Millennium between 7000 BC and 6001 BC
Millennia
:
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Centuries
:
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- 70th century BC
- 69th century BC
- 68th century BC
- 67th century BC
- 66th century BC
- 65th century BC
- 64th century BC
- 63rd century BC
- 62nd century BC
- 61st century BC
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The
7th millennium BC
spanned the years 7000 BC to 6001 BC (c. 9 ka to c. 8 ka). It is impossible to precisely date events around this millennium, and all dates mentioned here are estimates mostly based on geological and anthropological analysis.
Towards the end of this millennium, the islands of
Great Britain
, and
Ireland
were severed from
continental Europe
by
rising seawater
.
Communities
[
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]
Population
[
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]
Neolithic
culture and technology were established in the Near East by 7000 BC and there is increasing evidence through the millennium of its spread or introduction to Europe and the Far East. In most of the world, however, including north and western Europe, people still lived in scattered
Palaeolithic
hunter-gatherer
communities. The
Mehrgarh
chalcolithic
civilization began around 7000 BC. The
world population
is believed to have been stable and slowly increasing. It has been estimated that there were perhaps ten million people worldwide at the end of this millennium, growing to forty million by 5000 BC and 100 million by 1600 BC, an average growth rate of 0.027% p.a. from the beginning of the Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age.
[1]
Europe
[
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]
Neolithic culture and technology reached modern Turkey and Greece c. 7000 BC; and Crete about the same time. The innovations, including the introduction of farming, spread from the Middle East through Turkey and Egypt. There is evidence of domesticated sheep or goats, pigs, and cattle, together with grains of cultivated bread wheat.
[2]
The domestication of pigs in Eastern Europe is believed to have begun c. 6800 BC. The pigs may have descended from European wild boar or were probably introduced by farmers migrating from the Middle East.
[3]
There is evidence, c. 6200 BC, of farmers from the Middle East reaching the Danube and moving into Romania and Serbia.
[4]
Farming gradually spread westward and northward over the next four millennia, finally reaching Great Britain and Scandinavia c. 3000 BC to complete the transition of Europe from the
Mesolithic
to the Neolithic.
[5]
Near East
[
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]
The
Ubaid period
(c. 6500?3800 BC) began in
Mesopotamia
, its name derived from
Tell al-'Ubaid
where the first significant excavation took place.
[6]
[7]
By the end of this millennium,
Jericho
had become a large agricultural settlement with some eight to ten acres within its walls.
Kathleen Kenyon
reckoned that it was home to about three thousand people. Construction was done using stone implements to mould clay into bricks. The main crop was wheat.
[8]
The Steppe
[
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]
“Sheep and goats were domesticated in South West Asia, probably in the region of eastern Anatolia and northern Syria between 8000 and 7500 BC, and were part of the agricultural package that was transmitted to Greece and the Balkans during the pioneering movements in the seventh millennium. From there the herding of domesticated sheep and goats was gradually taken up by foraging communities in the Pontic-Caspian steppe during the sixth and fifth millennia and became an essential part of the herder economy.”
[9]
Geologic and climatic change
[
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]
The Northgrippian
[
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]
In the
geologic time scale
, the "
Northgrippian
" succeeded the "
Greenlandian
" c. 6236 BC (to c. 2250 BC).
[10]
The starting point for the Northgrippian is the so-called
8.2 kiloyear event
, which was an
abrupt climate change
lasting some four centuries in which there was a marked decrease in global temperatures, possibly caused by an influx of glacial meltwater into the North Atlantic Ocean.
[11]
Creation of Great Britain and Ireland
[
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]
The influx is believed to be one factor in the creation of
Great Britain
and
Ireland
as islands separate from the European continent. After the
Last Ice Age
ended c. 9700 BC, increasing sea levels gradually inundated
Doggerland
, a land bridge which linked Great Britain to
Denmark
and the
Netherlands
. This process began the formation of the
North Sea
and the
English Channel
. Further west, another low-lying land area was being flooded to form the
Irish Sea
and create Ireland. Sometime in the second half of the 7th millennium, the
Storegga Slides
occurred off
Norway
to generate a huge
tsunami
which completely overwhelmed Doggerland and its
Mesolithic
community of an estimated 5,000 hunter-gatherers. By about 6100 BC, Great Britain had become an island.
[12]
Astronomy
[
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]
Jupiter
occulted
Saturn
in 6857 B.C.E.
[13]
This is one of the rarest astronomical events in the solar system,
[14]
with the next occurrence on February 17, 7541.
[15]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
Jean-Noel Biraben, "Essai sur l'evolution du nombre des hommes",
Population
34-1 (1979), pp. 13?25.
- ^
Barry Cunliffe (2011).
Europe Between the Oceans
. Yale University Press. p. 94.
- ^
"Ancient Pig DNA Study Sheds New Light on Colonization of Europe By Early Farmers"
.
ScienceDaily
. 4 September 2007
. Retrieved
31 May
2019
.
- ^
"Isotopic data show farming arrived in Europe with migrants"
.
EurekAlert!
. American Association for the Advancement of Science. 11 February 2013
. Retrieved
31 May
2019
.
- ^
"Neolithic"
. Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2019
. Retrieved
6 November
2019
.
- ^
Carter, Robert A. and Philip, Graham
Beyond the Ubaid: Transformation and Integration in the Late Prehistoric Societies of the Middle East (Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, Number 63)
Archived
15 November 2013 at the
Wayback Machine
The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (2010)
ISBN
978-1-885923-66-0
p. 2; "Radiometric data suggest that the whole Southern Mesopotamian Ubaid period, including Ubaid 0 and 5, is of immense duration, spanning nearly three millennia from about 6500 to 3800 B.C."
- ^
Hall, Henry R. and Woolley, C. Leonard. 1927.
Al-'Ubaid. Ur Excavations 1
. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- ^
Bronowski, p. 70.
- ^
? By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia by Barry Cunliffe
https://a.co/3dkOTDJ
- ^
"GSSP Table ? All Periods"
.
www.stratigraphy.org
. International Commission on Stratigraphy. 2018
. Retrieved
1 June
2019
.
- ^
Alley, Richard B.; Agustsdottir, Anna Maria (2005). "The 8k event: cause and consequences of a major Holocene abrupt climate change".
Quaternary Science Reviews
.
24
(10?11): 1123?49.
Bibcode
:
2005QSRv...24.1123A
.
doi
:
10.1016/j.quascirev.2004.12.004
.
- ^
Lane, Megan (15 February 2011).
"The moment Great Britain became an island"
.
BBC News
. BBC
. Retrieved
5 November
2019
.
- ^
Bob King (20 December 2020).
"Jupiter and Saturn Embrace in Solstice Conjunction"
. Sky & Telescope.
- ^
"Chapter 2: PREDICTABLE NON-PERIODIC EVENTS-PART II"
. Archived from
the original
on 13 August 2012
. Retrieved
2 January
2021
.
- ^
"Jusatocc.txt"
. Archived from
the original
on 11 May 2012.
Bibliography
[
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]