Spread of agriculture

The advent of agriculture ( 7000-4000 BC) changed little in the relations between people. Agriculture came as a new technology probably from the Middle East and spread slowly over Europe from east to west.

The spraying of PIE over local languages

PIE = proto-Indo-European language. Some linguists say that PIE is 9000 years old [1], others believe it is only 5000 years old [2]. PIE is the supposed ancestor of all modern European languages, except Basque, Hungarian and Finnish. Other PIE languages include Farsi (Iran), Pashtun (Afghanistan / Pakistan), Hindi and many more, 75 in total. Many historical linguists are trying to reconstruct the original PIE language, upon the assumption that all Indo-European languages evolved directly from this single language. This hypothesis is represented by a language tree: PIE evolved first in a number of major branches (e.g. Germanic, Brythonic, Occitan-Romance, Tocharian, etc. ) and each branch evolved further into the modern languages (e.g. for Germanic: German, English, Dutch, Danish, etc.).

However, we feel that the estimated age of PIE, even some 9000 years, is way too short to make this evolutionary hypothesis plausible. Modern Greek is traceable to the first ancient Greek texts ever found, a distance in time of some 3600 years. Surprisingly, it was already very much Greek in 1600 BC. This means that proto-Greek is even older (1000 years?). Coptic (original Egyptian language and non-PIE) was spoken in Egypt between at least 3200 BC (earliest hieroglyphs) and 1800 AD, or some 5000 years. Of course, both languages evolved over time, and considerably, but they didn't change into a radically different language. Their core remained. Our conclusion is that languages evolved very slowly and that the spectacular diversification of PIE can not have happened within a few thousand years.

How can one explain that 75 languages evolved and diversified within a few thousand years? Given the attested age of ancient Greek (since 1600 BC), this supposes that PIE fell apart between 7000 BC and 1600 BC or some 5400 years. Assuming that proto-Greek is older, this reduces the period of evolution to maybe 4500 years. That is to be compared with the known age of the Greek language: 3600 years or with the known age of non-PIE Coptic: 5000 years. The classic evolutionary hypothesis also implies that PIE was present in all the mentioned regions before it began to evolve. Thus, once upon a time, all of Europe spoke an identical language: classic PIE. Linguists also state that PIE most likely spread slowly during maybe 2000 years. This shortens even more the time of evolution and subsequent diversification. It supposes that PIE fell apart in 75 languages within 3400 or 2400 years (the latter taking in account proto-Greek). Here we have a clear contradiction: linguists know that Greek remained Greek for 3600 years, yet they suppose a stormy evolution during a period of 2400 up to 3400 years, during which PIE fell apart in 75 languages, of which many were mutually no longer intelligible!

We propose a radically different scenario. We think that such a pace of evolution is too fast, given the attested fact that once the languages were there, their subsequent evolution slowed down to a near standstill. More likely the PIE language became sprayed over pre-PIE and non-PIE languages and gave birth to the various known languages such as German, English, Italian, etc. from the very beginning. This could have happened indeed within 2000 years. In other words: the Indo-European languages are so diverse because their substrate languages (the original local languages), not only in words, but also in sounds, were very different before. This process is called creolisation. The older local languages so to say swallowed PIE and coloured it. PIE becomes the upper layer. Under this layer, the sublayer or substrate layer, we find in some languages variations of ancestral PIE (its precursor), in others we find non-PIE and there were probably mixed ancestral PIE and non-PIE influences too. Thus, we can explain why for instance the Germanic language group has words we find nowhere else. These words are most probably non-PIE or ancestral PIE substrate words. PIE never evolved into Germanic, the language was Germanic-like from the very beginning. It is only after it was Germanic that its evolution commenced.

