Forever Opportunists

THE spreading out of a Central Asian population into Europe around 30 thousand years ago was only part of a wider picture. There is no reason to suppose that such an expansion followed a single direction. After all this was not a concerted drive or migration, like the raids of Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes would be many millennia later, but a demographic collared dove-style expansion. We have seen the driving force behind the expansion and the human response is what biologists would call ecological release: a population adapts to a new, untapped, environment and spreads rapidly in the absence of competitors. There are many such examples of animals that have been introduced into foreign lands by people, often with hugely negative effects on the local endemic fauna. The rapid expansion, practically reaching France from the steppe within a millennium, may have been the result of a simple increase in birth rate and decrease in mortality as a result of improved resources. The catalyst of the rapid expansion may have had to do with the new way of life of the plains people. In the previous chapter we touched upon the village or camp site as an information centre, allowing different groups of hunters to exchange data about where the herds were located. The efficiency of hunters on the open plains would have been seriously compromised if all the individuals of the group—old, young, pregnant women, weak individuals—went along. Such movement of entire kin groups might have been possible in other environments where territories were smaller, and it was probably the way the Neanderthals moved about.

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