On the Trail of the Indo-Europeans: From Neolithic Steppe Nomads to Early Civilisations

By Harald Haarmann

For more than 3000 years, Indo-European languages have been spoken from India through Persia and into Europe. Where are the origins of this language family? How and when did its different linguistic branches emerge? The renowned historical linguist Harald Haarmann provides a graphic account of what we know today about the origins of Indo-European languages and cultures and how they came to be so widely disseminated. In this impressive study, he succeeds in drawing connections between linguistic findings, archaeological discoveries and the latest research into human genetics and climate history. In addition to linguistic affinities, he shows the economic, social and religious concepts that the early speakers of Indo-European languages had in common all the way from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Indus. Particular attention is devoted to the processes of assimilation with pre-Indo-European languages and civilisations. The result is a fascinating panorama of early "Indo-European globalisation" from the end of the last ice age to the early civilisations in Greece, Italy, Asia Minor, Persia and India.

• Language: English
• Publisher: marixverlag
• Release date: Jan 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9783843806565

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INTRODUCTION: THE MYSTERY OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS

Two thirds of the world’s population speak Indo-European languages today, as their primary language, as a second language, as a lingua franca, as the language of education or as a country’s official language. The spectrum of around 440 individual languages ranges from major languages such as Hindi with around 550 million speakers (of which around 430 million are primary speakers) to minor languages such as Vedda in the mountains of Sri Lanka with fewer than 300 speakers.

Most historical and modern world languages, i.e. languages with global communication potential, belong genealogically to the Indo-European language family: Greek and Latin in antiquity; and in more recent times, Spanish, Portuguese, French and English (in chronological order since the 16th century). The holy scriptures of various world religions have been recorded in Indo-European languages: Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Pali, among others. How did Indo-European languages become so successful? Where did they originate?

In search of linguistic affinities

The relationships between languages and the reasons for their differences have been contemplated since the times of the earliest civilisations; however, this did not produce any systematic research. In the Middle Ages scholars first identified the Romance and Germanic language groups, yet they failed to recognise that there was also a relationship between these two groups. In De rebus Hispaniae, written in 1243, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada noted that the languages of Europe were divided into three main groups: Romance, Slavic and Germanic. It was not until the 17th century, however, that the first serious attempts were made to identify the overarching language families.

The impetus for this came from the Europeans’ deep preoccupation with the languages and culture of India from the early modern era. The first samples of the Sanskrit language to be conveyed to Europe, the text of a religious invocation (Om Srii naraina nama), appeared in a letter written in 1544 by the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier, who knew Greek and Latin. Thomas Stevens (1583) and Filippo Sassetti (1585) were the first to make comparisons between Sanskrit and European languages. This led to the development of more comprehensive collections of samples from many different languages. Among the earliest endeavours to catalogue and classify the world’s languages are the works of Theodor Bibliander (De ratione communi omnium linguarum, 1548) and Conrad Gesner (Mithridates, 1555). Gesner based his collections of language material on translations of the Lord’s Prayer.

About 150 years later Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) proposed to Tsar Peter I that he should compile a list of the languages of his empire, but this suggestion was not taken up until later, when the German-born Tsarina Catherine II (ruled 1762–1796) ordered it to be undertaken. She was deeply committed to language research and fostered an imperial-scale project to collect language samples from her multi-ethnic state as well as from around the world. For the purpose of expanding her collections, Catherine also corresponded with George Washington, who subsequently commissioned a researcher to draw up an inventory of the North American Indian languages. The collections were collated by the German scholar Peter Simon Pallas in two volumes entitled Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa (1786, 1789) (Adelung 1815, Haarmann 1999). This approach to collecting languages reached its climax in the four-volume monumental work Mithridates oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde (1806–1817), which was started by Johann Christoph Adelung and continued and completed by Johann Severin Vater. The main purpose of these documentation projects was to classify the languages of the world according to language branches or language families.

The first scholar to succeed in delineating the contours of what two centuries later became known as the ‘Indo-Germanic language family’ was Marcus van Boxhorn from Leiden. Around the middle of the 17th century, he made comparisons between Latin, Greek, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Persian and Sanskrit, and for the first time he also took morphology into account, i.e. the grammatical structure of the languages. He was convinced that all these languages had a common origin, which he called ‘Scythian’ in reference to Herodotus’ description of the steppe inhabitants of Eastern Europe and Central Asia (Beekes 2011: 12).

