Religious Factors in the Geography of Animal Husbandry

Extract

The general expansion of western Asian peasant cultures through the Mediterranean to Iberia, France, Switzerland and ultimately to the channel coast and across into Ireland and the British Isles is well documented by detailed studies. The resultant local European cultures, collectively known as Western Neolithic, were the product of colonists who introduced the first domestic cattle into their areas of settlement. The period of the migrations to Europe can be bracketed roughly. Mesopotamian tholoi and other megalithic architecture were introduced into Cyprus in the fifth millennium together with snake symbolism. At the farthest reach of the migration lies Great Britain, and the neolithic colonists, known to the archaeologists as the Windmill Hill culture, arrived at the southern shores of Great Britain ca. 2300. Obviously the expansion into Europe was not a single movement, but proceeded by fits and starts with groups hiving off and even back tracking along the routes. Longifrons cattle were introduced into Europe with this migration. The important migration of the fifth millennium was followed in the third millennium by a second major expansion with West Asian colonists following the track of the first expansion, but this time taking two major additional routes, one into southeastern Europe via Asia Minor and the Aegean and the other into Europe via the Caucasus, the southern Russian grassland and forest steppes. In the settlement sites of this second migration, whether in Crete or in the Caucasus on the shores of the Baltic, the evidence for the cultural complex we have described becomes overwhelming, and primigenius, the sacred breed, is found at all major sites.