Page 100 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

It was in Denmark that they met the builders of the stone

passage-graves, the megalith peoples, with their trade and cul­

tural connections extending by way of the sea roads to Crete.

At first they did not mix with the passage-grave people. For these

settled farmeis lived neai the coast and on the islands, among

the heavy woods of oak and ash and elm. The battle-ax immi­

grants confined themselves to the upland backbone of Jutland,

where the grazing would suit their herds. It was not an empty

land. From time immemorial small bodies of hunters had in­

habited this upland area, living on the booty of their flint-tipped

bows and spears. With the coming of the herdsmen these

hunters disappear, more probably absorbed than exterminated.

It would seem that the truce between the cultivators and the

herdsmen was more uneasy in Jutland than elsewhere. The bat­

tle-ax folk had reached the sea, and they could no longer move

on when they exhausted their pasture. There is still no evidence

of strife. But the child born at the beginning of the millennium

among the first Indo-European-speaking herdsmen in Jutland

would, before he died, see the passage-grave farmers of the coast

abandoning their villages and moving out to the Danish is­

lands. He would already be thinking of following them, while

his cousins in south Sweden would by then also be looking to

the Danish islands—from the other side.

To the south, on the Rhine, this lifetime brought different

events and problems. For some reason the nomads went no far­

ther than the Rhine. Perhaps the forests were becoming too dense,

now that they were leaving the wide plains of glacial dust, the

loess area, which gave them the grazing and the mobility on

which they depended. Perhaps the country was already too
densely populated by settled communities. And perhaps the ex­

pansion was simply losing impetus. Enough land had been over­

run, and it was time to settle down.