Further treatises on linguistic affinities were written in the 18th century, facilitated by the interest which Jesuit missionaries took in the languages and cultures of Asia. The Jesuit Gaston Coeurdoux not only made systematic comparisons of words in different languages (e.g. Sanskrit padam ‘foot’ – Latin pes, pedis – Greek pous, podis), but also found that both Sanskrit and Greek had the grammatical category of dual (in addition to singular and plural), and he discovered similarities in numerals and pronouns. He also saw how the verb ‘to be’ and its many different forms were related across the languages he compared. However, the manuscript that Coeurdoux presented to the Institut Français in 1767 did not receive the attention it deserved. The work was not printed until 1808.

During the 18th century, speculations on the concept of a ‘primordial language’ gained in prominence and the search for the origins of the known ancient languages came to be pursued with ever increasing intensity. At that time, the only point of reference for the development of languages was still the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel and the ‘Confusion of Tongues’. The search for the ‘pre-Babylonian’ primordial language resulted in many fanciful theories. For example, Catherine II was convinced, in line with a growing language-based nationalism in Russia, that the primordial language must have been Old Slavonic, since it was such a venerable, dignified language. In autumn 1784 she tried to impress Grimm with the confidential news that she had identified geographical names in France, Spain and Scotland, in India and America and the names of Merovingian, Vandalic and even ancient Babylonian rulers as being Slavic in origin (Scharf 1995: 270). In her conversations with Pallas, however, Catherine’s enthusiasm for Slavic as the primordial language soon waned. The French court was of a different opinion. Voltaire reports that a lady of the court spoke to him about the primordial language, which of course must be French, because the whole world had been blessed with this most civilised of languages (Voltaire’s letter to Catherine of 26 May 1767).

The search for the primordial language was also taken up by serious scholars. The Jesuit Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro published a multi-volume language encyclopaedia (Catalogo delle lingue conosciute, 1784, Trattato dell’origine … dell’idiomi, 1785, Aritmetica di quasi tutte le nazioni conosciute, 1785, Divisione del tempo fra le nazioni Orientali, 1786, Vocabolario poligloto, 1787, Saggio pratico delle lingue, 1787). He noticed that the wide diversity of languages could not be explained by a single primordial language. He suspected that there were several primordial languages in different regions of the world, which he called matrices. Thus he stood in contradiction to the Bible, according to which there was only one pre-Babylonian primordial language, and he was considered to be a heretic. Hervás feared that he would attract the displeasure of the Catholic Church, so he left Italy and went into exile in Spain (Haarmann 1997).

Endeavours to explore the relationship of Sanskrit to the languages of Europe were less dramatic. The scattered observations of Sanskrit’s linguistic affinity with European languages (Greek and Latin) were taken to a new level when in 1786, in a lecture to the Asiatic Society he founded, William Jones, Chief Magistrate of Calcutta, explained Sanskrit’s affinity with various other ancient languages: The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia (Quoted in Mallory/Adams 2006: 5). Jones himself did not elaborate on his observations, but they were pointing in the right direction. Others continued his work.

The discovery of the kinship of Sanskrit with other Asian languages (Persian) and with the languages of ancient European cultures (Greek and Latin) triggered a research boom that not only brought ever deeper insights into the manifold branches of the Indo-European language family, but also had a decisive influence on the development of entire branches of science such as linguistics, mythography, literature and religious studies.

The geographical context began to be discussed at the beginning of the 19th century. The identification of the language family as ‘Indo-European’ was made by Thomas Young. The term was first found in an article in the London Quarterly Review (1813) and has become generally accepted in the English-speaking world. On this basis, the terminology was transferred to other languages (French indo-européen, Italian/Spanish indo-europeo, Russian indoyevropeyskiy, Finnish indoeurooppalainen and others). In Franz Bopp’s 1816 comparative language study On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit in comparison with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic he uses the expression ‘Indian-European’. In the German-speaking world, however, the established term became ‘Indo-Germanic’, which was coined by Friedrich von Schlegel in 1823. When the comparative study of Indo-European languages was established in Germany as an independent academic discipline, it was known as ‘Indo-Germanic Linguistics’ (Kuryłowicz/Mayrhofer 1986, Szemerényi 1996, Meier Brügger 2010, Kausen 2012).

