Joseph S Crary:
> This theory of an agricultural inspired demographic expansion into
> Europe from the Near East is at best dull, simplistic, and lazy but
> far worse it just does not work. On whatever scale one wants to use,
> early agriculture requires population aggregation not dispersal. In
> other words it pulls people into zones where early agriculture is
> most productive while the associated technology is transmitted
> primarily by interaction and the incorporation of local populations.
The recently-demonstrated reality of the Black Sea event ca 5500 BCE
has thrown everything up into the air. Demic spread of agriculture
into Europe most likely came via the now-inundated former coastline of
the ancient freshwater Euxine Lake, especially immediately after the
Med burst catastrophically thru the Bosphorus.
You had refugee agriculturalists fleeing north and west from the
shores of the newly emerging Black Sea. Some went up the Danube.
Others the Dnistr. In time, the latter group would have encountered
the easy passage from the headwaters of the Dnister to those of the
San-Vistula and those of the Tisza (permitting access to Hungary and
the mid-Danube).
An emerging model, then, is that agriculture did not enter Europe from
the Middle East, but from the Euxine basin. The first European
agriculturalists, then, never really got to Greece.