Backward to Beginning to 8000 B.C.

Back to Africa: Beginning to 8000 B.C.

About 7,000 B.C. a two-man plough was used in Egypt, one man ahead pulling on a rope and the other pressing down the point. (Ref. 213) It is assumed that hunters and pastoral peoples lived in great parts of Africa, particularly the north and east at this time, but there is little or no evidence of their culture except in the Sahara, itself. Some of the Tassili pastoral rock paintings of that area may date back to 6,000 B.C. During the climatic optimum from about 7,000 to 3,000 B.C. the Sahara was bush country, well stocked with game. It well could have been a zone of human interbreeding of races, in that today there are a number of Saharan and Sudanese tribes which appear to be intermediate between Caucasoids and African Negroes. Mediterranean dark-white Hamitic Caucasoids appear to have come from Asia, bringing Cushitic languages about 8,000 B.C. and spreading south along the Rift Valley of Africa to settle by the lakes in Kenya. They were fishermen, using stone instruments and making pottery. (Ref. 83) But to return to the area of the Sahara, certainly before 6,000 B.C. this was a region of lush valleys, wooded hills and fertile rolling plains, and the rock drawings of this early period suggest that the people were like the present day Bushmen, now found only in the South African desert. But with the disappearance of the big game, particularly the buffalo, these people were apparently replaced by herdsmen from the east, perhaps the ancestors of the present day nomadic Fulani peoples (Ref. 215, 176) Elsewhere in Africa from about 6,000 B.C. on, some groups living near lakes or rivers adopted a more settled way of life, using bone harpoons for fishing. Remains of these have been found near Lake Chad, Lake Edward and Khartoum on the Nile. (Ref. 88)

Forward to Africa: 5000 to 3000 B.C.

Back to The Near East: Beginning to 8000 B.C.

The early agriculture of the naturally growing wild wheat and barley in parts of this area allowed the development of communities permanent enough to develop brick and stone for both private and public buildings. The earliest sites were not far from the mountain ranges which had been the original home of the cereals just mentioned and all were within a belt of 300 millimeters (120 inches) rainfall a year, or in a flood plain. Such were Tell es-Sultan at Jericho and Catal Huyuk in central Turkey. The latter covered thirty-two acres with perhaps 6,000 to 10,000 people, with evidence of long distance trade, volcanic glass for tools and blue apatite for ornamentation. This center came to an end about 5,000 B.C., apparently simply abandoned. But the first known pottery and woolen textiles were found there^[5]. Jericho, in Judea, is thought to be the world's oldest city, dating back 9,000 years ago, some 4,000 years before the first Sumerian city. Sitting beside a spring near the Dead Sea, it had stone walls and a tower thirty feet high and a population of perhaps 2,500, all living 800 feet below sea level, whereas its counter-part Catal Huyuk was at an altitude of more than 3,000 feet. In both it appears that women cultivated the crops and looked after cattle while the men went hunting with their newly domesticated dogs. Additional Notes

Although not yet at the stage of city building, Sumerians in Mesopotamia are thought to have invented the wheel sometime between 65500 and 6,300 B.C. (Ref. 222) Wheat and barley were both grown in southern Iraq by 79000 B.C. Excavations at Tell es-Sawwan, seventy miles northwest of Baghdad indicate a high level of civilization there around 6,000 B.C., with buildings built from unbaked, mortared bricks and houses with access through the roofs and coated with plaster, then bitumen and finally facings of gypsum. This site was occupied for 1,000 years and has similarity to Catal Huyuk although occurring much later in time. It fills in a gap between the new Stone Age and recorded history. Thus the so-called "Neolithic Revolution" appears to have taken place between 7,000 and 6,500 B.C. Some instruments instead of being chipped were now highly polished. The first farm animal tamed was probably the goat, which lives off wild grass. Sheep, pigs and finally cattle followed. The pig is not a ruminant and pig-rearing could not occur until nuts, acorns, meat scraps and cooked grain were available. Cattle, domesticated either in Turkey or Macedonia between 6,000 and 5,800 B.C., offered a difficult task as the originals were fiery and agile, but this was a most important step in man's exploitation of the animal world. They were brought under control by poor feeding, close penning, hobbling and castration of the bulls. The barn yard animal became man's first power tool, but cattle were not used in any other area of the world in this millenium time-frame. Even in this Near East region desert still predominated and man and animals were actually crowded in oases. Eridu was an agricultural settlement of 5,000 B.C. (Ref. 68, 8, 213, 222)