The real origin of PIE

PIE developed probably somewhere between 20 000 BC and 10 000 BC on the shores of the Black Sea. In 1997, William Ryan and Walter Pitman published evidence that a massive flooding of the Black Sea occurred about 5600 BC through the Bosphorus. At that time, the Black Sea was a fresh water lake with a water level which was situated some 80 meters below the present day level. The water levels of the Black Sea between 20 000 BC and 10 000 BC are more difficult to assess. It is probable that the beaches moved continuously back and forth, making it tricky to assign an old beach, now probably situated under water, to a certain period. Another consequence is that finding archaeological proof of the very existence of people who lived on the beaches will be arduous. Yet we know that humans like to live near beaches. A lot of food can be found in the sea by fishing. The shores themselves provide shellfish. The hinterland is often full of wild game. Marshlands attract waterbirds which are easy to capture. It is in that environment that the first PIE people lived.

It is essential to understand the living conditions of these first PIE people. 

Proto-Indo-Europeans were mainly shoreline people with an advanced technology and good social organisation. Thanks to the fact that they had boats they were also fishermen. They colonized all shores of the Black Sea. The Black Sea was very much their Mare Nostrum, 'our sea'. Their situation was to a certain extend comparable with that of the Greeks in the Aegean Sea. The fact that they used 'their sea' as a mean of transport and communication means that their language not only spread on all the shores, but also prevented a too great diversification of it. All Greeks claimed that they could understand each other and portrayed all non-Greek speakers as barbarians. This means 'brabrabra'-people, whose language no Greek could understand. 

Greeks in the Aegean Sea, PIE around the Black Sea, Gaels around the Irish Sea, Low Germanic around the North Sea, there seems to be a pattern here. However, this is merely a coincidence. People around the Adriatic Sea spoke very different languages for instance. But if a language became spread on most shores of a more or less closed sea, then the language tended to become more uniform. The pace and intensity of development of a common language depended on a number of conditions, such as: ancestral tribal feeling and tradition, intense family contacts, trade and trade monopoly which provided much more added value, similar living conditions, perhaps the presence of a common enemy, and so on.

The importance of organisation

The reason why some people become so successful is rarely their technology. The main reason is their level of internal organisation.

The Romans were masters in organisation. They overcame major difficulties because they had developed of an excellent and fair (for the time!) social system and administration. In addition, the Romans had the capacity to impose their organisation upon other people.

Suffering one humiliating defeat after the other against Hannibal, the Romans managed each time to rebuild, re-arm, re-train and above all, to re-organise their army.

At the Battle of Cannae (southeast Italy) Hannibal tackled a, until then still mainly classic, Roman army that was composed of half-trained farmers posing as legionnaires and young, inexperienced but rich, aristocrats as officers, coupled to rather unreliable auxiliary troops. The Romans had on paper 40000 legionnaires, the auxiliaries had promised in principle the same number.  In reality, the Romans had probably less than 70000 soldiers in the field. Nevertheless, this was all Rome could throw into the battle. The Senate was confident that outnumbering the Carthaginians two to one was the answer. The city of Rome itself could mobilize 3000 men at best, because Rome counted back then some 35000 inhabitants. The rest came from the Italian regions that had become a part of the Roman Republic, which was about half of the peninsula at that time. The auxiliary troops came from the regions that liked to become a part of the Roman republic. (Later, a small war broke out because some regions were not allowed to become full members of the Republic - that is how good the Roman republic was)

Hannibal disposed of some 35000 Carthaginians, all battle-hardened veterans. His men had mainly been recruited in Spain and the south of France.  

The battle ended with a crushing defeat for the Romans. A real bloodbath. 

The Roman Senate blamed the obvious incapability of their generals for the disaster. But that was only half the truth. In reality, no Roman general could have won. Hannibal had a brilliant plan. He elaborated this battle plan because he knew that his well-trained men were perfectly capable of executing it. The Roman generals had no such soldiers. A poorly trained militia is incapable of complex manoeuvring. All they can do is to storm forward or to flee. That is exactly what Hannibal knew and exploited. Hannibal's plan aimed not so much to defeat the Romans, for he knew that would not be so difficult, but to completely destroy it. Indeed, the Romans lost half their army, an unparalleled loss percentage.

After the battle, the newly appointed Roman general Scipio Africanus was allowed to train and completely re-organize the army in Sicily (where deserting was virtually impossible).

