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By Root 498 0

along the upper Euphrates, through the Damascus basin and down the Jordan Valley. Seashells from the Red Sea were going the other way. This is precisely where the first farming settlements are – at Catalhoyuk, Abu Hureyra and Jericho. Such settlements were sited in oases where springs of fresh water from the mountains spilled out on to the western edge of the desert: places where soil nutrients, moisture and sunshine came together nicely – and also places where people mixed with their neighbours because of trade. This is surprising only because it is easy to think of early farmers as sedentary, self-sufficient folk. But they were exchanging harder in this region than anywhere else, and it is a reasonable guess that one of the pressures to invent agriculture was to feed and profit from wealthy traders – to generate a surplus that could be exchanged for obsidian, shells or other more perishable goods. Trade came first.

In the 1960s, Jane Jacobs suggested in her book The Economy of Cities that agriculture was invented to feed the first cities, rather than cities being made possible by the invention of agriculture. This goes too far, and archaeologists have discredited the idea of urban centres preceding the first farms. The largest permanent settlements of hunter-gatherers cannot be described as urban even among the fishermen of the Pacific coast of North America. None the less, there was a germ of truth in her idea: the first farmers were already enthusiastic traders breaking free of subsistence through exchange, and farming was just another expression of trade.

In Greece, farmers arrived suddenly and dramatically around 9,000 years ago. Stone tools suggest that they were colonists from Anatolia or the Levant who probably came by boat deliberately seeking to colonise new land. Moreover, these very earliest Greek farmers were also apparently enthusiastic traders with each other and were very far from being self-sufficient: they relied upon specialist craftsmen to produce obsidian tools from raw material imported from elsewhere. This is once again not what conventional wisdom envisages. Trade comes first, not last. Farming works precisely because it is embedded in trading networks.

Some time later, 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.

Other descendants of the Black Sea refugees took to the plains of what is now Ukraine where they domesticated the horse and developed a new language, Indo-European, that would come to dominate the western half of the Eurasian continent, and of which Sanskrit and Gaelic are both descendants. It was also somewhere near the Baltic or the Black Sea between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago that a genetic mutation, substituting G for A in a control sequence upstream of a pigment gene called OCA2, gave adults blue eyes for the first time. It was a mutation that would eventually be inherited by nearly 40 per cent of Europeans. Because it went with unusually pale skin,