Could the Neolithic have kicked off in a large island off the coast of Morocco that's now mostly under water? I was musing about the Atlantis story and how it would best fit with the rise in sea levels after the Ice Age. I reckoned that any lost civilisation significant enough to have got into folk memory would have to be just that - a civilisation, implying permanent settlements, and therefore farming. It would have to have flourished before about 5500 BC, since that is when there was the last major sea level rise - the one that flooded the Black Sea. Herodotus firmly places Atlantis beyond the pillars of Hercules, so if he is right that would rule out the Black Sea itself, and also Santorini/Crete (which anyway didn't have anything to do with rising sea levels). Now I knew that the Neolithic didn't reach Spain, France or the British Isles until 4000 BC at the earliest, which would eliminate the Bay of Biscay or Dogger Bank as locations for a possible Ys/Atlantis, but if you look at a map of ocean depths there are various spots off the coast of Morocco that would have been dry land for a while after the glaciers retreated. Most are quite small, but the Canaries would have formed one large island. So when did the Neolithic reach Morocco? Remarkably the earliest Neolithic site so far discovered there dates back to 8000 BC, only about 500 years later than the oldest discovered anywhere (near Jericho - a region that has been subjected to much more intense archaeological investigation.) It wouldn't be ridiculous to speculate that the spread of farming could have been the other way - from the Maghreb into the Levant.
It then struck me that a large island would be just the sort of place for farming to have originated. Hunter gatherers would have been quite capable of wiping out any wild-life fit to eat and would then have had to improvise or starve.
So when their land began to flood and they were forced to disperse they would have taken their agricultural practices (at that time mostly arable) with them. Their first landing would no doubt have been Morocco, but then the idea of farming would have travelled through Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, Anatolia, the Black Sea region and then into Europe, evolving as went so as to encompass crops more suited to local conditions, and animal husbandry.
Conceivably the islanders could also have travelled north to Spain, France and the British Isles, bringing the Ys legend with them, but if so their unevolved arable methods didn't survive transplantation to cooler,wetter climes.
A neat idea, I think. Does anybody have data that would trash it?
[this is good] Actually, I'm writing a novel about it as we speak (write? type? converse?) and the canary islands (or more importantly Madeira) will play a part in it (possibly the second book, it's a trilogy). The problem lies with getting people out to it.
They may have been able to island hop to the Canaries in the way that aborigines island hopped to Australia, but even with the lower sea levels, that's a tremendous journey for a boat to make, let alone hunter/gatherers in dug out canoes. There's also the problem of finding hunter/gatherers in North Africa at that time. It was just as much a flaming waste as it is now. It's not until the Younger Dryas event (circa 9,000 to 10,000 BC) that the Sahara turns green and becomes the agricultural mecca that would in turn become Egypt.
Of course, by the Younger Dryas, the water levels will have risen to where the Canaries are distant and harder to get to. No. I place the dawn of civilization to be pretty much where you're at, only slightly to the south and west, out on the Celtic Shelf.
How do I rationalize that? You'll just have to wait for the book to come out. :-)
Posted by: Jerry | 08/30/2007 at 03:46 p.m.
Thanks for the comments - I look forward to reading the books. If you let me know the title of the first one & I'll look out for it.
There was certainly a Neolithic culture on the Canaries 7 they must have got there somehow. I don'tthink there's any technological barrier to Mesolithic people getting out there - the Polynesians covered much greater distances in dugout canoes & Heyerdal showed that a reed vessel could crosss the Atlantic.
Where the Mesolithic people could have come from originally is a more interesting question. How about Spain? They could have been pushed out by our own ancestors as they retreated from the glaciers.
All the best.
Posted by: DB | 08/31/2007 at 10:27 a.m.
Actually, that's one of the interesting things I've come upon from writing this and dealing with characters in their situation. It's not the technological barriers which holds back our advancement but social barriers, most specifically the desire not to innovate and not to explore. Both of these include a fierce gamble of ones livelihood. From our point of view looking backwards we can see that agriculture was a good thing, but from the hunter/gatherer's looking forwards you had to be either starving, insane or most probably both.
So far as Mesolithic people in Spain and Morocco. When the water levels were low, they might have been able to island hop, but why would they? You don't have to go far from the coast to be out of sight of land, and to sailors with little to no knowledge of the world, that prospect would be terrifying, much like us rocketing into outer space. It could have been climate problems. In my book the end of the Older Dryas turns France into a dustbowl and pushes everyone west where they hunt away any prospects of remaining hunter/gatherers. Unfortuntately, aside from the greening of the Sahara (circa 8,000 BC) its hard to find any decent information of what it was like before then. Basically it was a desert, but how intense and for how long, and whether it would grow to an extent that it would create a concentration of people in Morocco and force them through overpopulation into island hopping is hard to say (but it does sound good now doesn't it :-)
BTW It'll be called the Golden Axe by JD McDonnell.
Posted by: Jerry | 08/31/2007 at 02:32 p.m.
I see "The Celtic Shelf" is now out as an e-book. Is that how it's going to stay, or are there plans for a print version eventually?
Posted by: DB | 05/23/2010 at 08:05 a.m.