Soon, objections were raised against the term ‘Indo-Germanic’. If the term aims to define the boundaries of the distribution area, then ‘Germanic’ is unsuitable, because Germanic languages are not widespread at the western periphery of Europe; instead, there is Celtic in the northwest (Ireland, Scotland) and Romance in the southwest (Spain, Portugal). Following this logic we would have to speak of ‘Indo-Celtic’ or ‘Indo-Romance’ languages. Some scholars opposed ‘Indo-European’ by pointing out that there are also other, unrelated languages in Europe, such as Finnish, Ugric and Basque. This objection is not particularly convincing, because non-Indo-European languages are also widespread in India, i.e. the Dravidian languages. Modern scholarly terminology prefers ‘Indo-European’ – which is in line with international conventions. Linguists generally use the English term ‘Indo-Aryan’ to denote the Indian branch of the Indo-European language family.

The term ‘Proto-Indo-European’ refers to the early phase of the Indo-European language before its separation into regional languages and cultures. Proto-Indo-European is the hypothetical ancient common ancestor of all members of the Indo-European language family. Elements of vocabulary and the grammatical structures of this ancient language can be reconstructed from a comparison of historical and more recent languages. However, there is no written proof, since the oldest scripts used to record any Indo-European languages were not developed until several millennia after the time horizon of the proto-language.

In historical comparative linguistics, words and grammatical forms of Proto-Indo-European are marked with an asterisk (e.g. *mehater ‘mother’, *wodr ‘water’, *penkwe ‘five’). Such lexical reconstructions are substantiated by comparisons of phonetic and morphological characteristics of individual languages, historical and/or modern, for instance:

*septm ‘seven’ > Old Irish sechtn, Middle Welsh seith, Latin septem, Old Norse sjau, Old English seofon, German sieben, Gothic sibun, Lithuanian septynì, Old Church Slavonic sedmi, Russian sem’, Albanian shtate, Greek hepta, Armenian ewt’n, Hittite sipta-, Avestan hapta, Old Indic saptá, Tocharian spelt, i.a.

From a people to a race: Indo-Europeans and Aryans

At the time of the discovery of this linguistic affinity in the 19th century, it was becoming the orthodox wisdom to regard ancient and contemporary peoples and nations as the actors that made history, and this quickly led to the conclusion that the Indo-Europeans must also have been a people. This book does not share that assumption. Here, when we talk about ‘Indo-Europeans’, we mean the speakers of a common language family whose cultures also have common characteristics. This does not imply that there was an Indo-European people in the biological or political sense.

However, 19th century scholars attempted to find such a people. For a long time it was believed that Sanskrit was the mother of all Indo-European languages and that India was the original homeland of the Indo-European world. Since the Indo-Europeans who immigrated to India called themselves ‘Aryans’ (Old Indic arya ‘Aryan, free man, one who follows the Vedic religion and cultural tradition’), the hypothetical speakers of Old Indic were initially called Aryans. However, outside the field of linguistics, the term soon became an ethnic designation for all speakers of ‘Indo-Germanic’ languages who were believed to be descended from the light-skinned, noble Aryans. It was considered certain that the genealogy of languages was reflected in the genealogy of peoples. The idea that the ancient Indian Aryans and their Indo-European descendants were a ‘race’ was just a short step from this.

By the 1860s, comparative linguistics had already come to the conclusion, through the work of the Neogrammarians, that Sanskrit itself was a daughter language of Indo-European and that there was not even a linguistic genealogy linking the ‘Aryans’ to the other speakers of Indo-European languages, but this realisation could not stop the spread and radicalisation of the belief in an Aryan race. The same applies to the realisation that the term ‘Aryan’ in Indian sources does not refer to a people, but to a social and cultural upper class in India. "If a person sacrificed to the right gods in the right way using the correct forms of the traditional hymns and poems, that person was an Aryan. … Rituals performed in the right words were the core of being an Aryan." (Anthony 2007: 408 f.). Non-Aryans were known as ‘Dasyu’, which according to old tradition meant that they did not carry out the true rituals and thus threatened the cosmic order. Therefore, from the point of view of the Aryans, the Dasyu were people who were not as trustworthy as themselves (Parpola 1988). As early as 1850, Martin Haug had called for the concept of Aryan to be defined based on the context of the Rig Veda (Marchand 2009: 296 f.). However, apart from among linguistic scholars, his plea went unheeded.

