4.3 Europe: 5000 to 3000 b.c.  (Page 2/3)

Now some very interesting theoretical propositions must be discussed with relation to the population of ancient Greece. Were the indigenous people known to inhabit the peninsula after 6,000 B.C. the same who later became known as the Mycenaeans, or were the latter invading conquerors who overcame the originals? If the former is true, then, since the Mycenaeans spoke an early Greek language, there must have been Indo-European speakers in the area by 6,000 B.C. But some linguists say this cannot be. Another alternative is the idea championed by Professor Marija Gimbutas, that Kurgans from the lower Volga steppes migrated by land and sea (Vikings of the 4th millennium B.C.)

Central europe

The Danubian I Neolithic Culture which spread from the Near East, now reached well up into Germany, and this is usually described as an Indo-European culture. Village-based agriculture was present in Hungary by 5,000 B.C. In Switzerland the lake dwellers, with houses on stilts, built either in the lakes or on adjacent marshy ground as early as 5,000 B.C. The extreme north of central Europe, however, was still subarctic, with only hunting tribes following the herds. New peoples introduced mixed farming in central Europe about 4,400 B.C. These Neolithic peoples lived in villages consisting of six to thirteen wooden longhouses averaging about 325 feet long, and they used the so-called Linear pottery. They grew wheat by a slash and burn method and kept cattle, sheep and pigs. This is the culture which spread into northern France and Belgium.

Western europe

Impressed-ware pottery people lived all along the coast of the western Mediterranean by 6,000 B.C. The island of Mallorca in the Balearics, about 125 miles from the eastern coast of Spain, was definitely inhabited by man in the 5th millennium B.C., co-existing with ruminant artiodactyl mammals. There were Bowl Culture agricultural settlements in France, northern Spain and England in the 4th millennium and these people were probably distinct from the Windmill Hill groups which we shall identify later, and of the old Iberian or Western Mediterranean race, which may have spread by boat up the Atlantic coast. Small boats were definitely in use for coastal transport by 5,000 B.C. In Belgium a flint mine of about 4,300 B.C. has been discovered which required the miners to go through about thirty feet of unstable gravel and sand to reach the flint. The tunnels were shored inside and at the bottom the mine fanned out into a web of galleries. The farmers of Belgium and northern France of this era came from Germany between 4,000 and 3,000 B.C. and built large farm houses and used Linear pottery of the tradition of central Europe. In contrast, the people of France, using Chassey pottery after 3,500 B.C. developed a separate Neolithic farming group.

The earliest flint mine of Britain was in Sussex and has been dated to about 4,300 B.C. The area of the Salisbury plain in southwestern England was inhabited by the Windmill Hill people by about 4,000 B.C., coming from the continent. They were a farming people with cattle, goats, pigs, sheep, dogs and wheat, who added fish and shell fish to their diet. They built at least seventeen known enclosures (and probably actually many more) in this area of England with the largest of these on top of Windmill Hill about one and one-half miles northwest of Avebury, and thus the origin of their archeological name. This particular causeway enclosure was built about 3,250 B.C. and originally consisted of three concentric circles, the largest being 1,200 feet in diameter, covering twenty-one acres. Some 1,300 pottery vessels have been recovered from this spot, and it is thought to have been more or less continuously used for over one thousand years. This, and the other similar constructions were probably used for ritual or ceremonial centers rather than for habitation. When these Windmill Hill people arrived in England, about 4,000 B.C., it was the end of the Mesolithic Age in Britain, and there were certainly other people already there living as semi-nomads, making flint and stone tools for cutting and shaping timber, red-deer antlers and skins. Most of southern England was heavily forested, but Wessex, with chalk and limestone, had lighter vegetation and was attractive to the immigrating stock breeders and agriculturalists. Some feel that cattle may have been shipped to England from the continent as early as 5,000 B.C.