New radiocarbon dates for the Neolithic period in Bosnia & Herzegovina

Abstract

Nearly a century ago, Gordon Childe coined the expression “Neolithic Revolution” to account for the shift from a foraging to a farming lifestyle. If the social, cultural, economic and demographic implications of this change indeed had a profound and inalterable impact upon the fate of humanity, this process was by no means sudden, as the term Revolution would imply. On the contrary, the process of domestication of plants and animals took several millennia to be completed, from the earliest occurrences of domesticates by c. 8500–8000 cal. BC in the Fertile Crescent, to the general presence of farming practices by 7000 cal. BC across the Levant. Likewise, the very process of crop domestication can take up to several millennia to be fully completed. Wild predecessors for Neolithic plant domesticates are absent in Europe, while the contribution of the European wild fauna to animal domesticate populations appears to be overall limited. All categories of data thus indicate that farming practices were introduced into Europe from the Near East. Although the precise mechanisms of this process are a matter of contention, its chronology is well known thanks to the accumulation of radiocarbon dates across Europe and the application of various statistical tools. It is now established that that the spread of farming practices in Europe lasted three to four thousand years, from its earliest occurrences in the Greek peninsula at the turn of the 8th and the 7th millennia cal. BC to its inception in Britain and Ireland during the first centuries of the 4th millennium cal. BC. Another significant recent result is that the diffusion of farming practices is not a continuous process, but is rather structured by alternating episodes of dispersion and stasis. Such local delays were previously suspected. The rate of dispersal changes significantly from region to region, being much faster for instance in the Mediterranean and comparatively much slower in central and north-western Europe. Several factors account for these chronological differences, including climate change, ecological constraints, the nature of early farming practices and, notably, the most difficult variable: the density and role of local foraging populations.