page_title: Pottery Neolithic
section_title: Europe
hierarchical_section_title: Pottery Neolithic / Diffusion / Europe
caption_attribution_description: premier peuplement maltais lors de l'expansion néolithique
context_page_description: The Pottery Neolithic or Late Neolithic began around 6,400 BCE in the Fertile Crescent, succeeding the period of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. By then distinctive cultures emerged, with pottery like the Halafian and Ubaid. This period has been further divided into PNA and PNB at some sites.
  The Chalcolithic period began about 4500 BCE, then the Bronze Age began about 3500 BCE with the invention of writing, replacing the Neolithic cultures and starting the historical period.
context_section_description: The European Neolithic is generally dated to 7000–3000 BCE. The spread of the Neolithic in Europe was first studied quantitatively in the 1970s, when a sufficient number of 14C age determinations for early Neolithic sites had become available. Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza discovered a linear relationship between the age of an Early Neolithic site and its distance from the conventional source in the Near East (Jericho), thus demonstrating that, on average, the Neolithic spread at a constant speed of about 1 km/yr. More recent studies confirm these results and yield the speed of 0.6–1.3 km/yr at 95% confidence level.
caption: Neolithic expansion of Cardium pottery and Linear Pottery culture according to archaeology.
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