Page 185 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

146 The Chariots

other, three had already been doing so for centuries before our
millennium opened.
The first was the ancient hunter strain, the original “natives”
of the European continent, nomadic trappers following the sea­
sonal movement of the game, or fishing communities settled along
the salmon rivers or on the sheltered estuaries and fjords of the
coast.
The second was what we have called the “backwoodsmen,”
homesteaders and colonists, long settled on the lighter-wooded
plains and low hills, but still comparatively few in number
(probably not very much more numerous than the “natives”) and
not yet firmly planted on their own soil. They were always mov­
ing on, clearing with stone ax and fire a new sowing area every
generation or so, dependent largely on their millet and barley, to
a lesser degree on their sheep and cattle, mixed farmers, mar­
ginal cultivators.
And the third way of life was that of the passage-grave set­
tlements along the coast, folk with their spiritual home in the
warmth and civilization of the eastern Mediterranean, but with
only an occasional ship trading from point to point along the
coast to keep the lifeline open. They were factors and farmers
and missionaries, and possessed no higher standard of life than
the people among whom they had established their stations.
These three ways of life had been acting upon each other for
longer than memory went back, for periods which we can meas­
ure as, in some areas, five hundred or so, in others several thou­
sand years. But during the first third of the Second Millennium
b.c. their life had been further complicated by the intrusion of
two new peoples. We have met them both; one was the battle-ax
people from south Russia, cattle herdsmen, charioteers, appar­
ently unacquainted with the growing of grain or with a settled
life; the other was the beaker people, spreading east and north
from Spain into all western and central Europe in small bands of
bronze traders, shepherds, prospectors, and smiths.
By 1650 b.c. the two latest arrivals were no longer new­
comers. Even at the extreme limits of their ranges they had been
settled for two or three generations, and, willingly or not, the
original inhabitants had come to terms with them. In eastern and