Ancestral Journeys - the peopling of Europe from the first venturers to the vikings

378 Pages·2015·23.4 MB·English

by  Jean Manco

Frontispiece Neolithic figurines from Cernavoda, Romania, late 4th millennium
BC.

About the Author
Jean Manco is a building historian with an inter-disciplinary approach, having
been trained within an archaeological unit. She has taught at Plymouth and
Bristol universities. Her previous publications include building, town, parish and
charity histories. More recently she has pursued her wider interests in genetics,
linguistics and the prehistory of Europe.
Other titles of interest published by
Thames & Hudson include: The Complete World of Human
Evolution Exploring the World of the Vikings
The Historical Atlas of the Celtic World The Human Past: World Prehistory and
the Development of Human Societies The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How
Modern Science is Rewriting Their Story The Origins of the Irish
See our websites
www.thamesandhudson.com
www.thamesandhudsonusa.com
To my late father, for the gypsy in his soul
Contents
Preface
1 Who Are the Europeans?
2 Migration: Principles and Problems
3 The First Europeans
4 Mesolithic Hunters and Fishermen
5 The First Farmers
6 Dairy Farming
7 The Copper Age
8 The Indo-European Family
9 Indo-Europeans and Genetics
10 Beaker Folk to Celts and Italics
11 Minoans and Mycenaeans
12 Iron Age Traders and Warriors
13 Etruscans and Romans
14 The Great Wandering
15 Enter the Slavs
16 Bulgars and Magyars
17 Vikings
18 Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Sources of Illustrations
Index
Copyright
Preface
Since the first edition of this book, the flood of exciting results from ancient
DNA has continued to reshape our views of the European past. So Thames &
Hudson kindly permitted me to revise the text for the paperback edition. The
enlarged tables of ancient haplogroups show the leap in knowledge in just two
years. It has enabled me to replace conjectures from modern DNA and/or
physical anthropology with more reliable evidence. Archaeology has not stood
still either. New evidence has rearranged ideas and shuffled the sequence of
events in several parts of our story.
As I revealed in the preface to the original edition of this book, I entered the
world of archaeology at one remove. As an historian my perspective was that of
the outsider. That often encourages critique. I soon began to feel that the
archaeological love affair with continuity had gone too far. An archaeological
colleague to whom I confided my frustration surprised me. On a far distant
shore, he told me, there was an archaeologist who agreed with me. That
surprising person was David Anthony. The year was 1990. That gave me hope
that one day I might be able to talk openly about migration without having my
sanity called into question. David Anthony has continued to blaze a trail for
those of us fascinated by the wanderings of our ancestors. His recent cooperation
with geneticists from Harvard University in a study of the genetics of the Indo-
Europeans generated crucial data new to this edition. My greatest debt therefore
is to him.
A second debt is to the polyglot online communities following the progress
of population genetics and participating in it. Their members alert each other to
the publication of papers on genetics, comment on them, root out relevant
material in many languages from other disciplines, create projects to investigate
the origins of specific genetic lineages and support them financially. The first
edition of this work was written and rewritten in constantly evolving online draft
while pelted with comments from far too many of them to thank individually
here. During the transfer to print format, it was the turn of archaeologists Jim
Mallory, Chris Scarre, James Graham-Campbell and David Miles, and geneticist
Terry Brown, to point out problems. My thanks go to all those throughout this