The Great Dispersal, Part 2: The Push and Pull of Climate Instability - Westward Migration

 

Previously, in Part 1 of The Great Dispersal, we left off in Anatolia (modern Turkey), where sedentary farming communities thrived, especially in the northwest regions around the shores of the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea. These were refugees who had relocated from the environmentally stressed Fertile Crescent during the seventh millennium BC. Anatolia proved to be well suited for their mixed agricultural way of life, ushering in what I refer to as the golden age of early Neolithic dairying and cheesemaking. This golden age did not last long, however, as the situation turned dire during the late seventh millennium BC when a catastrophic climatic event, which I will refer to as the 6200 BC event, triggered mass migration out of western Anatolia.

Now, to put this into context, I said in an earlier post that the Holocene has been an amazingly consistent, human-friendly climate era over the past 11,000 years. Nevertheless, there have been periodic climate change events during the Holocene, quite small relative to the pre-Holocene, but large enough to devastate human communities, because it doesn’t take much in terms of a climatic shift to wreak havoc on humanity. This should serve as a stark wakeup call to global humanity today. There is no longer any question that we are in for a rough future, and we need to be building resiliency into our food systems across the globe, NOW.  Furthermore, dairying and cheesemaking MUST be a component of innovative strategies to build resiliency . But that is a topic for a future post.

The ensuing migratory surge was, arguably, the single most influential event in cheese history. Why? Because the resulting movement of displaced cheesemakers led to their dispersal into diverse new environments across Europe that would inspire the development of radically new cheesemaking practices made possible through the mastering of rennet coagulation. Indeed, upon their migration across the Aegean Sea to the Balkan Peninsula, cheese makers from Anatolia found themselves in the exceptionally diverse and hospitable environment (or more accurately, collection of microenvironments) of Europe. From there, as they spread throughout Europe, their descendants would go on to profoundly shape cheese history in the millennia to come as these sojourners developed a seemingly endless array of different cheese varieties and sub-varieties, each exquisitely sculpted to their new local environment.

However, westward migration across Europe was not the only route taken by cheesemaking refugees from Anatolia. Concurrently, a migratory surge through the Balken Peninsula moved northwards and then eastwards to the western fringes of the Eurasian Steppe, which then commenced a several millennia long movement of cheesemaking technology eastwards to the shores of the Pacific Ocean and even beyond to Japan. In striking contrast to the westward movement, cheesemakers along the eastward trajectory clung tenaciously to the simple acid coagulated and acid-heat coagulated techniques of the earliest cheesemakers. The story of eastward migration will be the topic of The Great Dispersal, Part 3, but for now let’s focus on the west.

The 6200 BC Event
The principal driving force behind the Neolithic mass movement out of western Anatolia to the Balkan Peninsula and beyond (both to the east across Asia and west across Europe) took the form of an extraordinarily severe climatic disruption caused by two independent rapid climate change events that happened to occur simultaneously. The first event involved a recurring climatic fluctuation that takes place approximately every fifteen hundred years, possibly due to an irregularity in the earth’s orbit that temporarily reduces the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth’s surface, or possibly due to periodic changes in solar output. Whatever the cause, the repercussions on earth include pronounced cooling and drying lasting several hundred years. These climatic oscillations have repeatedly influenced the history of cheesemaking in remarkable ways.

One such oscillation that occurred towards the end of the seventh millennium BC plunged the northern hemisphere into a cold and dry period. On this occasion, however, the effect on climate was magnified dramatically by an abrupt, independent, secondary climatic event that occurred concurrently around 6200 BC. The cause of this secondary event was the sudden release of an inland sea of glacial melt water that had accumulated for several thousand years behind an ice dam formed by the retreating Laurentide glacial ice sheet of North America. When the ice dam finally gave way, a veritable ocean of fresh water poured into the Labrador Sea, which raised global sea levels by as much as 1.4 meters. The resulting disruption to ocean currents then set into motion the most abrupt, severe, and widespread cold event during the past ten thousand years.

Archeological evidence indicates that sea level rise combined with very cold winters and drought that descended upon Southwest Asia triggered widespread social collapse, violence, and mass migration of Neolithic farmers out of Anatolia to the Balkan Peninsula. From there, the archaeological material record that the Neolithic refugees left behind, including their trails of discarded pottery, remains of domesticated plant and animal species that they brought with them from Anatolia, and the genetic fingerprint that they left among ancient human skeletal remains, reveal two great paths of migration westwards across Europe that commenced out of the Balkan Peninsula around 5900 BC: a continental route and a coastal Mediterranean route.

The European Continental Route
The continental migratory path proceeded north from the Balkan Peninsula to the Danube River. From there, Neolithic migrants followed the Danube and then Rhine Rivers in fits and starts, dispersing and settling along the way across the cooler, well-watered, fertile lands of Central and Eastern Europe, and eventually reaching the North Sea around 5300 BC. These northern Neolithic settlers incorporated a strong emphasis on dairy cattle into their mixed agricultural subsistence strategy, and the occurrence of milkfat residues in pottery shards from central and eastern Europe dating from 5900 BC indicate that dairying and cheesemaking were practiced from the earliest stages of migration. Indeed, the fabrication of ceramic sieves used to separate curds from whey during cheesemaking was perfected by Neolithic communities in Central Europe by the early sixth millennium BC, which spread from there. Around the same time, the fabrication of ceramic “baby bottles” to assist in feeding animal milk to weaning infants came into practice in central Europe, thereby intensifying selection pressure for the genetic mutation that led to adult lactase persistence, which probably began to make inroads among these communities around this time.

