Old Europe (archaeology)

A high level of craft skill and trade is evident from tons of recovered copper artifacts and a small amount of gold, as well as pottery and carved items.

[6] Regardless of specific chronology, many European Neolithic groups share basic characteristics, such as living in small-scale communities, being more egalitarian[disputed – discuss] than the city-states and chiefdoms of the Bronze Age, subsisting on domestic plants and animals supplemented with the collection of wild plant foods and hunting, and producing hand-made pottery, without the aid of the potter's wheel.

[8] Using evidence from pottery and sculpture, and combining the tools of archaeology, comparative mythology, linguistics, and, most controversially, folkloristics, Gimbutas invented a new interdisciplinary field, archaeomythology.

[12][13] Colin Renfrew's competing Anatolian hypothesis suggests that the Indo-European languages were spread across Europe by the first farmers from Anatolia.

In the hypothesis' original formulation, the languages of Old Europe belonged to the Indo-European family but played no special role in its transmission.

[14] According to Renfrew's most recent revision of the theory, however, Old Europe was a "secondary urheimat" (linguistic homeland) where the Greek, Armenian, and Balto-Slavic language families diverged around 5000 BC.

According to those studies, haplogroups R1b and R1a, now the most common in Europe (R1a is also common in South Asia) would have expanded from the steppes north of the Pontic and Caspian seas, along with at least some of the Indo-European languages; they also detected an autosomal component present in modern Europeans which was not present in Neolithic Europeans, which would have been introduced with paternal lineages R1b and R1a, as well as Indo-European languages.