Scientists trace prehistoric farmers' epic voyage of colonization

The journey began with a 4-foot-thick oak tree. In December 1997, in Bohemia, Czech archaeologist Radomir Tichy and his students felled the oak with a chain saw. For the next few months, in snow and thaw, they hollowed out a 30-foot section of the trunk. They used iron axes and adzes but also, for verisimilitude, tools made of stone. In summer, they loaded what was now a large, rude dugout canoe onto a trailer and drove south, all the way to Sicily. There they mounted an ox skull on the prow, donned shades and sunscreen, and put to sea.

Over the next month they paddled: up the Italian coast, west along the Riviera, and down the coast of Spain. Sometimes, when the mistral winds blew too strong, they cheated and traveled by car again. After an encounter with 10-foot waves, they decided to bypass the Strait of Gibraltar and drive to southern Portugal. Tichy is confident, though, that the real pioneers could have negotiated that tricky passage; unlike his crew, they would not have been in danger of getting mowed down by a supertanker. And they would certainly have had room in their dugout for a sheep or two, he says. "The boat is very primitive, but its possibilities are big."

That was the whole point–to show that Tichy and his mates were not the first to make the journey. When the Czechs landed safely in Lisbon in September 1998, they added one more strand of evidence to an extraordinary story that archaeologists have been piecing together over the past decade or so. Beginning around 9,000 years ago, Europe was transformed by a radically new way of life: agriculture. In some places, archaeologists think it spread slowly, by example and trade; in others, it moved faster, borne by migrating farmers themselves. Along the southern shores of Europe, from Greece to Portugal, it may have traveled fastest of all: by sea.

Six thousand years before the Romans, five before the Phoenicians, early farmers from the Near East or Turkey set out on a great voyage of colonization. Wheat and barley, sheep and goats, ceramic pots, the habit of settling in villages–all came from the East, many researchers now believe, by primitive boat.

The latest evidence again comes from Portugal. In a paper last fall in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, João Zilhão of the Portuguese Institute of Archaeology showed that artifacts left by early farmers at sites north of Lisbon–potsherds, deer-tooth pendants, sheep bones–look virtually identical to ones from southeastern Spain and have almost the same early date: about 5400 B.C. That's little different from the dates of other early farming sites as far east as Italy. Farming apparently spread through the whole western Mediterranean, from central Italy to Portugal, in just a few generations, 150 years at most. "The only way to do that is by sea," Zilhão says.

Those first farmers still used stone tools, and so the period they lived in is called the Neolithic, or New Stone Age. But otherwise their lives were radically different from those of the hunter-gatherers who preceded them. Instead of merely gathering wild plants, they cultivated the ones they wanted. Instead of merely hunting wild animals, they herded and bred them. Instead of moving from one cave or rock shelter to another, they built houses and villages. The Neolithic revolution "is the biggest cultural change that human society ever made," says archaeologist Douglas Price of the University of Wisconsin. "It's an unbelievable transformation in how people do things."

Seeds and stock
Just who Europe's first farmers were and how they got there, though, has been vigorously debated for decades. One thing just about everybody agrees on: Agriculture was not invented in Europe. It began at least 11,000 years ago in the Near East, perhaps in northern Syria. (It was also invented later and independently in China, Peru, and Mexico.) Wheat, barley, sheep, and goats, those mainstays of European agriculture, all have wild ancestors in the Near East but not in Europe. The latest genetic evidence indicates that modern cattle too are descended from Near Eastern ancestors.

Nearly 30 years ago, geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and archaeologist Albert Ammerman put forward one theory of how farming made its way westward: the "wave of advance" model. In this picture, farming was spread by migrants from the Near East who gradually advanced across Europe, their swelling population forcing them west and north into new territory at the rate of less than 1 mile a year. One flaw in this scenario is that it tends to make the hunter-gatherers whose lands were overrun sound rather hapless–and these were people who had survived the Ice Age thousands of years earlier.

In another school of thought there was little or no migration. What gradually diffused across Europe was not flesh-and-blood farmers but their culture–much as international trade has spread Big Macs and Microsoft Windows around Earth. Except that it takes a lot more know-how to be a farmer than to eat a Big Mac (or even to use Windows). It's hard to picture a hunter-gatherer knowing what to do with, say, a sheep, after he had acquired one.

Lately, archaeologists have been moving toward a sensible synthesis of these two hypotheses. "What is emerging is that things happened in different ways in different regions," says Peter Bogucki of Princeton University, who excavated a Neolithic site in Poland. The whole region from Ukraine to eastern France, Bogucki thinks, was indeed colonized by immigrating farmers, between 5500 and 5000 B.C. Settling in fertile river valleys, they established a fairly uniform culture across that vast region, marked by pots scored with curvy lines.