Woolen garments were woven and there is evidence of early trade in obsidian which was ideal for tools. This came from the area of Lake Van and was exported to Mesopotamia as early as 7,000 B.C. Baskets and wooden as well as stone vessels had been invented before the 6th millennium. At Hacilar in Asia Minor, beginning about 5,500 B.C. there is evidence of a Chalcolithic Culture which involves the use of pure copper along with stone. Elam, in southern Iran was settled by the 8th millennium and in the middle of the 6th Iran had farming villages with irrigation agriculture, supplemented by hunting. Animal paintings and imported copper tools have been found.

As we have noted in the last chapter, the Black Sea, up to this time, had been a freshwater lake, connected in turn to the Caspian-Aral system. Now, as the ice cap melted and the sea level rose, salt water in the Mediterranean eventually went over the Bosporan shelf into the Black Sea, killing the fresh-water life it contained. The decomposed remains of this ice-age population still poisons the lower levels of the stagnant Black Sea, which is still devoid of life below 250 feet. (Ref. 176, 60, 28, 45, 215, 88, 158)

Forward to The Near East: 5000 to 3000 B.C.

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.

Archeological evidence is also plentiful on the European continent, but not so in the other areas. Sardinia and northern Algeria are more nearly similar to the Near East than the rest of the Central Mediterranean, and Sardinia has very low Rh negative frequency and other frequencies that are most unusual. The archeology there shows first that the earliest occupation was Neolithic - with no Paleolithic antecedent and secondly that there was substantial colonization by both Phoenicians and Carthaginians. The first farmers, however, probably came from southern Italy. The island Melos, in the Aegean, has a distinctive variety of obsidian, and there is evidence that Greek and Cretan sailors exploited it and brought it to their own countries as early as 6,000 B.C. (Ref. 222, 215, 136, 211, 170, 176, 143) Additional Notes

The majority of middle Europeans passed into the Mesolithic Age in this period. There were no longer large animals to hunt, perhaps only deer, and man augmented his diet with nuts and berries. The dog was present in the human encampments and boats were used. Farming, which appeared in the Danube basin about 6,000 B.C. spread to the North European plain about 5,000 B.C. They used wooden saws fitted with chipped flint teeth. Neolithic pottery called "Bandkeramik", which was characterized by incised parallel lines above the neck, appeared in areas of south and north central Europe and accompanied the gene gradient which we described above. Such farmer migrations involved more people and have a better potential for increase in population than "barbarian" invasions which have only limited numbers and not enough people to effect gene frequencies striking1y. This farming and the associated pottery spread rapidly along the main river valleys, especially the Danube and the Rhine, at the end of this period about 5,000 B.C. Although much controversy still exists, there is much evidence to suggest that the Indo-European speaking people were actually a single group or people at this time, living in the Danube Valley. We shall examine some other ideas about this later. (Ref. 136, 215, 143)

Swiss lake dwellers with domesticated dogs and plow oxen collected or grew flax for use in making fish lines and nets and general utility ropes by about 6,000 B.C. They also made a bread from crushed grain and had true pottery. (Continue on page 50)