In his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853–1855), the Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau was the first to speak of an ‘Aryan race’. The founder of Social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer (Social statics, 1851; Synthetic philosophy, worked on from 1860, completed 1896), preached the cult of world domination by the white race because of its supposed social superiority. Spencer’s notions were readily received, particularly in the lands of the British colonial empire (Ballantyne 2002). At the turn of the 20th century, the Aryan myth legitimised the imperial colonial rule by Europeans around the world and, after the First World War, culminated in the Nazi racial ideology and its inhuman consequences.

The German racial hygienists of the ‘Rassenhygienischen Forschungsstelle’, founded in 1934, or the German ancestral heritage organisation ‘Deutsches Ahnenerbe’ founded in 1935 initially oriented themselves towards a ‘Nordic Aryanism’. During the Second World War, however, the focus of German ideologists shifted to the Aryans as the pillars of civilisation in India. It was hoped that after a German victory over Great Britain the Indian Aryans would be freed from the yoke of British colonial rule.

It is not just in Germany and Europe that the Aryan myth is still widespread today, but also in North America. The Norsemen, who explored the American east coast (Vinland) in the 11th century, are celebrated as great explorers, who are said to have made long expeditions into the hinterland, as far as Minnesota. This idea is promoted above all by American historians of Scandinavian descent. To date, however, the only evidence of the Vinland seafarers is a single seasonal settlement on Newfoundland (Davis 2009). The racist views of certain white American fringe groups that call for a crusade against the pollution of the Aryan race is a perpetual burden on US society.

However, it is in India that the Aryan myth is most popular today. Some years ago, Hindu nationalism began to take a stance against the principle of democratic tolerance and turned to an ‘Aryan’ icon: Hitler and his book Mein Kampf. At the beginning of this century an English edition (My Struggle) appeared in India and more than 100,000 copies have been sold. T-shirts, bags and key rings with Hitler’s portrait also sell well in India. Hitler is celebrated by the Hindu nationalists as a hero because he had the courage to stand up to the hated British colonial power and to start a war against it. The genocide of Jews and others is simply disregarded as being of negligible concern.

The swastika, an Aryan symbol?

The swastika, which became the emblem of Hitler’s NSDAP in 1920 and a central component of the flag of the German Reich in 1935, was long regarded as being symbolic of the ‘Aryans’. The National Socialists thus drew on a symbol that was already widespread in völkisch circles. The anti-Semitic ‘Germanenorden’ (Germanic Order), founded in 1912, and the ‘Thule-Gesellschaft’ (Thule Society), which emerged from it in 1918, also used the swastika. Hitler, however, was responsible for turning it in the opposite direction. He later reported that as a schoolboy he had been deeply impressed by the sign of the cross above the portal of Lambach Monastery in Austria, where he sang in the church choir. The cross, which is part of the coat of arms of Abbot Theoderich Hagn is indeed astonishingly similar to the basic swastika form.

For the National Socialists, the swastika was a Nordic, Germanic symbol, but it was also widespread in many ancient European and Asian cultures. If the cultures in which the swastika appears are listed chronologically and geographically, the following pattern emerges:

–The pre-Indo-European culture of Old Europe (Danube Civilisation): This is the oldest advanced civilisation in Europe, built by early farmers (Old Europeans). The name Danube Civilisation is a reference to the great river, which was used as a trade route at that time. The trade network (including the regional tributaries of the Danube) extended over most of Southeast Europe as far as western Ukraine (Anthony 2009b, Haarmann 2019). Its heyday was in the Late Neolithic (5th millennium BCE) and the Chalcolithic (4th millennium BCE). The Old European farmers were the first non-Indo Europeans that the Indo-European steppe nomads came into contact with. The swastika appeared in iconography at the end of the 6th millennium BCE.

–The pre-Indo-European (ancient Dravidian) Indus/Harappa civilisation: This oldest of South Asian civilisations developed across a wide region covering parts of the territories of modern India and Pakistan. The Indus civilisation takes its name from the River Indus, on whose banks most of its ancient settlements were built. The Indus civilisation was in existence approximately from 2600 to 1750 BCE (Parpola 1994, 2012b). The swastika motif was used there from the 3rd millennium BCE.

