This chapter examines the great importance of migration in human history and in creating human patterns of diversity, both biological and cultural. It also examines some examples of migration as recorded in early historical sources and in the ethnographic records of indigenous peoples made during the early colonial era. An ability and a propensity to migrate over large distances have always been defining features of our human species, Homo sapiens, right across the globe. The focus of this book, however, is on prehistoric and indigenous populations and their migrations, prior to the massive global movements of the past few centuries.
We only need to look at our neighbors, at large crowds, or television, to realize that the world of humanity is very diverse. Human populations have different kinds of behavior, speak different languages, and look different from each other in biological terms. How has all this diversity come about? Has it evolved in place through the 60 or more millennia since the ancestors of H. sapiens first spread across the Old World, purely as a result of differing adaptations to varied natural and cultural environments? To a degree, the answer must be “yes,” given that we can see so much environmentally related biological variation if we compare, for instance, Europeans, southern Africans, and eastern Asians. But does it also reflect the results of successive episodes of population migration, in many different times and places, erasing or mixing the old patterns and creating strikingly new ones? The answer is emphatically also “yes.” Recent history tells us a great deal about major population migrations, about how Europeans and Africans migrated to the Americas, Britons to Australia, Russians to Siberia, Dutch to South Africa, and Chinese to Taiwan. Recent history leaves no doubt that migration has been absolutely fundamental in the creation of our modern world, even if some of those migratory episodes occurred with little attention to the basic human rights that concern so many of us today Going back in time, we read how Arabs migrated from Arabia into Iraq and Egypt, Turks from central Asia into Anatolia (now Turkey), Vikings from Scandinavia to Greenland, and Anglo-Saxons from across the North Sea to England. Before this we have the Roman Empire, Han Dynasty migration from central into southern China, and Greek and Phoenician colonies in the Mediterranean. And before the Greeks? History before 3000 years ago rather lets us down, certainly if we go back beyond the Old Testament and the ancient Indian
First Migrants: Ancient Migration in Global Perspective, First Edition. Peter Bellwood. © Peter Bellwood. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Rig-Veda. But the research tools of archaeology, comparative linguistics, and human biology are at hand.
What can these three disciplines reveal to us? Old rubbish has a tale to tell. If it did not, there would be no archaeologists, although any archaeologist will rightfully insist that the archaeological record consists of far more than just rubbish. Artifacts, offerings to the dead, art and architecture, ways of acquiring and processing food, technology in stone and metal, and human-environment relations, all play major roles in interpreting the past. When taken together, they allow us to read how ancient lifestyles, as expressed in material culture, migrated hand in hand with human populations across continents and oceans.
Comparative linguistics tells us how related languages have evolved within families, have spread, mixed, and sometimes died. Language families are an absolutely fundamental source of data on ancient migrations. In the historical record, the main mechanism behind their large-scale and long-distance spreads and their establishments as the long-term vernaculars of whole populations, not just elites, has always been migration of their speakers. Large-scale linguistic switching (or 'language shift' in linguistic terms) on a permanent basis without migration of any kind has generally been of limited geographical significance.
Skeletons and genes tell us how biological populations of humanity have evolved and migrated. Living populations such as sub-Saharan Africans, Western Eurasians (including North Africans), eastern Asians (including Native Americans and many Pacific peoples), and Australasians (Indigenous Australians and Melanesians), all form major geographical and biological foci of variation that are of great significance in the human migration story. But all human populations also have blurred biological boundaries and reveal histories of admixture, some no doubt on many occasions if we go back far enough in time.