Central France and most of Spain had Mesolithic cultures while southern Spain had coastal agricultural settlements that were extensions of Adriatic and southern France cultures. The very southern part of England was not covered by the last glacier, and recent discoveries and dating techniques suggest a very early inhabitation of that area. Dogs were domesticated by tribes in the British Isles by 7,300 B.C. Churchill (Ref. 29) says that at 7,000 B.C. there was still no English channel and Britain was a promontory of Europe. There was land in what is today the North Sea, also, and men lived there at 6,000 B.C. when there was continuous tundra from Jutland across to Eng1and. These men of the north were reindeer hunters, coming up from central Europe. As the glaciers retreated the animals depending on snow water had to have salt. Where human beings accumulated, the reindeers would accept human urine as a source of salt and so semi-domestication became possible, although these animals never became subject to true domestication. Britain may have become separate from the continent by about 5,900 B.C. In Ireland wattle huts date back as far as 7,000 B.C. along the coastal routes and inland waterways. Most of the Irish, particularly in the north and west have blood type O, pointing to a strong pre-Celtic physical inheritance which is believed to have come via the Atlantic from the Mediterranean area. Hunter-gathers of Western Europe and probably the British Isles have close to 100% Rh negative genes, with later positive genes arriving from the east and southeast of Europe. (Ref. 143, 215, 117, 29) (Continue on page 51)

Even at 8,000 B.C. the last glacier had retreated sufficiently to leave all of Denmark and southern Sweden free of ice and there were men living there, eating oysters, fish and seal meat. Denmark and all islands guarding the approaches to the Baltic were settled by Lapps and Finns. These people were probably of European origin although both spoke a related Finno-Ugric tongue, originating in the Urals far to the east. Denmark was then one continuous stretch of land, not multiple islands and peninsulas as today, and there was one large water channel across Sweden via the great lakes to the Kattegat. The Baltic Sea and the Sound may not have existed as such. A Neolithic rather than a Mesolithic culture existed in this portion of the world. (Continue on page 53)

There were good supplies of flint in eastern Poland, and the miles of rivers, lakes and timber afforded resources for early man. The great water system including the Black and Caspian Seas along with the Ural Mountains acted as a barrier between the Asiatic peoples and the Indo-Europeans. Some would locate the origin of the Indo-European speaking peoples at this time just north of the Black Sea, and certainly there were sparsely scattered people throughout all of northern European Russia up to the edge of the retreating glacier. McEvedy (Ref. 136) calls all of these northern Stone Age people "Finns", but most would probably prefer the term "Arctic peoples" or "Lapps". Certain scholars include the forefathers of present day Lapps among the Paleo-arctic groups, while others maintain that they are Alpine and came from central Europe and were pushed north. They do not all belong to a single physical type and do not belong to a single blood group. Their Finno-Ugric language is close to Finnish but the two are not mutually intelligible and there are three mutually unintelligible Lappish dialects. Today practically all Lapps are bilingual. (Ref. 229, 61, 88) (Continue on page 53)

Back to Central and Northern Asia: Beginning to 8000 B.C.

Middle Stone Age sites with their delicate flake-shaped tools occurred mainly in India in the central and peninsular areas, but also in the Soan Valley and at Sanghao in northeast India. Microliths and Mesoliths of the Late Stone Age are distributed almost throughout the subcontinent, except in Pakistan. Interestingly enough, scattered in remote areas throughout there are still today about twenty million aboriginal peoples such as the Gonds, Bondos, Kani, Todas and Magas, of uncertain racial ancestry. A few seem to be related to the Australoids of Australia. Pollen analysis suggests forest clearance and cereal culture in Rajasthan as early as the 8th millennium B.C. (Ref. 33, 88, 8)

Forward to Central and Northern Asia: 5000 to 3000 B.C.

Middle Stone Age sites with their delicate flake-shaped tools occurred mainly in India in the central and peninsular areas, but also in the Soan Valley and at Sanghao in northeast India. Microliths and Mesoliths of the Late Stone Age are distributed almost throughout the subcontinent, except in Pakistan. Interestingly enough, scattered in remote areas throughout there are still today about twenty million aboriginal peoples such as the Gonds, Bondos, Kani, Todas and Magas, of uncertain racial ancestry. A few seem to be related to the Australoids of Australia. Pollen analysis suggests forest clearance and cereal culture in Rajasthan as early as the 8th millennium B.C. (Ref. 33, 88, 8) (Continue on page 54)