Spread of Farming into Europe: The Neolithic Expansion

The spread of farming into Europe was the long process, between about 6700 and 4000 BC, by which agriculture and animal herding moved from Anatolia across the continent, replacing a way of life based on hunting, fishing and gathering. It reshaped Europe’s landscapes, diets and settlement patterns, and ancient DNA has shown that it also reshaped Europe’s population: most of the first European farmers were descendants of migrants from Anatolia.

Background: farming before Europe

Farming began in the Fertile Crescent of south-west Asia around 9500 BC, as described in the article on the Neolithic Revolution. Over the next three millennia people there domesticated wheat, barley, lentils, peas and flax, and herded sheep, goats, cattle and pigs.

By 7000 BC farming villages were well established across central Anatolia. The best known is Çatalhöyük, a densely packed settlement of mud-brick houses on the Konya plain. Farming then spread westwards through Anatolia to the shores of the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara, at sites such as Barcın Höyük and Menteşe.

Europe itself offered few of the wild plants and animals that had been domesticated in the Near East. Wild wheat, wild barley, wild sheep and wild goats were essentially absent from most of the continent. When farming arrived, it therefore came as a complete “package” of crops, livestock, tools and knowledge brought from outside.

What happened: the routes into Europe

The earliest farming settlements in Europe appeared in Greece and Crete between roughly 7000 and 6500 BC. Knossos on Crete was first settled by farmers around 7000 BC, and Thessaly in northern Greece saw villages such as Sesklo and Argissa established by about 6500 BC. Franchthi Cave in the Peloponnese shows foragers giving way to domestic plants and animals in the same period.

From the southern Balkans, farming followed two main corridors. The first, often called the Danubian route, led north through the Balkans. The Starčevo–Körös–Criș cultures, named after sites in Serbia, Hungary and Romania, spread across the central Balkans and the Carpathian Basin between about 6200 and 5600 BC.

Around 5500 BC a new culture emerged in western Hungary and spread with extraordinary speed: the Linear Pottery culture, known by its German abbreviation LBK. Within about 300 to 500 years its farmers, living in timber longhouses, had settled the fertile loess soils from Ukraine and Poland to the Paris Basin.

The second corridor ran along the Mediterranean. Farmers making Impressed Ware pottery reached the Adriatic coast and southern Italy around 6100-6000 BC. Their successors, the makers of Cardial Ware, decorated pots by pressing the edge of cockle shells (Cardium) into the wet clay. They settled the coasts of southern France and Spain around 5700-5400 BC, often moving by boat and leapfrogging from one coastal pocket to the next.

The final stage was slower. Farming reached the northern European plain and southern Scandinavia, with the Funnel Beaker culture, around 4000 BC. In Britain and Ireland, farming communities appeared around 4000-3800 BC, as told in the article on the arrival of farming in Neolithic Britain.

Migrants or ideas? The debate and the DNA

For most of the twentieth century archaeologists argued over how farming spread. The Australian-born archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, who coined the term “Neolithic Revolution”, saw it as the movement of peoples and influences from the Near East.

In the early 1970s the archaeologist Albert Ammerman and the geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza combined radiocarbon dates with mathematics. They proposed a “wave of advance”: a gradual expansion of farming populations, with each generation settling a little further on, at an average of roughly 1 kilometre per year. Cavalli-Sforza later argued that modern European genes still preserved a gradient from south-east to north-west.

Many archaeologists in the 1980s and 1990s preferred a different model, in which local hunter-gatherers adopted crops and livestock from their neighbours with little movement of people. In 1987, from a different angle, Colin Renfrew linked the spread of farmers to the spread of Indo-European languages, a theory known as the Anatolian hypothesis.

Since about 2010, the study of DNA extracted from ancient skeletons has largely settled the main question. Genomes from Neolithic farmers in Germany, Hungary, Spain, Greece and Britain consistently show that they descended mostly from Neolithic populations of Anatolia and the Aegean, not from the hunter-gatherers who lived in Europe before them.

Geneticists call this population “Early European Farmers”. Their ancestry differed sharply from that of the “Western Hunter-Gatherers” who had lived in Europe since the end of the Ice Age. A well-known example of the latter is Cheddar Man, whose genome suggests he had dark skin and blue eyes, a combination common among Mesolithic Europeans.

The DNA also shows that migration was not a single event. Farmers moving north along the Danube and those moving west along the Mediterranean had both come from the Aegean region but formed two partly separate streams. The farmers who reached Britain around 4000 BC were descended mostly from groups that had travelled the Mediterranean route and then through France.

