As early as 1902, the first Neolithic site on the southern fringe of the Danube Valley was excavated by Vasic at Jablanica and soon afterward he dug the classic site of Vinca near Belgrade. … it’s lowest levels showed painted and burnished pottery that prove a connection with Asia Minor and points east, where already at this time, about 3000 BC, a fully civilized Bronze Age was in being. But the first settlers of Vinca were without Bronze. They were farmers using stone tools and supplementing their crops by stock-keeping, hunting and sturgeon-fishing in the Danube.

These Neolithic farmers of the Balkans, looking out from their mountains over the immense plain, cannot have hesitated long before the first parties of homesteaders set out with their cattle and their sacks of seed & corn into the Promised Land.

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Half the population of Europe today is essentially Serb-derived; from the Neolithic Vinca people from Central Serbia.

The men of the Koln-Lindenthal Culture are the descendants, not very far removed of the Balkan farmers who ventured further into the loess lands. From Hungary to Northern Germany and from Poland to Belguim, one single people using the same equipment and pottery identical in every way that leaves a record in the earth spread at tremendous speed establishing a culture known as Danubian 1 with most of its ideas derived from the Balkans. Along its northern fringe a little inland from the North Sea and the Baltic…and pressed onward to colonize Denmark and Southern Sweden.

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Geoffrey Bibby

            Testimony of the Spade

            Chapter 17: The First Farmers

Page: 275

Alfred A. Knopf

New York 1956

The culture that these farmers carried with them into Europe was developed specifically in Vinca

The first people to migrate into what are today Serbs lands were of a particular physical type. Much of their kinsmen who eventually went on to populate all of Europe in the next two millennia furnished the base population from which most living Europeans descend.  

The main conclusions to be drawn from the foregoing study of the Mediterranean World, in its stretch, a quarter of the way around the globe, from India to the Atlantic, may be expressed simply and briefly. In this zone the Mediterranean race is the one predominant human genetic factor. It abuts on the Veddoid group to the southeast, the negroid to the southwest, and the world of the descendants of hybrid Upper Palaeolithic hunters on the north and on the west.

The early divisions of the Mediterranean race noted in the skeletal material from as far back as the fourth millennium B.C. are still valid. These divisions may be separated on several bases; notably, stature, degree of dolichocephaly, and facial cast, which is most easily expressed in terms of the nasal profile.

Carleton Stevens Coon

            Races of Europe         

            (Chapter XI, section 9) 

                Macmillam Press

                1939

In Europe, the Neolithic is primarily the period of the Mediterranean race, in one form or another. It was, apparently, the Mediterraneans who accomplished the change to a food-producing economy elsewhere, and who expanded into the territory of the food-gatherers.

(1) Mediterranean Proper (hereafter meant when the word "Mediterranean" is used alone): Short stature, about 160 cm.; skull length 183-187 mm. male mean; vault height 132-137 mm. mean; cranial index means 73-75; brow ridges and bone development weak, face short, nose leptorrhine to mesorrhine. Type already met in Portugal and Palestine in Late Mesolithic. Represents the paedomorphic or sexually undifferentiated Mediterranean form, and often carries a slight Negroid tendency.

(2) Danubian: The same in body size and build, skull length and cranial index the same; Individually, the index goes to 80. Vault is higher than breadth, means 137-140 mm. Nose mesorrhine to chamaerrhine.

(3) Megalithic: Tall stature, means 167-171 cm., slender build; skull length over 190 mm.; cranial index 68-72 means, individual range below 78; vault moderate in height, less than breadth; forehead moderately sloping, brow ridges often of moderate heaviness, muscular markings stronger, skull base wider, face medium to long, nose leptorrhine, mandible often deep and moderately wide. The East African Elmenteitans represent an individual and extreme form of this. It represents a gerontomorphic or sexually differentiated Mediterranean or Galley Hill form, and in cranial features is closer to Galley Hill itself than any other branch.

(4) Corded: Tall stature, means 167-174 cm.; build linear but muscular, perhaps heavier than the Megalithic; extremely long-headed, 194 mm. mean. Vault of great height, means over 140 mm., exceeding breadth; brow ridges and muscular markings medium to strong; face very long, and of slight to moderate breadth; mandible deep and chin marked, but narrow through the gonial angles. Nose leptorrhine, often prominent. This type, in western and northern Europe, approaches in some respects the Upper Palaeolithic type with which it mixed.

(5) Other Forms: Include mixtures between the four named, as well as others which are also intermediate but perhaps ancestrally undifferentiated. The later "Nordic" forms are intermediate. In Asia Minor and the Irano-Afghan plateau appear forms noted for great prominence and convexity of the nasal skeleton, and lack of nasion depression. Since these features are found on individuals of varying size and proportions, as well as brachycephalic races of the same neighborhood, they seem to represent some local genetic tendency, and cannot be considered the exclusive property of a given race. However, one might name the small variety found in Asia Minor Cappadocian, while a larger form commoner farther east, and metrically close to the Corded, may be called Afghanian.

Carleton Stevens Coon

            Races of Europe         

            (Chapter IV, section 2) 

                Macmillam Press

            1939

What follows are citations from geneticists & anthropologists on the dispersal of this population through Europe:

The first farmers arrived in Greece and settled in the plains of Thessaly as early as the 7^th millennium BC. It is not known whether they made their way round the Thracian shores from Anatolia or crossed the Aegean on rafts. The first settlers no doubt soon appeared in eastern Crete and penetrated to the valley of Knossos.

 

The early colonists in Greece have connections with Anatolia from which they brought their crops, their stock and their goddess figurines. They show connections to Palestine to which they owed some of their pottery. But throughout the Neolithic age, they changed very little.

 

The Evolution of Man and Society

C.D Darlington

Page 150

Simon & Schuster

New York

1969

 

Colin Renfrew, who theorized that Indo-European language was spread by this very population, gives more detail about the first European immigrants:

 

At present it is safe to say that the first farmers in Europe were settled in Greece and Crete before 6000 BC. They had a mixed economy based on the cultivation of wheat and corn. Their livestock were mainly sheep and goats, cattle and pigs were known though perhaps not domesticated at the outset.

 

The process of bringing a farming economy to Europe began somewhere shortly before 6000 BC in Greece or Crete. To be more accurate, we should probably try to use a calibrated radiocarbon technology. If we do so, we should say that farming Greece sometime before 6500 BC. It had reached the Orkney Islands at the northern tip of Scotland and the rest of Europe by about 3500 BC.

 

            Colin Renfrew

            Archeology and Language

            Chapter 3: Lost Languages & Forgotten Scripts

            Page: 147, 148

            Penguin

1987

 

The ancestors of many modern, contemporary, living Serbs (and many Europeans, as we shall read below) entered Europe almost 7000 years ago. They were among the first human beings to populate Europe since the Upper Paleolithic. These early farmers arrived from Anatolia, thousands and thousands of years before this land ever came to be associated with Islam and the Turks.

 

It is possible, with the aid of radiocarbon dating, to trace the spread of the farming economy throughout Europe. From Greece in 6 500 BC, the same type of farming economy was well established in Yugoslavia by around 5000 BC ... The house form here was a very different one (than in Greece). These were long, timber-framed houses much more suited to the winters of north and central Europe than were the mud houses of Greece.

 

            Colin Renfrew

            Archeology and Language

            Chapter 7: Early Language Dispersals

            Page: 155

            Penguin

            1987

 

Epirus, Illyria, Macedonia, Paeonia and Thrace…had been settled, colonized or rather penetrated in the 7^th or 6^th millennium by the first cultivators entering Europe from Anatolia. Three thousand years later, they had been entered by successive southward waves of Aryan expansion.

 

            C. D Darlington

            The Evolution of Man & Society

            Chapter 11: Macedon

            Page: 211

            Simon and Schuster

            1969

 

This map below, taken from Colin Renfrew, illustrates the distribution the Starcevo culture (near Belgrade, Serbia) of the early European Neolithic farmers of various Mediterranean stocks.

 

John Wilkes is Yates Professor of Greek and Roman Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College, in London, England. He has conducted excavations at Hadrian's Wall in Scotland and at Diocletian's Palace in Dalmatia and at Sparta, Greece.

