Recent excavations in Turkey as well as genetic analyses of domestic animals and Stone Age skeletons recovered there are turning upside down many prevailing views about how agriculture came to Europe, thus making it possible for sedentary life to spread in less than 300 years all the way to the Paris basin.
This is according to findings reported in “Neolithic Immigration: How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe,” which was written by Matthias Schulz for the October 23, 2010 issue of the German magazine
Spiegel Online International. Schulz reported on the initial results of the so-called “Leche” project, an association of 13 research institutes in seven European Union countries that is genetically probing the beginnings of butter, milk, and cheese.
The conventional wisdom was that a small group of immigrants inducted the established inhabitants of Central Europe into sowing and milking with “missionary zeal,” and that this new knowledge caught on quickly. But as reported by Shulz, the excavations show that at around 7000 B.C., a mass migration of farmers from the Middle East to Europe began, bringing along domesticated cattle and pigs. And what now appears to be the key to the explosive growth in the migrant population was milk.
The migrants produced fresh milk that, as a result of a genetic mutation among them, they were able to drink in large quantities as well as to process into butter and cheese. (
Homo sapiens was originally unable to digest raw milk.) Also, the new-found evidence shows that there was no interbreeding between the migrants and Europe’s original population. The Middle Eastern milk drinkers became dominant in Europe largely because milk made them sturdier and stronger than the indigenous inhabitants who were intolerant to milk.
Read Matthias Schulz’s “Neolithic Immigration” in Spiegel Online International now!
