Despite their precocious development, sites like Jericho and Çatalhöyük did not form the focus of more complex polities. By 4000 BC the foundations of literate, urban civilization had been laid in Mesopotamia, where it was the organizational and economic potential of the highly productive irrigation economy in the south and the powerful, strategic positions of sites like Nineveh in the north, controlling access to areas rich in raw materials, that saw the growth of the world’s first complex states.
7000 TO 2000 BC
EARLY EUROPE: THE COLONIZATION OF A CONTINENT
Farming first spread from the Near East to southeast Europe c. 7000 BC and then along the Mediterranean coast and across central Europe, reaching the Low Countries by 5000 BC. After a brief pause it spread to Britain and northern continental Europe by 4000 BC. It was only c. 2000 BC that farming reached the more northerly parts of European Russia and the Baltic.
The earliest farming villages in Europe, dating to immediately after 7000 BC, were on the western side of the Aegean (eg Argissa) and on Crete (eg Knossos), but by 5500 BC such villages were distributed widely across the Balkans. They consisted of clusters of mudbrick buildings, each with a similar layout of hearth and cooking and sleeping areas. Their economy was based on keeping sheep and cultivating wheat and legumes. Such villages were situated in areas of good soil with a plentiful water supply and were often occupied for hundreds of years.
AGRICULTURAL VILLAGES
Villages of this kind spread inland as far as Hungary but from here northwards a new pattern developed. The mudbrick dwellings were replaced by wooden long-houses whose remains did not build up into settlement mounds. Agricultural settlement spread in a broad band from northeast France to southwest Russia on soils produced by the weathering of loess—a highly fertile windblown dust laid down during the Ice Age. Over this area the characteristic pottery was decorated with incised lines in spiral or meandering bands, a uniformity which reflects the rapid spread of settlement between 5500 and 5000 BC. Cattle were more important than sheep in the forested interior of Europe but wheat continued as the main cereal crop. The settlers did not clear wide areas of land but practised intensive horticulture in the valleys around their settlements.
At the same time as it was spreading into continental Europe, aspects of an agricultural way of life were also spreading westwards along the northern shore of the Mediterranean, reaching Spain by around 5500 BC; in this zone environmental conditions were much closer to those where agriculture started and fewer adjustments had to be made.
Alongside the early agricultural communities, small groups of foragers pursued their way of life in areas untouched by the new economy. Hunting populations were rather sparse in the areas first selected by agriculturists, and the rapidity with which farming spread across the loess lands may in part reflect a lack of local competition, but elsewhere foragers were more numerous. They were especially well-established in the lake-strewn landscapes left by the retreating ice sheets around the Alps and on the northern edge of the North European Plain.
There has been much debate about whether the spread of agriculture was due to the expansion of colonizing populations from the southeast or to the adoption of the new way of life by existing foragers. Current evidence from archaeology and the analysis of the DNA of modern populations suggests that there was a colonizing element, probably associated with the expansion through the Balkans and the loess lands of central Europe, but that in most of Europe the dominant process was the adoption of agriculture and its material attributes by existing populations, perhaps in part because of the prestige of the new way of life.
MEGALITHIC EUROPE
In much of western Europe, farming was first adopted around 4000 BC and the clearance of land in rocky terrain provided the opportunity to build large stone (megalithic) monuments as burial places and mortuary shrines for the scattered hamlets of early farmers. Some of the earliest megalithic tombs were built in Brittany and Portugal around 4500 BC, but particularly elaborate forms were made in Ireland and Spain up to 2000 years later. Alongside the tombs, other kinds of megalithic monuments were constructed in some regions, such as the stone circles of the British Isles.
From 4500 to 2500 BC, important developments occurred which were to change the established pattern of life. Early metallurgy of copper and gold developed in the Balkans from 4500 BC, although whether this was an independent invention or came from the Near East is still in dispute. Fine examples of the products come from the rich Copper Age cemetery of Varna on the Black Sea coast.
From around 3500 BC there is evidence of contact between eastern Europe and the steppe zone north of the Black Sea; some link this to the spread of Indo-European languages to Europe. The time around 3500 BC also saw the rapid spread across Europe of wheeled vehicles and the plough, both associated with the first large-scale use of draught animals. These slowly changed the nature of agricultural production. Widespread clearance of forests took place and flint mines produced stone for large quantities of axes. It was only after 2000 BC that stone axes were superseded by metal ones in western Europe.
TO 900 BC
AFRICAN PEOPLES AND CULTURES
Archaeology is revealing evidence that strongly suggests that the evolution of humans began in Africa. Virtually every stage of our development—stretching back over 5 million years—can be traced in the African record. Almost throughout this vast span of prehistory our ancestors lived in mobile groups engaged in scavenging, gathering and hunting.
From about the 10th millennium BC onwards, conditions in large parts of Africa were wetter than they are today, and human settlements began to spring up by lakes and rivers, from the Rift valley and Sudanese Nile valley in the east, across what are now the central and southern Saharan regions, to the Senegal River in the west. These earliest African settlements were based on fishing and were characterized by certain shared aspects of material culture, most notably barbed, bone harpoon heads. Such similarities between the disparate settlements have led to the view that these communities were part of one cultural complex. However, there is considerable local variation in associated stone-tool industries, and it may therefore be more accurate to consider the appearance of these sedentary hunting-gathering-fishing communities as the result of a broadly contemporary, but independent, adaptation of different groups of people to the changing environment.
It was this ability to adapt to changing circumstances that led to the gradual transition to food production, that is, the cultivation of domesticated plants and herding of domesticated animals. It must be stressed that our current understanding of African food production is far from comprehensive. However, the view that food-producing techniques spread from the Fertile Crescent via the Nile valley to the rest of Africa is no longer tenable as far as plant cultivation (with the exception of wheat and barley) is concerned, and it may not be so for cattle domestication. From the 7th millennium BC onwards there is evidence of cattle-herding in present-day Algeria and the Egyptian Western Desert at Nabta Playa, which may be indicative of local domestication. At about the same time barley, wheat and domestic small stock, such as sheep and goats, were introduced from the Near East into the Nile delta. In central and southern Sahara early food production involved a move from fishing to livestock herding. The domestication of plants in these regions seems to be associated with progressive dessication after about the 5th millennium BC. As water and grazing land disappeared in the emerging desert, cattle-herding communities dispersed. These climatic and demographic factors initiated, or perhaps accelerated, the independent development of tropical agriculture.
However, it was only in the Nile valley that the advantages of food production led to state formation before about the 1st millennium BC. This is seen most spectacularly in the rise of dynastic Egypt at the end of the 4th millennium; but as early as about 2400 BC there is evidence of