Our second way from Syro-Cilicia would also lie over Anatolia, to the northwest, where we would have to swim or raft ourselves over the Dardanelles or the Bosphorus to the European shore. Then we would bear left toward Greece, but some of us might turn right again in Macedonia, going up the valley of the Vardar River to its divide and on down the valley of the Morava beyond, to reach the Danube near Belgrade in Jugoslavia. Here we would turn left, following the great river valley of the Danube up into central Europe. We would have a number of tributary valleys to explore, or we could cross the divide and go down the valley of the Rhine to the North Sea. Our third way from Syro-Cilicia would be by sea. We would coast along southern Anatolia and visit Cyprus, Crete, and the Aegean islands on our way to Greece, where, in the north, we might meet some of those who had taken the second route. From Greece, we would sail on to Italy and the western isles, to reach southern France and the coasts of Spain. Eventually a few of us would sail up the Atlantic coast of Europe, to reach western Britain and even Ireland. [Illustration: PROBABLE ROUTES AND TIMING IN THE SPREAD OF THE VILLAGE-FARMING COMMUNITY WAY OF LIFE FROM THE NEAR EAST TO EUROPE] Of course none of us could ever take these journeys as the first farmers took them, since the whole course of each journey must have lasted many lifetimes. The date given to the assemblage called Windmill Hill, the earliest known trace of village-farming communities in England, is about 2500 B.C. I would expect about 5500 B.C. to be a safe date to give for the well-developed early village communities of Syro-Cilicia. We suspect that the spread throughout Europe did not proceed at an even rate. Professor Piggott writes that “at a date probably about 2600 B.C., simple agricultural communities were being established in Spain and southern France, and from the latter region a spread northwards can be traced ... from points on the French seaboard of the [English] Channel ... there were emigrations of a certain number of these tribes by boat, across to the chalk lands of Wessex and Sussex [in England], probably not more than three or four generations later than the formation of the south French colonies.” New radiocarbon determinations are becoming available all the time--already several suggest that the food-producing way of life had reached the lower Rhine and Holland by 4000 B.C. But not all prehistorians accept these “dates,” so I do not show them on my map (p. 139). THE EARLIEST FARMERS OF ENGLAND