The Neolithic Hypothesis (dates)

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>Linear Ware Culture raced ahead of agriculture.

-- nyet.  LBK spread rapidly, and so did agriculture -- all the way from
Hungary to northern France in a few centuries.  That left a lot of
uncultivated ground in between, and of course hunting continued right down to
historic times as a supplement, gradually decreasing in importance.

Bottom line:  they were farmers.  It took less than 500 years for farmers to
colonize the entire loess soil belt.  This shouldn't be surprising.  A human
population faced with an open land frontier doubles every 25 years or so.

1,000
2,000
4,000
8,000
16,000
32,000

-- and that's in only 150 years and starting from a very low base.

>This is where I think some of our problem arises.  Evidence of agriculture is
>not evidence of the adoption of agriculture.

-- walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a duck.  They were cultivating
crops, using the plow, and herding domesticated livestock.  The pollen samples
register both grain pollen and indications of forest clearance.  That's
agriculture in my book.

Agriculture includes livestock, by the way.  We're an agricultural
civilization, and we eat a lot of meat.  So did our ancestors, in periods when
there wasn't much population pressure -- post Black Death, for example,
northern Europeans ate over 2 pounds a day, on average.

>that in Britain,... grain was grown, or  even imported from the continent,
>only for ritual purposes.

-- maybe they gave it to the Saucer People in return for pyramidic sharpening
of razor blades.