Anfenwick’s Reviews > Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings > Status Update

This s the point at which I noticed that the bibliography and notes form a quarter of the book! Ah well... So, I'm a big fan of dairy products and should be more interested in the dairy farmers chapter, but unless palaeontologists can reconstruct the types of cheese they made, I feel a bit 'meh' about it.

Ch 5 - Should we say that farming spread across Europe in the Neolithic, or that farmers did? It would seem the answer is farmers (mostly). In fact, it seems a bit mechanical. Farming boosts populations, but all those people have to go somewhere, and take their farming with them. And their relationship with hunter-gatherers? There are no stereotypical answers, but they were necessarily a minority.

Ch 3 is about Europe's hunter-gatherers after the last ice age, right up until that lifestyle was abandoned about 5000 years ago. An interesting part is where they co-existed with farmers for a time, interesting because I've seen that in other more recent and more documented cultures.

Ch 3 is good to read with Google Maps open alongside. Shock figure: between 46,000 years ago when humans entered Europe and 20,000 years ago when the Ice Age nearly forced them out, the population is guesstimated at less than 6000 individuals. A village on a continent!

Ch 2 - Migration: Principles and Problems. This chapter spends some time on genetic and linguistic technicalities, but underlying that is a much more interesting discussion about the fluidity and hybridity of culture, the mobility of people and the extent to which the two are or aren’t linked. Take-away on that one: it's complicated and varied.

Ch 1 - Who Are The Europeans? Bearing in mind the fact that the borders of Europe are particularly arbitrary... Starts with a very basic summary of genetic science. Easy to forget that a handful of decades ago, we didn't know this stuff. And how quickly it changes. Getting a grip on Europe’s past through genetics is ‘the intellectual equivalent of whitewater rafting’. This book will be wrong by next week!