But once these Linear Pottery people hit northern Europe, their advance was stalled. The coasts of the Baltic and the North seas were more densely populated by hunter-gatherers, and with plenty of fish to eat, those indigenes apparently did not see any immediate need for sheep and wheat. For centuries, farming and hunter-gatherer cultures existed more or less side by side. When farming finally did surge into Denmark and Scandinavia, around 4000 B.C., the farmers were not invaders from the south, judging from their pots and other artifacts, but local converts.

Sex and marriage may have helped this cultural conversion along. Last fall Price reported an analysis of chemical tracers in the bones and teeth of 42 people buried in Neolithic graveyards in the Rhine Valley. It shows that more than a third of them had moved to the farming settlements from a long distance away. In one settlement, the newcomers were mostly females–perhaps hunter-gatherer women, Price says, who had come down from the hills to marry farmers.

Instead of a flood tide of Near Easterners advancing across the map, such research suggests that in much of Europe, farming was pushed forward by small groups of farmers who converted foragers to their way of life, one marriage at a time. The latest genetic evidence suggests that Neolithic immigrants contributed no more than about 20 percent to the modern European gene pool.There is one area, however, where their influence may have been stronger: the Mediterranean coast.

That's certainly how it looks to Maria Antonietta Fugazzola Delpino, director of the Pigorini Museum in Rome. Since 1992 she has been leading the excavation of a large Neolithic village submerged in Lake Bracciano, northwest of Rome, 20 miles by river from the Mediterranean. Fugazzola Delpino's divers haven't yet found the edge of La Marmotta, as the village is called, but she guesses it had some 500 inhabitants. They raised cows and pigs as well as sheep and goats, and grew apples and opium poppies besides the usual wheat and barley. And they had boats. A 35-foot-long dugout canoe Fugazzola Delpino discovered in 1994 was the model for the replica built by Radomir Tichy and his crew, and Fugazzola Delpino has also found toy boats made of clay.

The village's founders, says Fugazzola Delpino, must have come to Italy by boat, sometime before 5500 B.C. Archaeologically speaking, this sophisticated village appears out of nowhere. "I believe this was a group of people who came from far away, perhaps Greece or the Near East," she says.

From Italy the farmers voyaged westward. Early Neolithic sites have been found all along the coasts of France, Spain, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. The pattern certainly suggests a colonization by sea. So, too, says Zilhão, does the fact that at each site, the entire "Neolithic package"–animals, grains, and pots–appeared all at once.

Mysteries. Little is known about the people who unloaded sheep and seeds on new shores. They seem to have been tall, by prehistoric standards–the men around 5 feet, 7 inches, the women a bit shorter. They wore bracelets of polished stone and necklaces of sea snail shells. They still hunted to supplement their agricultural diet, and sometimes ate their dogs and even each other. In archaeological shorthand, they were the Cardial Pot people. From the Adriatic to Portugal, they decorated their pots by pressing patterns into the wet clay with the shell of the cockle, Cardium edule.

What drove them westward is even more elusive. It's not hard to understand why a bunch of Czech university students would decide to spend their summer paddling along the shore of the Mediterranean. It's harder by far to imagine what motivated a bunch of farmers in the Near East 9,000 years ago to set crude keel to breakers and paddle into the unknown.

For that matter, why did people invent agriculture in the first place? Archaeologists used to focus on external causes such as climate change. Now many look to the Neolithic people themselves for the cause–arguing, as Zilhão has put it, that "men make their own history, and they must have made their own prehistory too."

One intriguing hypothesis comes from Jacques Cauvin, a French archaeologist who excavated some of the earliest agricultural sites in the Near East. In a book recently translated into English, Cauvin proposes that the Neolithic revolution sprang from a change in the human psyche: the beginnings of religious faith. In the 10th millennium B.C., people in the Near East began crafting female figurines of stone, and they began implanting bulls' horns and even whole skulls in the walls of their houses. A bit later they made figurines of bulls, and then men. To Cauvin, these sculptures represent deities.

When people started believing in gods, he says, their world was sundered for the first time by hierarchy: The perfect world of the gods was above, the humdrum human world below. With that notion came the restless dissatisfaction and desire for change that, Cauvin says, drove the invention and spread of farming–as well as all human history to this day. Certainly it would have required "boldness and a spirit of adventure," as Cauvin puts it, to leave farm and homeland behind and push off to sea in a dugout canoe.

Although the Neolithic people were dominated by their gods, they may have felt they were not so unlike the gods. They could dominate the rest of the world, first by taming plants and beasts, then by projecting that dominion over the horizon. As Tichy surmised, those first conquering farmers may well have put an ox skull on the prow when they pointed their vessel to the west: for protection and for pride.

Once human beings had invented gods, Cauvin's argument goes, they started trying to act like them. And since then they've never looked back.

• Story originally published by:
U.S. News | Robert Kunzig - Apr 8.02

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