The Neolithic Hypothesis (Farmers)

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote:

>Not most of temperate Europe.  Not between 5500-5000.  That surge you're
>describing for LBK does not cover anything but a corridor that for some reason
>headed towards Holland (chocolate?).  And LBK's movement is not the "one
>kilometer per year" (in all directions) movement of agriculture, but closer to
>Zvelebil's often repeated comparison to it sweeping across Europe "in the
>manner of German panzer divisions."

Whether it was the occupation of most of temperate Europe or just
the initial "pincer movement" between 5500 an 5000, the effect is
historically the same: LBK becomes the dominant culture and
population from the Netherlands to Poland.  The most likely
linguistic outcome would have been a single dialect continuum
(with increasingly rare pre-LBK Mesolithic enclaves).  This is
comparable to the Bantu advance in Central, Eastern and Southern
Africa, which also looks like a pincer movement on the map (but
Bantu technology was Iron Age, so more advanced).

>Even as LBK expands and then disappears about 3700bce,

Disappears or mutates?  The decentralized nature of LBK culture
first results in a number of subdivisions (Roessen, Lengyel, SBK,
Tisza) after 500 years or so, and then some 500 years later most
of the northern part of the area (but extended now to Denmark and
the Baltic) is again united archaeologically as the TRB culture,
which might have resulted from a "merger" of (post-)LBK
agriculturalists, ultimately from Hungary, with indigenous
people, like the Ertebo/lle-Ellerbek "shellfish eaters" (and if
the LBK people were IE-speakers, as I maintain, that suggests a
convenient source for the famous "30% non-IE lexicon" in
Germanic).

>the northern European landscape is described as a "mosaic."
>Some areas are definitely quickly "colonized."  Others are definitely not.
>The appearance of domesticated animals does not necessarily correlate with
>grain agriculture, suggesting that the domestication appearing in LBK was
>closely tied to grain-feeding as opposed to pastural methods.

Yes.

>And finally it has become clear that it wasn't all that keen an idea to adopt
>agriculture.   This was the subject of keynote by Clark Spencer
>Larsen at the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological
>Sciences held at Williamsburg, Virginia last year.  For some time now, there's
>been strong evidence that "hunter-gatherers typically do less work for the
>same amount of food, are healthier, and are less prone to famine than
>primitive farmers (Lee & DeVore 1968, Cohen 1977, 1989)."  More recent
>research indicates that neolithic agriculture was particularly susceptible to
>Biblical-style patterns of famine and disease.  And mesolithic settlements
>like Biskupin and coastal fishery settlements in the north show population
>concentrations could reach Late Neolithic levels but with stronger trade
>advantages and sophisticated building techniques.

A lot depends on climate and environment.  The nuclear LBK zone
was not very populated before the Neolithic.  At least very few
Mesolithic remains have been found.  The introduction of
agriculure and livestock really did produce a population
explosion there.  The coastal areas around Denmark, on the other
hand, resisted the adoption of agriculture for more than a
millennium, and must have sustained population densities
comparable to or even higher than in the LBK area.

>All this had led some scientist to conjecture that it wasn't agriculture but
>some very inviting by-product that fostered the conversion.  See 'The origins
>of agriculture  a biological perspective and a new hypothesis' Greg Wadley &
>Angus Martin, University of Melbourne, in Australian Biologist June 1993.

>(Was fermentation the real secret of LBK?  In which case was PIE the language
>of neolithic brewers?)

Quite possibly.

>The paradigm for agriculture's spread in Europe still remains "one kilometer
>per year" despite LBK.  And that suggests that PIE must have somehow traveled
>thousands of years intact or disappeared well before northern Europe was
>finally "agriculturalized."  The kind of splintering and "swallowing up" that
>might have gone on at this time, not excluding by non-IE speakers, would make
>it all but impossible to accurately reconstruct a PIE.  But the fact that IE
>languages are so closely related in so many ways over much greater distances
>also suggests that this whole scenario can't account for IE.

But the actual LBK scenario can.  We have a fairly rapid
expansion originating from a fairly small area in Hungary: that's
your fairly uniform proto-language and its initial spread.
After 500 years, cultural differences (and no doubt dialectal
differences) begin to appear.  Additionally, "LBK people" might
have diffused into areas outside the LBK zone proper, to Poland,
Bielorussia and the Ukraine, where "sub-Neolithic" communities
appear c. 5000 BC (livestock, pottery, but little agriculture),
eventually developing into the steppe cultures of the 5th and 4th
millennia.  Meanwhile a northwestern group (LBK-Roessen) fuses
with the local Mesolithic (Ertebo/lle-Ellerbek) population,
providing a historical basis for the non-IE element still
discernible in Germanic.  Later still (c. 3500 BC), this
pre-proto-Germanic and some of the Eastern groups
(pre-proto-Balto-Slavic) interact in the Corded Ware culture,
which extends from Holland to Moscow, while a southern branch
(proto-Italo-Celtic) starts the Indo-Europeanization of
South-Western Europe.  The role played by the Tripolye culture
(5000-3000 BC), at the crossroads between the Balkans, the steppe
and the "LBK/TRB zone", must also have been of great importance.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam