The relationship between very early Europeans and those of more recent times may never be known. Were the makers of the spectacular cave art in southern France the ancestors of the Gauls and later the French? Even the question of whether the first people who populated Europe were later displaced by farming groups arriving from the Near East, were absorbed into them, or adopted farming techniques on their own is difficult to answer.
Linguists have attempted to relate prehistoric cultures to the present by using the similarities among European languages belonging to the Indo-European language group, which comprises most modern European languages, to postulate a proto-Indo-European language. Using a theory that languages diverge from one another at a relatively constant rate when speakers of a common language are geographically separated, rather like the theory of genetic drift applied to speciation, linguists try to assess how long ago proto-Indo-European was spoken by measuring how different modern languages are from one another and projecting back in time to their original divergence.
This method has proved to be problematic, however, and difficult to relate to archaeological data. It gave rise to the theory that Indo-European speakers arrived after peaceful, matriarchal (goddess-worshipping) farming communities had long been established in southeastern Europe; that they were warlike, patriarchal pastoralists (cattle herders) and that they violently displaced the matriarchal societies. Attempts to relate this to the archaeological record eventually discredited this theory, and it has few adherents today. An alternative theory proposed by the British paleontologist Colin Renfrew is that Indo-European speakers were actually the first farmers; he relates the amount of language drift between modern languages to the probable rate by which farming spread through the continent.
What this illustrates, along with the many uncertainties about human evolution and the relationships among our ancestral species, is that the European peoples who are recognizable either from the historic record, such as the Celts, Scythians, or Thracians, or from their artifacts, such as the La Tene culture, occupy the very latest chapters of an extremely long human prehistory during which the way of life for most people hardly changed at all for hundreds of thousands of years. In the same way, despite disagreement over such issues as whether modern Homo sapiens evolved once in Africa or in parallel in Asia and Africa, the discoveries of paleontology have continually reinforced the extremely close relationship among all hominids, and among members of Homo sapiens. We are all close cousins under the skin, truly members of the human family.
World History
