Old European or Pre-Indo-European (Pre-IE) language, which he termed "Urian" or "Urbian." The Proto-Indo-European (Pro-IE) language, the descendants of which should have replaced the Pre-IE language or language family, ought not to include a root corresponding to Latin urbs, as the Proto-IE were nomadic or semi-nomadic (in the Kurgan model and most reconstructions of IE society from the roots). Therefore, a reconstructed *OR/UR- or *OL/UL-, "huge, big, elevated", used also to refer to an urban settlement, may well be the root of a cross-cultural repertory of words, such as Latin urbs, "city", Thracian Az-oros, Uri (Swiss location), Basque uri, iri "township" and Greek lab-yr-inthos and Sumerian Urbillum today the city of Irbil in Iraq. On the other hand, many mainstream historical linguists, such as J.P. Mallory and John McWhorter, are skeptical of alleged linguistic connections based on allegedly common individual roots rather than systematic sound change patterns that demonstrate similar shifts across a range of words.

Competing theories

Few details of these cultures are widely agreed upon, and even the date of the Indo-European arrival in Old Europe is questioned, whether in a Late Neolithic or a Bronze Age context. One major reappraisal of the evidence by the archaeologist Colin Renfrew proposes that the Indo-European 'invasion' is instead linked to the relatively rapid spread of farming from Anatolia into Europe from about 6500 BC, an idea he has supported using some purely lexico-statistical studies.

Renfrew's views are rejected by a majority of linguists, however, who hold that the common Proto-Indo-European language is unlikely to date before 4000 BCE to 5000 BCE. For instance, the prominent linguist J.P. Mallory has not only carefully assembled the evidence for an origin north of the Black Sea, but has also assembled a compelling collection of evidence showing that Indo-European linguistic influences first appeared in Anatolia around the Bosporus, with the earliest Indo-European traces spreading steadily thence southward and eastward through Anatolia over the centuries, thousands of years after the region had adopted agriculture.

Another theory, the Paleolithic Continuity Theory, assumes formation of Indo-European in Europe, although this idea enjoys even less support.

The popularizer Melvyn Bragg has also asserted that Indo-European originated in India, although it's unclear whether any academic has backed this idea, or what evidence might be summoned to support it.

List of cultures

References

  • Gimbutas, Marija (1991). The Civilization of the Goddess. HarperSanFrancisco. ISBN 0-06-250337-5.
  • Gimbutas, Marija (1989). The Language of the Goddess. Harper & Row, Publishers. ISBN 0-06-250356-1.
  • Paliga, Sorin (Fall/Winter 1989). "Proto-Indo-European, Pre-Indo-European, Old European: Archaeological Evidence and Linguistic Investigation". The Journal of Indo-European Studies 17 (3&4).

See also

External links

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