About Caucasian Migration and Ukrainain Neolithization

Abstract

In recent years, Ukrainian archaeologist V. O. Manko has been boldly revising key positions in traditional ideas about the Mesolithic and Neolithic of South-Eastern Europe, to which his latest article in the journal Arheologia, written in co-authorship with the Georgian researcher G. L. Chhatarashvili, is devoted. The article begins with a call to abandon the traditional definition of the Neolithic, proposed by the classic scholar of prehistory V. Gordon Childe (the Neolithic is the era of the invention and spread of the reproductive economy) and replace it with an innovative one: the Neolithic is an information system. Since everything in the world is a system, the question arises: What is the meaning and benefit of such an innovative definition of the Neolithic? The co-authors of the article resolutely reject the Balkan-Danube version of the neolithization of Central-Eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine, founded by the already mentioned G. Child, as the brainchild of “improper research methodology”. Of course, the classics are also wrong, but a discussion with serious scientists requires serious argumentation, which, unfortunately, is catastrophically lacking in V. O. Manko’s constructions. The researcher proposes to replace the classical version of the neolithization of Europe from the Balkans through the Danube to the Caucasian route of the movement of Neolithic colonists to the Northern Black Sea; however, the arguments for his alternative are clearly insufficient. V. O. Manko boldly solves the complex problems of the genesis of a number of Mesolithic cultures of Ukraine and the Caucasus: Hrebenyky, Kukrek, Shpan-Koba, Swider, Mariupol and others. Loud revolutionary statements not supported by proper arguments and facts look like unconvincing declarations, which give rise to doubts and a skeptical attitude of the reader towards them. I will not claim that all the cultural communities highlighted in the article are illusory, and the migration routes from the Middle East through the Caucasus to the Black Sea region are ephemeral. However, the scant information on the typology of the flint inventory of cultural communities provided by its authors and clearly insufficient illustrative material in most cases does not allow imagining what it is actually about. Therefore, the topic chosen by the authors of the article of systematization of the cultural communities of the Mesolithic of the Caucasus and their cultural connections with the Black Sea region is definitely relevant, but its solution is complicated by the significant defects of the source base of the region and poor argumentation of the proposed hypotheses. Perhaps if the authors did not try to solve all the problems of the Mesolithic of the Caucasus and its neighboring regions in one article, then their conclusions would be more thorough, convincing and understandable for the readers.