–The civilisation of Ancient China: The swastika was in use from the 2nd millennium BCE.

–The Uralian cultures, divided into Finno-Ugric peoples in eastern Europe (Finland, Estonia, Hungary, minorities in the European part of Russia), Western Siberia (Khanty and Mansi) and Samoyed peoples of northern Siberia (from the Urals to Kamchatka). In the tradition of these peoples, the swastika has played an important role as a cultural symbol since ancient times and is still used to this day.

–Pre-Indo-European cultures in the Mediterranean region: The swastika motif can be found in rock paintings in Val Camonica in the Italian Alps as well as in the iconography of the Iberians of Hispania.

–The early Indo-European regional cultures: There is no evidence of the swastika being used during the Proto-Indo-European period. Indo-Europeans apparently adopted the motif from non-Indo-European local cultures which they came into contact with. The earliest instance of swastika use in an Indo-European regional culture (Andronovo) was in Central Asia in the 2nd millennium BCE, (Kuzmina 2008: 168). The Andronovo people adapted the motif in Central Asia, as did the Helladic migrants in Greece and the Aryans in India.

In two ancient cultures on the periphery of the Eurasian area, the swastika was integrated into the characters used by local scripts. These were the Danube script (not yet deciphered) and the ancient Chinese script. In the ancient Chinese script, the swastika character (with the sound value fang) meant ‘district’ (the arms of the beam cross indicate the points of the compass).

The swastika achieved its greatest popularity as a sacred symbol of Hinduism on the Indian subcontinent and of Buddhism in large parts of East Asia, and in these religions it has retained its original meaning:

Fig. 1:The Eswastika

a)Old European ceramics, 5th millennium BCE

b)Pre-Greek seals, Lerna 3rd millennium BCE

c)Old Indie seal, 3rd millennium BCE

Sanskrit svasti means ‘happiness; good fortune; well-being’, svastika means ‘all is well; harmony’. Right rotation means ‘good luck’ (svastika), while left rotation is connoted with ‘misfortune’ (sauvastika).

The history of the swastika shows the great importance that pre-Indo-European cultures had for the Indo-European language and culture. It shows us that the history of Indo-European languages and cultures can only be adequately reconstructed if the complex processes of exchange with non-Indo-European cultures are also taken into consideration. This book is intended as a contribution to this endeavour.

1.

HOMELAND IN THE SOUTHERN RUSSIAN STEPPE (11th – 8th MILLENNIUM BCE)

Scholars have known for over a century that linguistic methodology alone cannot do justice to the complex issue of the origin of Indo-European languages and their spread across Europe and Asia. Light can only be shed on the historical processes underlying the modern cultural and linguistic landscape by evaluating the findings of various scientific disciplines and integrating them into an overall context.

There has certainly been no lack of speculation about where the Indo-Europeans originated. Roughly ten homeland theories have been the subject of scientific research, the majority of which base their argumentation on findings achieved in a specific scientific discipline, such as linguistics, cultural research or archaeology. The focus on one discipline for all the answers becomes problematic when findings cannot be reconciled.

The homeland question can only be resolved by taking into account research results achieved in a wide range of scientific disciplines. This requires analyses of the economic system as the basis of existence and the associated lifestyles (anthropology), the material legacy left behind by prehistoric populations (archaeology), older stages of language (historical, comparative linguistics), cultural traditions (cultural history), the prehistoric world view as a framework (mythology and religious history) and especially the genetic characteristics of population groups (human genetics).

In recent years, the field has narrowed and now only two hypotheses are still a matter of serious debate: the theory of the Anatolian homeland, put forth by Colin Renfrew in the 1980s; and the theory of migrations from the Eurasian steppe, propagated by Marija Gimbutas in the 1950s, which developed into the hypothesis of Kurgan migrations in the 1970s.

In his study Archaeology & language (1987), Colin Renfrew breathed new life into a migration theory first presented by Gordon Childe in the 1920s and 1930s. According to this theory, farming and the cultural horizon of agricultural ways of life were brought to and spread throughout Europe by migrants from Anatolia. The novelty in Renfrew’s approach to this theory was in his attempt to link archaeological evidence on the spread of farming with two other strands of research: the migratory movements of the Indo-Europeans and the gene pool distribution as mapped out in the field of human genetics.

