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35 3 Arrival of Domesticates in Europe Ever since Gordon Childe, one of the most erudite and renowned prehistorians of the twentieth century, wrote his classic work, The Dawn of European Civilization, which was first published in 1925, there have been countless books, articles, and reviews written on the spread of farming from the Fertile Crescent westward and north across the European continent.1 As Childe noted in 1958, in his preface to a later, more popular work, the subject “is often buried under a forbidding accumulation of outlandish culture-names and references to obscure periodicals.”2 Today, as might be expected, this accumulation has grown enormously, but the core fact remains that the earliest knowledge about the cultivation of crops and the husbanding of livestock came to Europe from southwest Asia. Whether this knowledge came with the movement of people or by trade in plants and animals from one region to another has been much argued, but the overall picture must be a complex pattern of social and cultural change in which hunter-gatherer communities were transformed from collectors to producers of their food and other essential resources. This transformation should be seen as slow and affected by many factors both within the human communities and in the environment around them.3 Although the last Palaeolithic hunters would no doubt have been skilled managers of their prey, the material evidence for this is sparse, while the evidence for overhunting in the progressive scarcity over time of the bones of wild ungulates in Mesolithic sites is more evident. As suggested in Chapter 1, the invention of the long-distance projectile in the form of bows and arrows, in combination with domestic dogs, would have greatly increased the hunters’ efficiency. Following the first stage of close management in which ungulates would be kept alive as a walking larder rather than killed in the hunt, the way of life of the last hunters/first farmers would have undergone significant changes, which in some communities would have been rapidly accepted and in others would have been resisted. Animal dung would be used in the cultivation of crops, for fuel, and for building; hair, wool, and hides would be used for clothing ; milk would become a vital part of the diet; and cattle would provide traction. With the alteration in the material and spiritual outlook on the world, religion would change. The archaeozoological evidence for the so-called wave of advance for the spread of agriculture across Europe began in the eastern Mediterranean around 8,000 years ago, and it is not surprising that it took 3,000 years to reach Britain and Scandinavia in the north, and the Iberian Peninsula in the extreme west. Using radiocarbon dates that have been obtained for relevant archaeological sites, the advance has been plotted by Julian Thomas in his review of the Neolithic revolution as seen in figure 15, which was redrawn from the earlier model of Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza.4 36| Chapter 3 The very beginning of the westward transport of livestock and other animals from the Near East appears to have begun on Cyprus, at the extraordinarily early date of at least 9,000 years ago. At the site of Shillourokambos there is osteological evidence that wild cattle (Bos primigenius), goats (Capra aegagrus), sheep (Ovis orientalis), Mesopotamian fallow deer (Dama mesopotamica), foxes (Vulpes vulpes), and cats (Felis silvestris/catus) had been carried in boats across the sea from the Anatolian or Levantine coasts. There are also two sizes of pig remains, corresponding to the wild (Sus scrofa) and the domestic (Sus domesticus). As there are no fossil remains of these species from earlier periods on Cyprus, it can be assumed from these finds that the animals were taken there by humans. Furthermore, the large size of the ungulate bones and teeth indicates that the animals were in an intermediate stage between the wild and the domestic. They were presumably released in the new environment, became feral, and were then hunted as wild animals.5 There are many other early Neolithic sites on Cyprus apart from Shillourokambos, the most notable being the rather later site of Khirokitia from which the remains of sheep, goats, pigs, Mesopotamian fallow deer, and a small cat were first described by Judith King in 1953.6 A plausible scenario may be that there were still pigmy hippos living on the island of Cyprus when the first traveling hunters arrived there, perhaps 10,000 years ago. The overlap Figure 15. A...

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