Session 4 : Ceramics and cheese (more on early Neolithic europe)
During the Neolithic Period (New Stone Age) we've got evidence that in SE Europe, some communities prospered significantly. The defining characteristic of Neolithic communities is that they grew domesticated crops and kept herds of domesticated animals. Now that DNA has become part of the array of evidence, we know that the strains of farm stock and crop plants that entered Europe after 6200 BC were directly descended from Near Eastern ancestors - as were the farmers themselves.
So it looks like climate change after 6200 BC was indeed responsible for a wave of change sweeping across Europe, and that families packed up their seedcorn and drove their herds ever further inland along major river systems like th Danube.
It used to be thought that these new farmers rapidly marginalised and effectively killed off the indigenous hunter-gatherer groups, but discoveries made at the Blätterhöhle cave in Germany suggest a different story.
At Blätterhöhle, for some 2000 years groups of farmers and foragers co-existed to the extent of sharing the same cave burial-place, although their DNA suggests that during this time the two populations didn't interbreed.
Click here for more information about Blätterhöhle
So it looks like climate change after 6200 BC was indeed responsible for a wave of change sweeping across Europe, and that families packed up their seedcorn and drove their herds ever further inland along major river systems like th Danube.
It used to be thought that these new farmers rapidly marginalised and effectively killed off the indigenous hunter-gatherer groups, but discoveries made at the Blätterhöhle cave in Germany suggest a different story.
At Blätterhöhle, for some 2000 years groups of farmers and foragers co-existed to the extent of sharing the same cave burial-place, although their DNA suggests that during this time the two populations didn't interbreed.
Click here for more information about Blätterhöhle
Around 6000 BC European farmers developed the ability to digest milk, a mutation called lactase persistence. They were already making cheese - pottery cheese sieves have been excavated.
This new development gave milk-drinkers an additional way to ride out poor harvests, and unsurprisingly the farming population continued to expand. |
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