Renfrew’s hypothesis about the origins of Indo-Europeans shaped the Diffusion position, according to which various processes of social and cultural history were complementary in nature and ran in parallel with one another. This position propagated the following processes: an ethnic-demographic process (the migration of populations from Anatolia to southeast Europe); a socio-economic process (the spread of the Agrarian Package from Anatolia to Europe according to the wave-of-advance model) and a human genetic process (the diffusion of certain genetic patterns – the gene flow – from Western Asia to Europe). This theory assumes that the migrants from Anatolia not only introduced the agricultural way of life and farming technologies to Europeans, but also transferred their Indo-European culture and language to Europe.

However, there are no archaeological traces of any early presence (8th and 7th millennia BCE) of Indo-Europeans in Anatolia that would confirm the parallel diffusion hypothesis. The culture of the inhabitants of the oldest city in this region, i.e. Çatalhöyük, exhibits none of the features that are characteristic of the Proto-Indo-Europeans (Hodder 2006). There is also no evidence of large-scale migratory movements from Asia Minor to southeastern Europe.

Findings to date have converged to such an extent that only one theory remains as the top homeland candidate. It is in fact the older hypothesis, which states that the Indo-European homeland lies in Europe, and specifically in the southern steppe and forest-steppe zone situated between the rivers Volga and Don (Gimbutas 1974, 1991, 1992). One example of the archaeological finds typical for the early steppe nomads is the burial chamber, over which monumental mounds of earth were heaped. These mounds are referred to as kurgans, a word originating from the Tatar language but later borrowed by Russian and other languages. Gimbutas believed that the Kurgan people were early nomads from the steppe and identified their culture and language to be Proto-Indo-European. Gimbutas tracked the geographical distribution of the kurgans – which stand out as striking formations in the landscape – from the foothills of the Caucasus, across central Asia and around the Black Sea into southeast Europe and believed the locations of these kurgans to be evidence of the early migratory routes of the steppe nomads.

In the meantime, the former extreme polarisation of the Kurgan hypothesis (migration from southern Russia) versus the Anatolia hypothesis (migration from Asia Minor) has softened, mainly because the outlines of the Kurgan hypothesis have been confirmed by the results of recent research (Anthony 2007, Dergachev 2007, Haarmann 2012 and others). It now makes more sense to refer to the ‘Kurgan theory’ as support for its assertions has grown significantly. It has recently been concluded that Gimbutas’ Kurgan theory is of lasting value: … her key concept of the place and time of PIE [Proto-Indo-European] has stood the test of time (Manco 2013: 122).

Indo-European history certainly began earlier than these early migrations of nomadic herders from the Eurasian steppe to southeast Europe around 4500 BCE. They were preceded by a protracted process in the homeland, during which the Proto-Indo-European culture and language became fully developed. Thus, in order to discover the socio-economic conditions that decisively shaped the lives of the early Indo-Europeans and their language, we need to go back further in time than the period when farming was already being practised elsewhere. In fact, the emergence of pastoralism (nomadic livestock herding) in the Eurasian steppe is to be understood as a process that essentially took place independently of the spread of farming.

Neolithic transitions: Nomadic herders in the East, farmers in the West

The momentous transition from a hunter-gatherer existence to a new economic system took two distinct paths: one towards plant cultivation (farming) and one in the direction of nomadic livestock herding. The Neolithic Revolution, a term coined in the 1920s by the influential archaeologist Gordon Childe, is – in fact – a myth. The transformation, which began with harvesting seeds from wild grasses, eventually developing into the effective cultivation of fields, took place over a period of more than two millennia, from about 11000 to about 8500 BCE. In view of this, archaeologists now speak of a transition process with several localised setbacks (Bailey/Spikins 2008 and others). The success and progress of this transition in some regions and not in others depended on fluctuations in climate and the local populations’ ability to develop strategies to adapt to the Agrarian Package.

From a global perspective, the hunter-gatherer way of life was superseded by two basic socio-economic models. The first was farming, which originated in the Middle East and spread to Europe. The other model, early nomadic livestock herding, developed in Europe; its origins traced back to the steppe of southern Russia, from where it spread to central Asia and other regions. Pottery-making developed in both models, yet independently of each other. In Europe, there has been contact and conflict between the practitioners of both economic systems since the 5th millennium BCE.