The Neolithic continental march northwards and westwards ground to a halt upon reaching the North Sea of the Atlantic coast. The challenges of navigating the English Channel likely deterred further westward migration to the British Isles, and it evidently took a secondary influx of Neolithic farmers arriving from the Northern Mediterranean rim to brave the maritime transport of communities and their livestock to southern England and Scotland more than a thousand years later, as discussed below. Further continental migration northward along the North Atlantic coast to Scandinavia and the western Baltic region also was delayed. Neolithic communities eventually expanded northward into Denmark and northwest Germany by around 4000 BC, bringing dairying and cheesemaking with them to the western Baltic region.

The European Coastal Mediterranean Route
Western Anatolians had acquired extensive maritime experience in the Aegean Sea before the migratory surges that followed the 6200 BC event, thus they were evidently well trained and equipped to employ sea-faring vessels to speed them on their westward journeys. The remarkably rapid pace of westward movement along the Mediterranean coast is attributed to a process of “punctuated maritime pioneer colonization”, whereby Neolithic pioneering communities used boats to periodically relocate further westwards, bringing their livestock with them. The Neolithic colonizers left behind an extensive pottery trail containing telltale milkfat residues, indicating the arrival of a broad front of dairy processing and cheesemaking across the northern Mediterranean.

Strangely enough, the sea-faring expertise of the Mediterranean colonizers may have played a role in the eventual movement of Neolithic communities across the English Channel to Southwest England and Scotland. Analyses of ancient DNA from Neolithic skeletal remains indicate that a northward migratory spur from coastal Iberia (modern Spain) to northern France took place via the Atlantic seaboard and/or southern France, reaching Brittany by around 5000 BC. This second wave of neolithic arrivals to the North Atlantic apparently then utilized their Mediterranean maritime heritage to colonize the Channel Isles off the coast of France by around 4600 BC, and then colonize southwest England by around 4000 BC and then, shortly thereafter, Scotland, bringing with them a strong emphasis on dairying and cheesemaking as evidenced from an abundance of pottery shards left behind containing milkfat residues. Around 300 years later, Neolithic communities moved into Ireland, again bringing with them an intensive dairying and cheesemaking economy. Shortly thereafter, the neolithic way of life and dairying and cheesemaking reached the Shetland Islands and Isle of Mann north of Scotland.

In summary, the Neolithic mixed agricultural subsistence strategy with a heavy emphasis on dairying and cheesemaking had dispersed across most of Europe to the northern and western most fringes of the continent by the early 4th millennium BC. Furthermore, the intensity of dairying and cheesemaking displayed a pronounced latitudinal gradient from south to north, indicating more rapid and complete Neolithic replacement of indigenous hunter-gathering cultures in northern Europe compared to the Mediterranean south. Thereafter, the combination of isolated sedentary communities living in diverse natural environments across Europe over immense stretches of time set the stage for the slow evolution of a plethora of distinct cheese families and subfamilies that are still evident in Europe today.

Southern Neolithic migration to Africa
An important off shoot of the movement of Neolithic peoples out of Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent during the seventh millennium BC also included a southern thrust from the Levant to the Nile River delta of northern Egypt, bringing with them mixed farming and almost certainly dairying and cheesemaking. However, the origins of dairying and cheesemaking in Africa are more complex than the arrival of a Neolithic package from the southwest Asia. Indeed, evidence of cattle domestication and pastoralism as well as pottery fabrication extend all the back to the 8th millennium BC in the Sudanese Sahara region of northeast Africa. During the early Holocene a moist climatic phase that peaked between 7500 and 6500 BC extended across much of the present-day Sahara Desert, creating an expansive grassland savannah that enabled hunter-gatherers in northeast Africa to develop a new subsistence strategy based on the herding and domestication of cattle, independently of domestication taking place in the Fertile Crescent.

As the Monsoons shifted southwards and the climate of north Africa became progressively drier after 6500 BC, east African cattle pastoralists migrated westwards across southern Libya, where they left behind the first definitive evidence of dairying and cheesemaking on the African continent in the form of milkfat residues in pottery shards, dating to around 5200 BC.  Similar evidence of milkfat residues in pottery shards occur in the upper Nile River valley in Sudan around 5000 to 4600 BC. Furthermore, milk protein residues have been identified in the dental calculus of human remains dated to around 4000 BC, providing further evidence of milk consumption by humans. However, it is not clear whether these cattle pastoralists developed the know-how for dairying and milk processing independently or whether they borrowed the technology from incoming Neolithic migrants from the Levant of southwest Asia who brought their own domesticated cattle, sheep and goats with them.

A second wave of pastoralism, dairying and cheesemaking, this time based on sheep and goat herding, developed along the Mediterranean coast of Algeria around 5000 BC. Sheep and goats are not native to Africa, and human genetic studies strongly suggest that this instance of pastoralism and dairying resulted from southward migratory spurs of the “punctuated maritime pioneer colonization” that was taking place concurrently along the northern Mediterranean coast by Neolithic migrants from Anatolia.

Back in the northeast region of Africa where cattle pastoralism originated, a trail of evidence of dairying and cheesemaking in the form of milkfat residues in pottery shards and milk protein residues in human dental calculus marks the migration of pastoralists southwards in the face of climatic drying, reaching Kenya, and Tanzania by around 3000 BC. Again, it is not clear whether these pastoralists developed the know-how for dairying and milk processing independently or whether they borrowed the technology from incoming Neolithic migrants from southwest Asia. What is clear, however, is that a strongly cattle-based mobile pastoralist subsistence strategy heavily dependent on dairy production and processing developed widely across North Africa around 5000 BC and then spread southwards in the face of climatic drying and desertification. Amazingly, this ancient form of mobile pastoralism continues to be practiced across wide swaths of North Africa and sub-Sarahan Africa to this day.  Much more remains to be discovered about the vibrant dairying and cheesemaking communities of Africa.