The earliest traces of human habitation in Ukraine reach back about 150,000 years.
Arriving on the shores of the Black Sea by way of the Caucasus and, perhaps, the Balkans, the earliest human inhabitants still possessed the signs of their primitive origins. Their brains were small and they had low foreheads, heavy jaws, and large teeth.
But their posture was already upright and their extraordinarily manipulative hands were fully formed. By approximately 40,000 BC, in the midst of the last ice age, the Cro-magnons (or Homo sapiens) appeared, the species from which modern man is descended – relatively tall, erect, and with greatly enlarged brain capacity. In response to the cold, unforgiving climate and the difficulties in obtaining food, these hunters and gatherers produced an unprecedented array of technological innovations: flint weapons and tools, fish-hooks, harpoons, and shelters made of animal hides and bones.After the last of the ice glaciers had retreated by about 10,000 BC and had left behind the landscape that exists in Ukraine today, the tempo of man-made changes began to quicken. Indeed, during the Neolithic period, which lasted in Ukraine from about 6000 to 2000 BC, mankind experienced more profound changes than in the previous two to three million years. Despite its name, the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, had little to do with stone. It is in the radically new ways that humans developed for feeding themselves that the “revolutionary” significance of this age lies. Instead of merely gathering and hunting food, human beings had finally learned to produce it.
In Ukraine, agriculture is thought to have first made its appearance in the southwest, between the Buh and Dnister rivers where the earliest agricultural communities in Eastern Europe evolved about 5000 to 4000 BC. Instead of wandering about in search of game, people settled down in order to be near their fields. Villages came into existence. Because agriculture, unlike hunting and gathering, demanded a relatively large labor force, the population increased rapidly. As it did, primitive forms of political and social organization slowly developed.
The best known of the early agrarian peoples on the territory of present-day Ukraine were associated with the so-called Trypillian culture, which originated along the Dnister, Buh, and Prut rivers and later expanded to the Dnieper.2 At their high point between 3500 and 2700 BC, they lived in large villages with as many as 600–700 inhabitants. Organized in clans along patriarchal lines, they often lived in long, narrow dwellings in which each nuclear family had its own clay oven and partitioned space. The decorations on their pottery, characterized by flowing designs of ocher, black, and white, reflected a culture rich in magical rituals and supernatural beliefs.
But this culture also had its practical side. The first mechanical device in Ukraine – a drill for boring holes in wood and stone – appeared among the people of the Trypillian culture. Even more important was the introduction of the wooden plow, which definitely made agriculture a more dependable means of obtaining food than hunting. Another innovation, probably imported from Asia, was the use of the first metal – copper.
Map 2 Prehistric cultures and sites
Little is known about the decline of Trypillian culture. Archaeologists speculate that overpopulation forced many of its people to resettle in new, inhospitable lands. Some of them moved deeper into the steppe, while those who lived along the Dnieper moved northward into heavily forested Polissia and beyond. By 2000 BC, the people of the Trypillian culture had ceased to exist as a distinct cultural entity. Warlike tribes from the steppe probably over whelmed or assimilated many of them. Others may have taken refuge in the sheltering forests in the north.