One year later, some members of the Senate became very nervous because of the soaring costs. It was unheard of that training an army took so long. They wanted to see for themselves how well their money was spent in Sicily and they had very serious doubts about that. Warned,Scipio organized a full size show for the inquisitive delegation. In a vast valley, the complete army moved for hours from left to right, forward and backwards, forming squares and lines and so on. Standing on a hill and overlooking the spectacle, the senators were utterly baffled.No army had ever done this before. Finally, Rome was ready to face its worst foe: Hannibal.

The Battle of Zama, the next and last battle of the Second Punic War, was fought in modern Tunisia, close to Carthage. Hannibal faced this time a completely different Roman army than at the start of the Second Punic War. Although the Carthaginians now outnumbered the Romans, the latter won a decisive victory. Carthage would never rise again.

From then on, the Roman army got a reputation for its discipline and internal organisation. In contrast to the modern myth, its weaponry was nothing special for the time.

The reason why the Europeans colonists in America in the seventeenth century could so easily overcome the native Indian populations was their capacity to organise themselves. Local Indian tribes fought on a tribal base. This inevitably limited their numbers. The Europeans assembled, when needed, the totality of the colonists in a militia. It is a mistake to believe that the slow loading firearms (17th century!) gave them an overwhelming superiority. By the time a colonist had reloaded his musket, an Indian warrior had shot at least twenty arrows. The minutemen are a fine example of a good social organisation which intended to overcome the lack of really superior weapons. The reality is that the Europeans nearly always outnumbered the Indians when facing them. The fact is also that the Europeans behaved far more disciplined.

Just before the first World War, the British shipyards could build battleships faster, better and cheaper then the German Empire could. The British were simply better organised to do so. The consequence was that a German battleship costed considerably more than a comparable British ship. The result was that the British fleet continued to 'rule the waves' during the war.

If the Europeans and Americans want to compete with the Chinese in the future, then they must start to re-organize themselves now.

Development & expansion of the PIE people

By living on the rich shores of a great lake with its numerous large estuaries (such as the Danube delta), the PIE-people could find sufficient food. The Ice Age caused chilling winters but they had the luxury to carefully prepare for winter during the mild summer. As sailors, they were in constant contact with each other and a strong tribal organisation developed. Technology and organisation rendered them superior to the neighbouring land dwelling hunters-gatherers. They had also the advantage of numbers. So, they were able to slowly expand their territory on dry land, mainly to the mild west and south, following upstream the estuaries of big rivers such as the Danube. 

The expansion happened slowly during the late Ice Age (Younger Dryas ± 12 500 - 8000 BC), but accelerated dramatically at the beginning of the Holocene (end of the Ice Age ­± 8000 BC and later). The PIE-people steadily took over land of their neighbours. Around 7000 BC, 1000 years after the warming up, they had colonized most of the east Balkan region and northern Greece.
They also penetrated deep into Anatolia (modern Turkey), where they imported a language later known as Hittite. It is there that they took over the agricultural technology and incorporated it into their culture.

After this expansion, the PIE language zone was no longer uniform. Some PIE clans had left the shores of the Black Sea and as the distance grew, communication with their homeland became more difficult. Variants of PIE developed locally before the advent of agriculture.

Time table

8000-7000 BC : PIE tribes in northwest Anatolia adopt agriculture, but as they are strong and well organised, they did not take over the language of the Syrian farmers. The new PIE farmers migrate to Greece and spread over the Greek east coast. The technology spreads to the northwest, following the Black Sea coastline. The population in that region speaks a similar language (PIE), so the acceptance of agriculture happens without problems. The PIE language itself becomes more uniform.

7000-5800 BC : spread to the west; most of the Balkan, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia accept agriculture and the new PIE language. Each new farmer generation follows the Danube upstream in search of new land. They bring PIE to populations situated to the west of the Hungarian plain. There PIE and agriculture is adopted without hindrance and quickly evolves into proto-German. In Romania, Bosnia, Croatia and Albania, the precursor of Occitan develops. Proto-German and proto-Occitan are at that stage new but strong dialects of PIE. Both populations can still understand each other with some difficulty.

