70 i Flora Unveiled
wheat, barley, sheep, and goats— and simple pottery is found for the first time.^3 At the same
period, living quarters expanded to a settlement beyond the cave, indicative of an increase
in population.
The rapid transformation observed at this site strongly suggests that agriculture came
to mainland Greece through a process of migration and colonization from the Near East,
rather than through the indigenous adoption of Near Eastern agricultural practices. The
case for migration is even stronger in Cyprus and Crete, which had no Epipaleolithic
human inhabitants and no indigenous wild progenitors of the suite of domesticated
animals and plants that suddenly appear around 9000 bce in Cyprus^4 and 7000 bce
in Crete.
The agriculturalists who colonized Greece and Crete in the Neolithic were once believed
to have spoken an ancient Anatolian language, unrelated to Indo- European languages such
as Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. More recently, however, the Anatolian language family, which
also includes Hittite, Lydian, Lycian, Palaic, and Luwian, has been shown to be an early
branch of the Indo- European (IE) language phylogenetic tree.^5 The hypothetical ancestor
of all the Indo- European languages, including the Anatolian group, has been reconstructed
and termed Proto- Indo- European (PIE). According to one estimate, the Anatolian lan-
guage family branched off from the main PIE trunk around 6500 bce.^6
The Rapid East– West Migration of Crop PlantsOnce agriculture had taken hold in Greece, Neolithic settlements began to appear in the
Balkans to the north, bringing an end to the remnants of the Mesolithic semi- nomadic life-
style that had persisted there. European Mesolithic sites were typically short- term camps
that were used repeatedly for hundreds of years. Rarely, more substantial permanent settle-
ments were built reminiscent of Çatalhüyük in Anatolia and the Natufian settlements in the
Levant.
Overall, it took only 3,000 more years for the new farming way of life to spread from
Greece to the rest of Europe.^7 It was not just the idea of agriculture that spread, but the
domesticates themselves. By the early fourth millennium bce, virtually all of the eight
founder crops in Europe, as well as the four animal domesticates, were descended from
ancestors in the Fertile Crescent region. With the exception of the pig, not one of them had
been independently domesticated by indigenous Europeans.^8
As outlined by Jared Diamond, the rapid transmission of the eight founder crops was
facilitated by the predominant east– west migration axis, which meant that the plants
remained at approximately the same latitude.^9 Since climate and day length, both of which
strongly affect plant growth, are closely linked to latitude, the founder crops were, in
effect, preadapted for European, especially southern European, climates. As discussed in
Chapter 3, none of the eight founder crops could have spread without human intervention.
Artificial selection had resulted in the loss of the seed dispersal mechanisms of the wild
progenitors of cereals. The heads of ripened grain remained intact because of their tough
rachises. Similarly, the ripened pods of domesticated legumes failed to split open as they
normally would, due to the loss of the dehiscence mechanism. Instead, humans took over
the role of seed dispersal.