Europe: Agriculture, Towns, and Megaliths
The entire prehistory of Europe part II
Welcome to Cosmographia — a newsletter dedicated to exploring the world and our place in it. For the full map of Cosmographia posts, see here. This is the part II of the story of Europe’s prehistory; you can find part I here.
Those who are too lazy to plough in the right season will have no food at the harvest.
— Book of Proverbs (20:4)
Beginning around 11,700 years ago, the Holocene — our current geological epoch — saw the Earth’s climate shift to more favourable conditions for us human beings.
After millennia and millennia of the bitter cold and unpredictable weather patterns of the Last Ice Age, the planet gradually began to get warmer and wetter, with increased rainfall and temperature stability. Crucially, as the glacial sheets began to roll back to the poles, the deglaciation allowed the oceans to emit considerable quantities of CO₂ into the atmosphere, causing a significant rise in atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas. Given we see a change in the activities of humans not long afterwards, it’s wondered if the development of agriculture was in part made more viable due to effects of the increased CO₂, which would have allowed the wild grasses that became humanity’s first crops an increased ability to photosynthesise and grow.
In the few thousands years before the Holocene began, the abrupt cooling in Northern Eurasia of the Younger Dryas event had led to large numbers of humans migrating to the warmer refuge of the Levant. In response to the increased competition for food resources, it seems the people of the Fertile Crescent began to innovate. Some looked to harvest wild plants; others concentrated on the wild flocks of sheep, goats, and gazelle.
Recent research has revealed the invention of agriculture is not as simple a story as we once thought. It seems the intentional cultivation of plants was not a single watershed moment that happened once and only once. Instead, human groups appear to have repeatedly begun the practice only to later abandon it, presumably as conditions or culture changed. Regardless, we know that somewhere around 12,000ya the practice of cultivating plants like wheat and barley seems to have stuck for good.1 Not long afterwards, humans in the same area began herding sheep and goats for the first time, then later, cattle and pigs.
Farming spread from the Levant north into Anatolia by cultural diffusion, where the indigenous Anatolian hunter-gatherers (AHG) copied the practices from those to their south, the surplus seemingly allowing them to build some of the world’s earliest permanent settlements, like Göbekli Tepe. From there Anatolian farmers eventually crossed the Bosphorus into Europe, and slowly but surely crept up through the Balkans into Central Europe, Italy, Western and Eastern Europe, and, eventually, up into the British Isles and Jutland Peninsula. DNA analysis has revealed that in some areas, like France, the farmers assimilated the indigenous Western Hunter Gather (WHG) populations into their own; in others they replaced them wholesale, such as in Britain. The farmers tended to keep to the rich alluvial plains, meaning some hunter-gatherer communities continued on as they were in the less fertile mountainous regions and denser forests.2 Along the Atlantic coastlines of Iberia and France, farmers and foragers managed to live side by side for several millennia, until the latter were either outcompeted or folded into the former.
The Early European Farmers (EEF), as the group is defined in archaeogenetics, brought with them the gene variants for the lighter skin pigmentations we see in modern Europeans today.3 To our eyes they would have looked Mediterranean, with mostly light, olive-coloured skin, dark hair, and dark eyes.