24th October 2011, 04:42 PM
P Prentice Wrote:@ jack - so what makes you think that the hunter gatherers of this country took up farming?
Ah good point........the evidence is scant.
Invasion or innovation (or both!)
I can't state a definite, but ockhams razor would have me favour a mixture of both...and a creolisation of the two separate cultures, resulting in the construction of monuments as a statement of ancestral 'ownership' or summit along those lines.
But nothing is simple. I'd have to say.............erm. Dunno for sure.
Till I get my mits on a time machine though.
There's interesting stuff around Ertebole in denmark and some sites in the balkans though, with 'hunter-gatherer' sites looking contemporary with 'farming' sites, and later 'hunter-gatherer' sites with pottery presumably form the nearby 'farmers'.
But definitions of both are dubious at best! We still hunt and gather now, and the divide between sowing a field with selectively bread crops and throwing the seeds of your gathered plants back where you got the from is very narrow (in archaeological terms). The whole thing is a very fuzzy transition.
Add that to the difficulty in recognising the difference between people and ideas moving in the archaeological record we're a bit stuffed.
Just have to wait for lots more isotope analysis of human and animal bones to provenance them and maybe tell what they've been eating to sort it out.