 

Farming communities first begin to appear in the lands between the Adriatic and the Danube in the context of the Starcevo Culture (6000-4500 BC), named after a site on the Danube a little below Belgrade, Serbia. These are at present the earliest farming groups known north of the Vardar valley and did not generally spread beyond the vicinity of Belgrade, northern Serbia, the Banat & Vojvodina. Some settlements of this culture have been found in eastern Bosnia (Gornja Tuzla, Obre near Sarajevo, Varos and Vucedol in Slavonia.

 

            John Wilkes

            The Illyrians

            Chapter: Prehistoric Illyrians

            Page: 30

            Blackwell Publishers

            1992

 

The first & earliest Neolithic culture in the northern Balkans was spread throughout contemporary Serb lands and centered in Belgrade by ancestors of modern, living Serbs. These are the Old Balkan cultures that predate the Slavic invasions by almost 9000 years. Their way of life was transformed when they began to engage in farming by cultivating cereals and thus moving into the Neolithic era, when populations exploded and food was abundant thanks to agriculture. Cities and towns became possible.

 

In northern Albania, the early Neolithic has been identified along the middle corse of the Balck Drim at Burim, Rajce and Kukes... In central Albania, the sites at Blaz, Mat & Korca are akin to the Adriatic Neolithic, identified at Smilcic, Zadar (Dalmatia). From these has been deduced a spread or advanced of farming methods in the form of a slow northward movement towards the Middle Danube that brought an increase of population and either integrated or eliminated earlier populations of hunters and gatherers.

 

...farming methods had reached the south Adriatic by the middle of the 6th millennium AD...and pottery has been found in many sites on the Dalmatian coast & islands, southern Italy...the northern Adriatic islands of Cres, Krk, Mali Losinj, on the Kvarner Gulf and...in the caves of the Velebit mountains.

 

            John Wilkes

            The Illyrians

            Chapter: Prehistoric Illyrians

            Page: 31

            Blackwell Publishers

            1992

 

 

Wilkes identifies two major population movements in the Early Neolithic.

 

One is a major Eastward population movement centered around Zadar, Dalmatia. This population entered central Albania, and most of the Adriatic coast, as far inland as Krajina's Velebit Mountain during the Early Neolithic.

 

The other population movement was centered around the Belgrade area populated eastern Slavonia, Northern Albania, western Serbia, eastern Bosnia in the Early Neolithic followed by a further expansion southward & westward during the Middle Neolithic (as we shall see below). Below are descriptions of the way of life these people lived more than 8000 years ago. It is shown that cultures that emerged from this population around Belgrade formed key starting points for expansion, revolution and innovation during the Neolithic and as we shall see in  Section 2 -in the Bronze Age, as well:

 

The economy of these Neolithic farmers was a mix of cereal arming, animal domestication, hunting and fishing. Crops included: wheat, barley, millet and beans; livestock included cattle, sheep, pigs and goats. Implements included stone tools, axes and adzes, stone scrapers and sickle blades. Obsidian from Hungary was also used for tools. Bone provided the material for needles, spoons and spatulas and clay was baked (for other implements). Human and animal clay figurines resemble those found in Asia Minor and Greece.

 

            John Wilkes

            The Illyrians

            Chapter: Prehistoric Illyrians

            Page: 31

            Blackwell Publishers

            1992

               

Belgrade was always the most advanced center of the Neolithic. Wilkes recounts the events of the second phase of the Balkan Middle Neolithic:

 

The next phase of the Neolithic era was named for the site of Vinca, which is also on the Danube below Belgrade. The Vinca Culture (4500 - 4000 BC) marks the spread of farming into the hills and valleys on the south and west towards the mountains of the Adriatic ... Along the Adriatic coast, the newer farming communities (along the northern Adriatic) ... show similarities with the pottery of Greece and Italy and the Trieste (Vlasko) Culture ... but did not spread inland. There are no traces of early farming in the mountains and high valleys of Montenegro and Bosnia.

 

            John Wilkes

            The Illyrians

            Chapter: Prehistoric Illyrians

            Page: 32

            Blackwell Publishers

            1992

 

The Middle Neolithic in the Western Balkans closes with the existence of two related cultural units:

 

1. The group from Zadar settled the length of the Adriatic coast in one wave from the Gulf of Kvarner to Central Albania.

 

2. The group from Belgrade settled the inland areas between the Danube and the Adriatic.