5800-4800 BC : using the Danube/Rhine axis the farmers arrived in the Moselle valley in 5000 BC and a bit later on the shores of the North Sea. Germany preceded France in adopting agriculture by 1000 years. The east coasts of Italy, Spain and the southeast of France also discovered agriculture around 5000 BC. This spread happened probably by boat. Farmers in boats came from a certain spot on the east Adriatic coast where a sort of proto-Albanian was spoken (in white on the map). Mixed with local languages, this gave birth to the Occitan-Romance languages in the west Mediterranean region.

4800-1800 BC : West Spain, France, Britain, Scandinavia eventually followed. Although its origin is still mysterious, Brythonic developed probably in Portugal where PIE imposed itself upon an unknown language. This local language influenced Brythonic and gave it its typical sounds. Farmers, always looking for new land, exported the language while sailing north, following the Atlantic coast, eventually ending in west Britain. Once settled on these coasts, Brythonic began slowly to diversify into Breton, Cornish, Welsh, Gaelic, etc.
In eastern Europe, the Slavonic PIE variant spread to the north (Poland) and on the Pontic steppe (Ukraine and south Russia).  Much later the Slavonic language would also fan out to the west, into Serbia and the Balkan region. The Germanic-like languages in the Balkan gradually disappeared.
Around 4000 BC, the horse is domesticated in the Pontic steppe. The horse, cart and wheel brought a great wealth. This horse folk is called today 'Kurgan people' and expanded around 3000 BC in all directions, eventually up to northern Pakistan and northern India. They brought with them a variant of proto-Slavonic.

Language situation around 1000 BC

The slow progress of agriculture is surprising. Archaeologists found foragers who lived in the immediate vicinity of farmers and who resisted farming for some 300 years! A comparative bones study of that period and region (ref.: "The Horse and the Wheel", David Anthony) revealed that the foragers were in a better condition than the farmers. Apparently, agriculture was not always a gift. The expansion of agriculture itself was due to the practised method: overcropping. The slash-and–burn method meant that the farmers required constantly new and fresh land. The indigenous population of hunters-gatherers had plenty of time to merge with the new farmers. Local foragers took over the technology and renewed their ancestral pre-PIE language in northwest Europe, but many original, local words subsisted in the new language as substrate-words. Typical are words for trees such as oak, birch, etc.

Even primitive farming can feed at least ten times more people than hunting and gathering. The local hunter-gatherers who had become farmers, rapidly overwhelmed in numbers the remaining hunter-gatherers in their neighbourhood. One can call this a snowball effect. When agriculture reached Middle-Europe, the eastern genes (genes of the original PIE people) had almost completely faded out and had been replaced by local genes. Not so much farmers, but farming technology moved steadily westwards, continuously absorbing and incorporating local populations. The passing on of farming technology happened through the age-old tribal relationships. The result is that local genes remained very much local.

The spread of agriculture bears some similarities with the spread of the Christian and Islamic religion.  Both religions did not displace people, but converted them.

Some populations on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea had learned how to practice agriculture  from farmers who had chosen to emigrate from their homeland by boat. Because some tribes on the receiving end were well organised and their teachers were few, they only took over the technology of farming, not the language. So, they kept their original non-PIE language. We know of two such languages: Basque and Etruscan (Tuscany, Italy), but the existence in the past of more non-PIE languages is very probable.

The conjecture that agriculture hardly displaced humans explains why, for instance, there is a proven genetic difference between Englishmen and Welshmen and why Welsh genetic characteristics resembles those of southwest France and northern Spain. Their respective genes were there before the agricultural age. 
A limited number of farmers in boats coming mainly from Bretagne (Brittany, Armorica) colonized west Britain and Ireland. At the same time, on the southeast coast (Kent), agriculture was introduced by farmers in boats who came from (proto-Flemish) Belgium. Once established in Britain, both farming populations grew towards each other and met somewhere in the middle of the British mainland. A likely place is on the watershed. In north England, the watershed is situated in the Pennines.

Everywhere in Europe language borders moved, absorbing some remaining minor non-PIE languages.

Many questions remain.