The New Stone Age in Northern Europe

by John M. Tyler

The objections to this view are weighty. One marked feature of Indo-European culture was the use of the horse, which held the highest rank among their domestic animals. But the domestic horse seems to have been introduced into Europe from the East. The few traces of its presence in northern Europe during Neolithic times are usually explained as remains of wild animals killed in the hunt. If they played so large a part in Indo-European culture, it is strange that they have left so few remains.

Kossina, in one of his studies, places the cradle of Indo-European culture in “Scandinavia, Denmark, and northwest Germany, wherever megalithic monuments with their characteristic pottery occur.” Wherever such monuments occur we find incineration coming in late in Neolithic time, or more exactly with the Bronze period, except in Brittany and England, of which later. But incineration seems to accompany the progress of the European branch, and must have come into use among these peoples well back in their history to explain its wide occurrence.

The word town, in the original language, seems to signify a settlement surrounded by a hedge or wall, or some sort of defense. But fortified towns are hardly known in North Germany at this time. All these cultural features seem to appear somewhat or considerably too late in North Germany to suit Kossina’s theory.

A second feature of Indo-European culture is the rise of the chieftain. But the Germans seem to have borrowed the name for king and other expressions for military organizations, as well as many culture-words, from the Celts. This fact has led some good authorities to declare that the Germans received their Indo-European language from the Celts.

The homeland of the Indo-Europeans must have supported a large population to send out all the tribes which went out from it. Only such a region can satisfy our requirements, and such was Germany, an Officina gentium, some 2,000 years later. But we notice that the migrations of peoples have always set westward into Europe, not in the reverse direction. Similarly the new discovery or idea has come westward or northward from western Asia or from the Mediterranean region. The north has almost never been a centre of origination of new ideas and movements. It has borrowed from the richer south. We would not expect that the Indo-European movement would form an exception to this rule. Moreover, the peoples of the banded pottery who had filled southeastern Europe, coming in, as is generally acknowledged, from the East, had brought with them a good knowledge of agriculture which could support a large population.

Now Kossina finds evidence of the spread of the corded pottery southward at the close of the Neolithic period, and infers that it was carried by a migration from the north. I am inclined to think that his conclusion is correct, though it may be doubtful whether the invasion went so far into the province of the banded pottery as he thinks. He sees in this the first stage of the Indo-European movement which was to sweep eastward as far as India. The people of the banded pottery apparently retreated eastward before this movement, and thus tended still further to increase the density and power of resistance in these regions. Furthermore, had this southeastward movement continued, it would have met the first of a series of waves of invasion which would surely have turned it backward.

We have seen that all through the Neolithic period brachycephals of the Furfooz or Grenelle race have been spreading from Belgium and the rough eastern part of France. At the end of the Neolithic period they are being crowded by the long-heads. During the Bronze Age the cephalic index rises all over middle and western Europe. At its very beginning we find a new people in England—tall, rugged, heavy-faced round-heads, who burned their dead and deposited the ashes in round barrows. They seem to have come from the Rhine valley, and may well have introduced incineration into Brittany, where it appears early. They differ markedly in stature and features from the Furfooz people. They have quite certainly come from the east, perhaps from the region of the Armenian highlands. They have crossed Europe in sufficient numbers and compactness to retain their anthropological characters until they strike England and crowd back the old Iberian or Mediterranean peoples. The movement looks like an invasion in mass, not like a quiet, slow infiltration. They were the forerunners of a general advance and spread of the broad-heads.

Were these people Celts or at least partially celticized? To express an opinion on a Celtic question is to accept an invitation to a Donnybrook fair. Anthropologically they differ markedly from the later Celtic invaders. But their custom of incineration is certainly suggestive, and it is not at all impossible that they spoke a Celtic dialect. They certainly seem to prove that the westward migration from the region of the Black Sea or from farther eastward had not ceased or been turned backward at this time. The spread of North German people southward at this time would have brought them where they would mingle with Celts coming westward and receive their first lesson in Indo-European language and culture, if it came from the east.

There is at present a strong tendency to seek the original Indo-European homeland neither in the extreme east or extreme west or north, but somewhere in the open country of southern Russia lying to the north of the Black Sea or farther eastward toward the Caspian. Here they locate them mainly in a long zone of parkland extending along the southern edge of the forest zone and in the valleys of the great rivers. Here at a much later date Scythians were settled who raised large quantities of wheat, while others were nomadic. We remember that Neolithic trade-routes followed mainly rivers and seashore. The islands of the Mediterranean were occupied early and sea commerce found a centre in Crete. A great centre of trade arose very early at Troy (Hissarlik), on the high way between the Ægean and the settlements along the shores of the Black Sea and in the valleys of the rivers descending from the interior.