Prehistoric Men

by Robert J. Braidwood

If the movement was up the Nile (southward), as these dates suggest, then I suspect that the earliest available village material of middle Egypt, the so-called Tasian, is also later than that of the Fayum. The Tasian materials come from a few graves near a village called Deir Tasa, and I have an uncomfortable feeling that the Tasian “assemblage” may be mainly an artificial selection of poor examples of objects which belong in the following range of time.

SPREAD IN TIME AND SPACE

There are now two things we can do; in fact, we have already begun to do them. We can watch the spread of the new way of life upward through time in the nuclear area. We can also see how the new way of life spread outward in space from the nuclear area, as time went on. There is good archeological evidence that both these processes took place. For the hill country of northeastern Iraq, in the nuclear area, we have already noticed how the succession (still with gaps) from Karim Shahir, through M’lefaat and Jarmo, to Hassuna can be charted (see chart, [p. 111]). In the next chapter, we shall continue this charting and description of what happened in Iraq upward through time. We also watched traces of the new way of life move through space up the Nile into Africa, to reach Khartoum in the Sudan some thirty-five hundred years later than we had seen it at Jarmo or Jericho. We caught glimpses of it in the Fayum and perhaps at Tasa along the way.

For the remainder of this chapter, I shall try to suggest briefly for you the directions taken by the spread of the new way of life from the nuclear area in the Near East. First, let me make clear again that I do not believe that the village-farming community way of life was invented only once and in the Near East. It seems to me that the evidence is very clear that a separate experiment arose in the New World. For China, the question of independence or borrowing—in the appearance of the village-farming community there—is still an open one. In the last chapter, we noted the probability of an independent nuclear area in southeastern Asia. Professor Carl Sauer strongly champions the great importance of this area as the original center of agricultural pursuits, as a kind of “cradle” of all incipient eras of the Old World at least. While there is certainly not the slightest archeological evidence to allow us to go that far, we may easily expect that an early southeast Asian development would have been felt in China. However, the appearance of the village-farming community in the northwest of India, at least, seems to have depended on the earlier development in the Near East. It is also probable that ideas of the new way of life moved well beyond Khartoum in Africa.

THE SPREAD OF THE VILLAGE-FARMING COMMUNITY WAY OF LIFE INTO EUROPE

How about Europe? I won’t give you many details. You can easily imagine that the late prehistoric prelude to European history is a complicated affair. We all know very well how complicated an area Europe is now, with its welter of different languages and cultures. Remember, however, that a great deal of archeology has been done on the late prehistory of Europe, and very little on that of further Asia and Africa. If we knew as much about these areas as we do of Europe, I expect we’d find them just as complicated.

This much is clear for Europe, as far as the spread of the village-community way of life is concerned. The general idea and much of the know-how and the basic tools of food-production moved from the Near East to Europe. So did the plants and animals which had been domesticated; they were not naturally at home in Europe, as they were in western Asia. I do not, of course, mean that there were traveling salesmen who carried these ideas and things to Europe with a commercial gleam in their eyes. The process took time, and the ideas and things must have been passed on from one group of people to the next. There was also some actual movement of peoples, but we don’t know the size of the groups that moved.

The story of the “colonization” of Europe by the first farmers is thus one of (1) the movement from the eastern Mediterranean lands of some people who were farmers; (2) the spread of ideas and things beyond the Near East itself and beyond the paths along which the “colonists” moved; and (3) the adaptations of the ideas and things by the indigenous “Forest folk”, about whose “receptiveness” Professor Mathiassen speaks ([p. 97]). It is important to note that the resulting cultures in the new European environment were European, not Near Eastern. The late Professor Childe remarked that “the peoples of the West were not slavish imitators; they adapted the gifts from the East ... into a new and organic whole capable of developing on its own original lines.”

THE WAYS TO EUROPE

Suppose we want to follow the traces of those earliest village-farmers who did travel from western Asia into Europe. Let us start from Syro-Cilicia, that part of the hilly-flanks zone proper which lies in the very northeastern corner of the Mediterranean. Three ways would be open to us (of course we could not be worried about permission from the Soviet authorities!). We would go north, or north and slightly east, across Anatolian Turkey, and skirt along either shore of the Black Sea or even to the east of the Caucasus Mountains along the Caspian Sea, to reach the plains of Ukrainian Russia. From here, we could march across eastern Europe to the Baltic and Scandinavia, or even hook back southwestward to Atlantic Europe.