Migration

Humans are excellent at changing their habitat and adapting to new circumstances. Therefore, migration is a phenomenon of all times. For instance, when the natural environment changed, as a consequence of a change in climate, either humans had to change their way of life or they moved on to elsewhere. As we have seen, after the fourth and last Ice Age, Paleolithic hunters moved northward with the retreating ice. A wide zone of a temperate climate thereby opened up for the first Neolithic agriculturalists: starting from the Near East, people, animals, and crops colonized the whole of South and Central Europe. The history of the Neolithic is practically everywhere the history of a steady expansion of areas inhabited and cultivated by these early farmers and at the same time the history of an ongoing shrinkage of the wild areas where groups of hunter-gatherers survived. That expansion must often have been accompanied by the migrations of particular groups, resulting in a mixture of old and new inhabitants in certain areas, or in the expulsion or extermination of the “primitive” hunters by the “modern” farmers and herdsmen in others. And migrations did not stop with the arrival of a sedentary population. Exhaustion of the soil because of simple and destructive agricultural methods—as, for example, the slash-and-burn techniques of clearing forest grounds—as well as the pressures of a relative overpopulation time and again pushed new groups of people to move on. In addition to this, there developed along the edges of certain agricultural zones forms of nomadism where the owners of herds of sheep and goats lived in a form of symbiosis with the agricultural settlements with which they would exchange their products. Such symbiosis would often lead to an enlarged food supply, which in its turn would lead to population growth among the herdsmen, until a critical point was reached that forced them to plunder and sometimes to conquer the neighboring agrarian regions. This was especially true of fertile and densely populated agrarian areas that were easily accessible, as were the river basins where the early Bronze Age civilizations had arisen. Immigration here often took place in the shape of conquests by foreign invaders who, however, in the course of time, regularly merged with the much more numerous local populations and so mostly lost their original nomadic habits.