The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

by Matt Ridley

at 7,600 years ago, farmers who were happily cultivating the fertile plains around the ‘Euxine lake’ suffered a rude shock, when rising sea levels burst over the Hellespont and flooded into the lake’s basin, filling it at a rate of six inches a day till it became the modern Black Sea. Baffled refugees presumably fled up the Danube into the heart of Europe. Within just a few hundred years, they had reached the Atlantic coast, peopling all of the southern half of Europe with farmers, sometimes by infecting their neighbours with enthusiasm for the new trick of farming, but more often (so the genetic evidence suggests) displacing and violently overwhelming hunter-gatherers as they went. It took another thousand years to reach the Baltic, chiefly because fishermen inhabited that coast at high densities and had no need to start farming. The crops the farmers took with them changed little, despite the new conditions they encountered. Some crops, like lentils and figs, had to be left behind on the Mediterranean. Others, like emmer and einkorn wheat, adapted readily to the wetter and cooler lands of Northern Europe. By 5,000 years ago farmers had reached Ireland, Spain, Ethiopia and India.