ABSTRACT
The preceding chapter consisted of an examination of the settlements and assemblages of food-gatherers in Eastern Europe roughly 7000-4500 B.C. On the basis of the present evidence, the hunters and gatherers during this period avoided settling in the fertile loess basins and plateaus of Europe north of the Danube and large alluvial plains of the southern tributaries of the Danube. Settlements of the earliest food-producing groups in Europe occur in a period contemporary with the latest of these food-gatherers and with the early part of the north European Atlantic vegetational period. They are distributed, however, in exactly those areas which were avoided by the hunters and gatherers. They occur on the brown forest soils and alluvial deposits of the rivers of south Bulgaria, south Yugoslavia and Greece which drain into the Aegean Sea. North of this they are located on the loess deposits of the widespread Danube basin and the upper reaches of rivers in Poland and Germany which flow into the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. Carbon 14 evidence (Fig.39) shows that the earliest of these settlements are on the south-east edge of Europe, in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece where they are dated to 5600-4500 B.C.1 Settlements at the north-western limits of the initial expansion of agriculture and stockbreeding (in Holland and Germany) are dated to 4500 B.C. at the earliest. It is accepted that the expansion of the earliest agriculturalists into Europe was from the Near East on the basis of evidence of the presence of the initial stages in the cultivation of plants and the domestication of animals in this region. Thence they spread westwards and northwards via south-east Europe into temperate Europe. But whether
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