In Britain, studies published from 2019 onward found that incoming farmers replaced most of the earlier hunter-gatherer ancestry, with only a small local contribution. This pattern, repeated across much of Europe, supports a demographic expansion of farming populations rather than the simple spread of an idea.

Meeting the hunter-gatherers

The encounter between farmers and foragers was complex and varied from place to place. In the Danube Gorges of Serbia and Romania, where the Mesolithic community of Lepenski Vir lived, there is evidence of contact and some intermarriage around 6200-5900 BC.

Elsewhere the two groups lived side by side for a long time. At Blätterhöhle, a cave in western Germany, genetic and isotope studies indicate that people with hunter-gatherer ancestry and diet coexisted with farmers in the region for roughly 2,000 years, until around 3000 BC.

On the coasts of the Baltic and the North Sea, hunter-gatherer cultures such as the Ertebølle of Denmark adopted pottery and traded with farming neighbours, yet kept fishing, sealing and gathering for more than a thousand years. Their resilience helps explain why the farming frontier stalled in northern Europe for centuries.

Over time, the genetic contribution of hunter-gatherers to farming communities grew. Between about 5000 and 3500 BC, many European populations show a “resurgence” of hunter-gatherer ancestry, reflecting gradual intermarriage as the two groups merged.

Consequences

Farming transformed daily life. People lived in permanent villages, stored grain, made pottery and polished stone axes, and kept animals for meat and, increasingly, for milk. Chemical traces of milk fats in pottery show dairying in north-western Anatolia by around 6500 BC and in many early European farming communities afterwards.

Farming also allowed populations to grow. Studies of skeleton age profiles and the number of settlements indicate a sharp rise in population in many regions after farmers arrived, followed in places by declines and crises. Violent episodes such as the Talheim massacre in Germany, around 5000 BC, show that the new way of life also brought competition for land.

Large parts of Europe’s landscape began to change. Forests were cleared for fields and pastures, and from the fifth millennium BC farmers built monumental structures, including long barrows, enclosures and, later, megalithic tombs.

By the numbers

Legacy

The farmers who spread across Europe left a lasting genetic mark. Most present-day Europeans carry a substantial share of Early European Farmer ancestry, combined with hunter-gatherer ancestry and the later steppe ancestry brought by the Yamnaya-related migrations after about 3000 BC.

The European diet of bread, porridge, peas, lentils and dairy products also goes back to this expansion. So does much of the rural landscape of fields, villages and grazing land that shaped European history for the next seven thousand years.

The debate over the spread of farming also changed archaeology itself. It became one of the first great questions in which genetics, radiocarbon dating and traditional excavation were combined, and it remains a model for studying prehistoric migration.

Myths and facts

Myth: Farming spread because hunter-gatherers saw it was a better life. Fact: Early farming meant hard work, a narrower diet and new diseases. DNA shows that the main driver was the movement and growth of farming populations, not hunter-gatherers voluntarily adopting a superior lifestyle.

Myth: The hunter-gatherers were wiped out. Fact: Their numbers were small compared with farmers, but their descendants survived, intermarried with farmers and still contribute to the ancestry of modern Europeans.

Myth: Europe’s first farmers were the ancestors of Indo-European speakers. Fact: This was proposed in the Anatolian hypothesis, but most linguists and geneticists now link the spread of Indo-European languages to later migrations from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, although the question is not fully closed.

Timeline

• c. 9500 BC: Farming begins in the Fertile Crescent of south-west Asia.
• c. 7000 BC: Farmers settle Knossos on Crete; farming villages flourish in central Anatolia.
• c. 6500 BC: Farming villages established in Thessaly, Greece, and around the Sea of Marmara.
• c. 6200-5600 BC: Starčevo–Körös–Criș farmers spread through the Balkans and the Carpathian Basin.
• c. 6000 BC: Impressed Ware farmers reach southern Italy and the Adriatic.
• c. 5700-5400 BC: Cardial Ware farmers settle the coasts of southern France and Spain.
• c. 5500-5000 BC: Linear Pottery farmers expand from Hungary to the Paris Basin.
• c. 4000-3800 BC: Farming reaches Britain, Ireland and southern Scandinavia.
• 1971-1973: Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza measure the spread of farming and propose their “wave of advance” model.
• 2010s: Ancient DNA studies show European farmers descended mostly from Anatolian migrants.

Why it matters

The spread of farming into Europe was one of the most important turning points in the continent’s history. It brought the crops, animals and settled villages on which every later European society was built, and ancient DNA has revealed it as a great migration that, together with later movements, forged the ancestry of modern Europeans.