It was long believed that nomadic livestock herding as an economic system developed as a secondary form – an offshoot of farming. This assumes that people first settled down, cultivated their fields and kept livestock. In regions where the natural environment was unsuitable for plant cultivation or where crop yields were too low, so the theory went, a nomadic way of life developed as an alternative, with animal husbandry serving as the main or exclusive economic form. However, recent archaeological findings have disproved this hypothesis.

The preconditions for the emergence of pastoral nomadism are directly linked to the climatic changes that took place towards the end of the last Ice Age. As the Arctic cold retreated north and the continental ice-sheets melted, large parts of eastern Europe, which until that time had been covered in ice, were now exposed and accessible for vegetation and animals, opening up land for human development. Post-glacial population groups advanced northwards from their former refuge in the coastal area of the Black Sea. In terms of ethnicity and language, these early populations were not highly divergent.

As late as the early 1990s there was still not much that could be said with certainty about the early nomadic cultures of Eurasia. But then a new branch of archaeology began to establish a separate identity for itself: the study of nomadic cultures. This development was accelerated by the easing of relationships between the Eastern European states and the West. Archaeologists from the USA and Western Europe now had the opportunity to take part in cooperation projects with Ukrainian and Russian colleagues and carry out excavations at nomadic camp sites that were thousands of years old. Research on the ancient nomadic cultures of Eurasia has since matured and produced results that demand serious consideration.

Dating indicates that the origins of nomadic livestock herding on the steppes of eastern Europe coincided with the spread of agriculture in western Europe. These two processes, which initially took place independently of each other, can be traced back to the 7th and 6th millennia BCE. This means that two transitions from the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) to the Neolithic (Younger Stone Age) were taking place in Europe at the same time, each progressing in a different direction.

In southeast Europe, indigenous (Old European) hunter-gatherers were influenced by the introduction of plant cultivation in the course of the 7th millennium BCE, which was brought to their territories by pioneering groups from Anatolia who settled in Thessaly (Davison et al. 2007: 139 f.). Initial contact for trading purposes developed into social contacts and eventually family ties. The bicultural and bilingual descendants of these families set the stage for the acculturation of the Old Europeans and the adoption of the Agrarian Package. Indo-Europeans had nothing to do with the continued spread of farming throughout Europe and there were no migrations of Anatolian farmers to western and central Europe (Budja 2007: 196 f.).

During a long process of acculturation, the Old European hunter-gatherers became sedentary farmers and livestock breeders who not only domesticated indigenous wild animals (cattle, sheep), but also crossed the European aurochs with imported Anatolian cattle. The offspring of these early European breeding experiments are the ancestors of today’s European livestock population. This sedentary way of life and field cultivation spread to central and western Europe, and after a time, further north to Scandinavia.

It was not possible to establish any form of plant cultivation in eastern Europe due to the environmental conditions at the time. Hunting and gathering has always predominated in the forests of Russia and in the forest-steppe zone. In the southeast, however, hunter-gatherers were eventually forced to adapt to a new economic form. They had no choice: increasing desiccation had begun in the areas north of the Black Sea and east to the Caspian Sea, while the arid climate of the southern steppe caused a gradual migration of wild game. The only larger animals that remained in the steppe were the wild horses, which hunters then turned their focus on. The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers remained mobile, but gradually began to keep wild goats and wild sheep in herds to supplement the spoils of their hunt, which was becoming increasing sparse in the steppe.

The region, which later became the migration starting point – the homeland of the Indo-Europeans – includes the forest-steppe zone and the steppe. To the west, it bordered on the farming areas of the territory associated with the historical Trypillya culture in what is now Ukraine.

Fig. 2:Land colonisation routes in post-Ice Age Europe

1 –Recolonisation originating in eastern Europe

2 –Recolonisation originating in southwestern Europe

3 –Oldest regional settlement areas

4 –Coastline at the end of the Ice Age

5 –Yoldia Sea (prior to the breakthrough of the Baltic Sea into the North Sea)

The Eurasian steppe belt stretches over thousands of kilometres west to east: from its western fringes in Ukraine, deep into Asia, Mongolia and western China (Xinjiang). The question is: If the transition from a hunter-gatherer