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Ireland for thousands of years, leaving little trace on the landscape and few permanent signs, shell
middens apart, for archaeologists to follow.
Meanwhile on continental Europe radical changes were under way. From modest beginnings in
the Middle East, farming was beginning its unstoppable march towards the Isles. Ten thousand
years ago in the Fertile Crescent, in that part of what is now Syria and northern Iraq that is drained
by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, people had learned how to cultivate wild grasses and how to
replace hunting with domestication. Farming ushered in the New Stone Age – or Neolithic, to
distinguish it from the hunter-gatherer Mesolithic – with a whole range of new stone implements
for farming. They also made pottery. The invention of agriculture seems such a small change in the
tactics of subsistence, yet it has led to the complete reshaping of the world into its modern form.
Whole books have been written about this, and I will resist the temptation to go off at a tangent,
restricting myself instead to the implications for our remote ancestors, and for the gene patterns that
await our scrutiny.
Carbon-dates from farming sites and the comparison of different pottery styles show that
agriculture spread through continental Europe by two principal routes. The split probably came as
the first farmers reached the Balkans and the lower Danube from Turkey around 8,500 years ago,
about the time that Ireland finally separated from Britain and the residents of Mount Sandel were
tucking into yet another bowl of limpet soup. One group of farmers headed north to reach the great
Hungarian plains, then, after a thousand-year pause, moved rapidly north and west along the major
river valleys of the Oder and the Elbe towards the Baltic and the North Sea. They needed to clear
thick forest to make enough space for cultivation. This they did by ring-barking and burning the
dead trees and undergrowth, thereby fertilizing the soil with ash. By 7,000 years ago they had
reached northern France, southern Belgium and the Netherlands.
Meanwhile the other group moved along the Mediterranean coast of Italy, southern France and
Iberia. By 7,500 years ago they had reached the Atlantic coast of France. At each point along the
way, in the forest and on the seashore, each group of farming pioneers encountered the earlier
Mesolithic inhabitants, but there is no archaeological evidence that their interactions were anything
but peaceful. Just as in Ireland, the highest density of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers was around the
coast, rather than in the dense inland forests. In several places, particularly around the coast near
Lisbon in Portugal, Neolithic farming communities lived fairly close to Mesolithic settlements and
carbon-dating shows that both were occupied at much the same time. However, the newcomers
chose sites a little way away from the estuaries favoured by the hunter-gatherers, instead setting up
camp inland on higher ground between the main river valleys. As they were not competing for the
same living space, this reduced the potential for conflict.
In Ireland the same process of peaceful co-existence seems to have accompanied the arrival of
farming communities. There were thriving Mesolithic settlements all around the coast, some of
which, like Sutton in County Dublin, had been occupied for long enough to accumulate enormous
middens of discarded shells over 100 metres long. They certainly would not have thrown in the
towel as soon as the first farmer paddled round the coast. At Ferriter’s Cove on the Dingle
peninsula in County Kerry, the presence of polished stone axes – which, like pottery, are a reliable
signal of the Neolithic – among the otherwise Mesolithic remains at this shoreline site, shows that
the hunter-gatherers were in contact with farmers. Cattle bones at the site also show this
interaction. So, in Ireland, just as elsewhere in Atlantic Europe, the transition to farming from