Neolithic age (approximately from 4000 to 2000 BC). – Agriculture and livestock breeding, with which the sedentary lifestyle, the construction of houses and fortified walls, and the beginnings of coexistence in villages are connected, bring with them enormous progress in civil life. In this period, the transformation and cultivation of the uncultivated land forever opened up the land susceptible to a civil settlement to the work of man. An external mark of this stage of civilization is given by the fact that the technique used up to now in stone processing, based solely on percussion and pressure, is replaced by that of faceting and polishing. Thanks above all to the development of ceramics, in its variety of shapes and decorations,
According to answerresume.com, the northern Neolithic civilization includes the part of northern Germany closest to the sea, as well as Scandinavia, and appears to us in its earliest stage subject to Western, pre-Indo-European influences, in the most recent instead – in the so-called megalithic civilization – to influences from from Thuringia. The Nordic civilization is contrasted by the other coming from the Balkan and Danube region, which comes from far away, from the classic agricultural countries near the mouth of the Danube (see Danubian, civilization); it culminates around 3000, in the so-called full Neolithic. All of central and southern Germany is under his rule. This is demonstrated by the diffusion area of its axes and its ribbon-decorated vases, among which the hemispherical and the pear-shaped ones prevail. The populations characterized by pottery with ribbon decoration (in German Bandkeramik), are wedged between those of northwestern Germany, characterized by pottery with deeply engraved decoration, and those of southern Germany and the Rhine, characterized by tulip glasses and sharp-based ax. Finally, a fourth cycle is represented by the so-called civilization of Thuringia, characterized by ceramics (large amphorae) with decoration impressed with cord, which has also earned it the name of civilization of cordial ceramics. (in German Schnurkeramische Kultur) and the ax with a perforated and faceted base. These four civilizations, to which it is not possible to give ethnic names, and whose chronological succession cannot even be determined, in part remained pure, in part they mixed together in the most varied ways, and then expanded, towards the ‘East and South-East, expansion that coincides with the spread of the Indo-Europeans in the rest of Europe and especially in the Italian peninsula. Thus, as a contribution from Northern Europe, the rectangular house with poles came to Greece, with an environment in front of the main one – in opposition to the basement house and the one similar to a fort -; this house with an anterior environment finds analogy in the fortified palaces of Troy, Mycenae and Tiryns and finally in the Greek temple. residents of Rössen, so called from a vast necropolis near Merseburg, in which the dead are buried huddled and with a rich set of ornaments, axes, pottery decorated with deep engraved ornaments, reminiscent of straw works intertwined. Stilt houses and numerous mainland dwellings also belong to the circle of Western Europe, especially fortified oval-shaped castles, surrounded by palisades and pits. In the most recent Neolithic period, alongside the burial with the lying corpse and the one with the curled up corpse, we also have the cremation. The last phase of the Neolithic period is finally given by the so-called zone pottery, akin to the civilization of the bell-shaped glass, born in south-western Europe, which forms a link with the beginning of the Bronze Age and is already equipped with some metals, such as copper and gold.