What is migration? More to the point, what might the concept have meant during deep prehistory before written records began? Historians and sociologists discuss many variations in the modern world.1 But the many complex categories within the modern concept of migration cannot be identified easily in the records of the prehistoric past. For the purposes of the prehistoric and early historical record of human affairs described in this book, migration was simply the permanent movement of all or part of a population to inhabit a new territory, separate from that in which it was previously based. Permanent translocation is an essential part of this definition.2
I suggest this simple baseline definition because, as we go further back in time, it becomes more difficult to identify migratory activity in any exact and practical way, for instance, separating warfare or disaster refugees from economic migrants searching for food or land. It also becomes more difficult to determine if the migrants spread gradually and continuously from a source, or if they undertook one or more long-distance jumps (leap-frogging) across large areas of intervening terrain. For instance, we know for certain that early humans had achieved the colonization of the habitable regions of the world before the end of the Pleistocene geological epoch, except for Antarctica and some remote oceanic islands. But exactly where the very first Paleolithic colonists in each region placed their footprints in the earth, how many people took part in each component migration, and what languages they spoke will never be known to us with any exactitude.
The concept of migration has another complicating factor. The first migrations were necessarily into regions that had no prior inhabitants. But after our hominin ancestors, both archaic and modern, had established their first colonies across the globe, so new migrants had to enter regions that already had populations in residence, unless they could settle in remote islands or environments too hostile for previous occupation. For this kind of activity we can use the term immigration, as used for late prehistoric archaeological contexts by some archaeologists,3 retaining the term colonization for migration into territories previously devoid of human inhabitants.
Migration is more than mere mobility. Hunters, pastoralists, and many species of mammals (including marine ones) and birds move regularly along well-defined routes through territories that are often of enormous size. Ethologists and anthropologists often use the term migration in this mode, and it might have allowed certain groups of humans to learn the distant landscape features that could assist them to undertake a permanent migration, as just defined. But, if involving return to a home territory this kind of movement is not considered to be migration in the sense used in this book.
Similarly, the migrations of single individuals or very small groups in prehistory cannot easily be recognized within the archaeological, linguistic, or genetic records, except in very rare cases. For instance, strontium isotope ratio analysis of ancient human bone from cemeteries can allow analysts to establish the geochemical location of a person's place of birth and childhood (Montgomery 2010). This analytical technique has developed greatly in recent years, but it is necessarily restricted to ancient individuals (sometimes more than one in any given archaeological site), who in many cases are hard to relate to the global sources of the populations to which they belonged. Individuals will always have been migrating locally as they found partners, fell out with relatives, or searched for new resources, exactly as they do now. But such migration is only of direct interest for this book if it can be related to an actual episode of population migration beyond the individual level. The focus is on the large-scale permanent translocations of population that changed prehistory, in all cases covering many generations in time, many hundreds or thousands of kilometers in space, and with repercussions on humanity that still live with us today.
How can we recognize the existence of migration in the prehistoric record? Most records are proxy, in the sense that they are not direct representations of ancient biological populations moving in time and space. Only ancient human bones and the ancient DNA contained in them can be witnesses in this way, and then only if the data obtained are interpreted correctly, especially bearing in mind the very small sample sizes that are generally available for study using these techniques. On a broader level, it is by comparing the patterns implied by the independent sets of data derived from biology, archaeology, linguistics and the paleoenvironmental sciences (to name the most significant data sources), rather than human biology and genetics alone, that the science of reconstructing human population prehistory makes real progress. None of these disciplines alone shows us real populations actually on the move in the deep past. Historical judgment will always matter - we cannot expect Significant prehistoric human migrations to become revealed in entirety by one technique, no matter how new or clever.
Migration has always been important for humankind. According to Anthony Marsella and Erin Ring (2003:3), it is “inherent in human nature - an instinctual and inborn disposition and inclination to wonder and to wander in search of new opportunities and new horizons.” They add rightly that migration has led to the separation of the human species into “its myriad ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and racial groups.” Russell King (2007:16) drives this home by stating “In a sense, humans are born migrants: our evolution is fundamentally linked to the act of migration, to moving from one place to another and adapting to that environment.”
For every migration, there will always be a hierarchy of underlying environmental and cultural causes, and these causes need to be identified and understood by prehistorians. The real value of migration is that it imposes new patterns in culture, language, and biology, both through time and in space, that were not present before. As such, it rearranges the component parts of preexisting circumstances and presents new patterns of variation upon which the processes of both biological and cultural evolution can act anew.
World History
