Exploring A Prehistoric Borderland

Hunter-gatherers in northern Europe withstood the spread of agriculture for 1,500 years

- Eric A. Powell

WHEN PEOPLE IN THE Near East’s Fertile Crescent first learned how to domesticate animals and cultivate crops some 11,000 years ago, they dramatically altered the course of human history. Known as the Neolithic Revolution, this radical event transformed mobile hunter-gatherers to sedentary food producers, fundamentally changing humans’ relationship to the environment around them. “Adopting agriculture is only possible after hunter gatherers abandon their egalitarian ethos and invest in the idea of owning land,” says Princeton University archaeologist Peter Bogucki. “It involves a fundamental shift in belief systems.” Certainly farming was a successful way of life, and it spread rapidly beyond the Fertile Crescent. The first Neolithic people arrived in Greece around 6800 b.c., b and farming then moved across the European continent by an average of about five miles a year, according to one estimate. It is thought that farmers displaced or absorbed the European natives, so-called Mesolithic people, who moved their camps with the seasons and fished, hunted, and foraged just as their ancestors had for thousands of years.