3.3 Europe: 8000 to 5000 b.c.

Southern europe

Crete and the Aegean Islands were sites of agricultural settlements spreading over from Asia Minor between 7,000 and 6,000 B.C. (A little different view is suggested in the next chapter). A mysterious people whose place names and therefore language was not Greek, spread over the eastern Mediterranean perhaps as early as 6,000 B.C. Linguist Leonard Palmer believes there is a definite Middle Eastern flavor to the words left behind, and traces them to the Luvians, a people from the hills of Turkey. "Corinth", "Olympus" and "Knossos" are among those names that are not Greek. The oldest houses below Knossos on Crete, in a neolithic layer dated at 6,000 B.C., were made of mud bricks hardened in fire, a mid-eastern technique never seen later on the island. The first settlers of Crete, whoever they were, found a heavily forested land with vast stands of cypress, oak, chestnut and pine, unlike modern, denuded Crete. Cyprus had a Neolithic population by the 4th millennium B.C. (Ref. 109 , 215 , 88 , 41 )

The central mountains of Greece are a series of limestone ridges running southeast into the Aegean Sea where peaks form a series of islands. The cultivable valleys on the coast are more accessible from the sea than from each other or the rest of Europe. Therefore the east coast of Greece participated in the agricultural settlement of the Aegean via the sea from the east. Domesticated sheep were in Greece by 7,200 B.C. The Balkans had agricultural settlements and painted and impressed-ware cultures from 6,000 to 5,000 B.C. spreading up from Greece. The economy was based on sheep, wheat and legumes. Karanovo, Bulgaria, is an example, with mound settlement debris forty feet high. Similar culture spread all along the coasts of the Adriatic, Sicily and southern France. Excavations in the Maritsa Valley (Valley of the Roses) in central Bulgaria indicate plastered mud-houses over wood framework present by 6,000 B.C. Each generation of people, however, would demolish their old house and build a new one on the site, so that after several thousand years, some of the resulting mounds rose as high as fifty feet. These people at 6,000 B.C. had ovens to bake bread, graphite decorated pottery and by 5,000 B.C. had early smelting and casting of copper, perhaps entirely independently of similar developments in the Near East. Lepenski Vir, on the right bank of the Danube in present day Yugoslavia, was an ancient city site dating before 5,000 B.C. It is characteristic of the work of hunters and fishermen of a pure Old Stone Age tradition before houses took on a permanent form.

Genetic studies of European peoples have indicated that farming advanced from the Middle East into Europe, starting at about 7,000 B.C. with a radial rate of advance of about one kilometer a year, and this advance occurred by diffusion of the farmers themselves (demic diffusion) rather than by the simple spread of technology from one population to another (cultural diffusion). This is evidenced by the fanning out of certain alleles in gene frequencies, spreading in Europe from southeast to northwest and also from the Near East to North Africa, Arabia and East Africa - and from Southwest Asia to the Indus Valley.