New Studies Reveal More About Spread of Farming Into Mesolithic Europe
8,000 years ago (Circa. 6,000 BCE) one or more groups of farmers left Asia Minor and colonized what is now Greece. We don’t yet know how they arrived there or why they left their homes but they probably walked across a small land bridge that was eventually inundated by the Mediterranean Sea.
The Black Sea, we know now, was ringed on the south side by settlements and farms. So we believe that farmers rose up near what is now the mouth of the Euphrates river on the Persian Gulf (perhaps even in the deeper lands that are now covered by the Persian Gulf) and they spread northward, eastward, and westward.
The northern migration reached Asia Minor and the Black Sea and then stopped or slowed its expansion. The inundation of the Black Sea was probably a catastrophic event that wiped out whole sub-cultures and disrupted others. One of the events in human evolution that is closely associated with this time frame is the development of adult lactose tolerance. According to this article researchers now believe that humans developed the ability to digest raw milk as adults around 8,000 years ago. The near concurrent inundation of the Black Sea and Persian Gulf lowlands may help to explain this sudden shift as survivors of the (probably gradual) flooding processes found it increasingly difficult to raise farm plants.
The slow (or rapid) rise of flood waters would have forced families and communities to move every 1-3 years; they would have become more dependent upon their livestock for survival. Cheese-making evolved in the steppes, we now believe — far from the lands afflicted by rising sea-levels. Evidence from another study shows that the capability to digest milk as adults evolved in multiple human populations around the same time, which would be consistent with a gradual “flight from the sea” in all directions. The transition to lactose tolerance (through the production of the lactase enzyme) must therefore be very easy, for unlike the traditional stories of flood events preserved by many cultures the seawaters are (currently) thought to have risen fairly gradually, not as an incoming tsunami-like wall.
In another study, researchers argue that hunter-gatherer societies in Europe acquired domesticated pigs by about 4600 BCE, which is approximately concurrent with the arrival of farmers in southeastern Europe. Again, the pigs would have been brought overland before the Black Sea was enlarged and the land bridge inundated to become what we now think of as the Bosporus. The study does not reveal how the hunter-gatherers acquired the pigs or why, but given the conflict that arose between Europe’s “native” hunter-gatherers and the incoming farmers over the next few thousand years, it is surprising that they did not include raiding/theft as one possibility.
Hunter-gatherer cultures were relatively sophisticated, far more advanced than many people still believe. They built semi-permanent settlements and permanent monuments, used pottery, made fabrics, and engaged in long-distance trade (which allows for possible trade connections with the incoming farmers). European hunter-gatherers were also territorial (which is at least one reason why they fought with the farmers). So it should come as no surprise that they were already using spices in their foods well before they began adopting agriculture and animal husbandry.
Hunter-gatherers would certainly have been augmenting their diets with fruits, nuts, berries, and wild plants. Plant experimentation may have been common, especially during hard times. Research shows that garlic mustard was being used in Denmark and Germany about 7,000 years ago (Circa. 5000 BCE) — after the arrival of agriculture, but the findings leave open the possibility of extending documented use of spices farther back in time, especially considering that these residues are associated with meats and not nutritional plants.