home | before 1000 BCE | before 1000 BCE previous | next Civilization to Europe, and a Dark Age Civilization came to Europeans later than it did to people in West Asia, North Africa, India and China. It was preceded by agriculture and the raising of animals, which appeared in sunny Greece as early as 6000 BCE -- around the time that people there built stone walls around their villages, presumably to protect themselves from wild animals and marauding outsiders. A debate exists as to whether the move to agriculture was an internal cultural development or it was introduced to Europe by migrants from the Near East and Asia Minor. An online article in Science Daily (February 22, 2011) reads: Results provide evidence that indigenous hunter-gatherers in central Europe were largely replaced or assimilated by incoming Near-Eastern farmers in the core region of Southeast and Central Europe. However, hunter-gatherer populations survived in outlying regions and adopted some of the cultural practices from neighboring farming communities. After 6000 BCE, farming spread from Greece into the colder southern Balkans. Between 5000 and 4000 BCE it spread up the Danube River into central Europe, along the Rhine River, the Netherlands, Gaul and finally into what is now Switzerland. During these years, Europeans used digging sticks and hoes made of wood. They had stone axes with a sharpened and polished edge, and they had stone knives for reaping their crops. They used ornamented pottery. And where wood was plentiful they built log homes – as large as thirty by forty meters. Map of Europe By 4000 BCE, Europeans were using a wooden plow. And sometime after 4000, farming spread to people around the Vistula River and into Scandinavia, while people in Finland bred pigs and hunted seals. Farming spread to Britain as people with farming skills crossed the English Channel in boats made of skins and wood. And, sometime between 4000 and 3000 BCE, farming spread along the Dnieper, Bug and Dniester rivers. Humanity likes to tinker and, like others, the Europeans did much of this. To make it easier for their oxen to transport their loads they hitched the oxen to carts with solid wooden wheels. They began weaving and embroidering. They made skis for hunting during winter. In southern Britain, southern Scandinavia and in what is now Russia, people built mineshafts to follow seams of flint. They used fire to loosen the flint and shovels made from the shoulder blades of cattle. And along the western coast of Spain they built great stone monuments to their dead, a practice that soon spread to Scandinavia. In Europe, copper had been picked from the ground and used as jewelry. The Europeans shaped the copper by pounding it cold. Then someone discovered that heating copper made it more malleable. Working with metals had begun in southeastern Europe as early as around 4600 BCE – almost a thousand years before it reached Asia Minor. Around 3300 BCE, flint tools were still widely used in Europe – while copper, silver and lead were being smelted in Spain. But soon the working of copper spread through much of Europe. Copper workers made plaques, wires, copper punches, axe and adze heads, pins, and jewelry such as spiral armbands. They crafted copper and gold to adorn their religious idols and as offerings to their gods. Those working copper sought to maintain a supply of the ore, and after the year 3000 prospectors looking for copper ore were combing Europe and creating copper mines. Stonehenge, England, click for description and to enlarge. Scandinavia (specifically Finland) without its snow and ice The Danube River, cutting through northeastern Romania Ruins of Mycenae The Lion's Gate, Mycenae External links to interactive maps: The Minoan World Mycenaean Greece The Bronze Age Collapse Europe remained less densely populated than West Asia and Egypt, but a great migration into Europe began as warrior-herding peoples from farther east moved into Eastern Europe searching for pasture for their animals. Sometime after 3000 BCE an Indo-European people called Balts – including Lithuanians – and a Finnic people called Estonians settled along the Baltic Sea, near the West Dvina River. From Asia came more Indo-Europeans, who would be called Slavs, and they settled around the Vistula, Bug and Dnieper rivers. Between 2900 and 2700 BCE more Indo-Europeans came, and they settled in and around what are now Belgium and the Netherlands, near where the Rhine River runs into the sea. They brought to Western Europe a new kind of husbandry of animals, and they brought individual burial as opposed to the group burials practiced by Europeans before them. Around 2500 BCE, small communities of metal working tradesmen from Spain began peaceful migrations. They are called Bell Beakers after their pottery, and they too buried their dead individually. Europe was rich in the deposits of tin needed for making bronze, and the Bell Beakers exploited local sources of copper and tin. T...