One of the focuses of archaeological research in the the last decade has been on the spread of agriculture—including wheat, pigs, peas, sheep, goats, barley, lentils, cattle, pottery—from out of its origins in East and Central Asia into the broader world. Much of the focus, in the English-speaking academic publications anyway, has been on the Linearbandkeramik, or LBK, the people that carried the suite of animals, plants and behaviors into Europe, beginning about 5500 years ago.
Why Nominate the LBK?
The long-running debate about the LBK concerns whether the LBK culture was local hunter-gatherers adopting new techniques that they had learned from the central Asians, or the central Asians themselves. While not all of the evidence has agreed, much of it seems to indicate that the LBK resulted from a massive population movement, out of central Asia, into the Balkan states and from there into Europe.
