From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Human migration in general may be described as a natural function of social development. It has taken place at all times and in the greatest variety of circumstances. It has been tribal, national, class and individual. Its causes have been political, economic, religious, or mere love of adventure. Its causes and results are fundamental for the study of ethnology, of political and social history, and of political economy. In its natural origins, it includes the separate migrations first of Homo erectus then of Homo sapiens out of Africa across Eurasia, doubtless using some of the same available land routes north of the Himalayas that were later to become the Silk Road and across the Strait of Gibraltar. Under the form of conquest, the pressures of human migrations affect the grand epochs in history (e.g. the fall of the Western Roman Empire); under the form of colonization migration has transformed the world (e.g. the prehistoric and historic settlements of Australian and the Americas). Forced migration (see population transfer) has been a means of social control under authoritarian regimes, yet under free initiative it is the most powerful factor in social adjustment (e.g. the growth of urban population).
It must suffice here to indicate the extent and character of the principal movements in the past, and then describe certain aspects of modern migration, with some links to other Wikipedia topics.
Indo-European migration into Europe
Not much is know about the Preindoeuropean inhabitants of Europe.
Basque language is a remain of that era.
The great migrations
Historians divide the period of migrations that separated antiquity from the middle ages in Europe into two phases. The first phase, between 300 and 500 AD, set in motion Germanic and other peoples and resulted in putting Germanic peoples in control of the societies of the former Western Roman Empire. See also: Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Burgundians, Suebi, Alamanni Marcomanni.
The second phase, between 500 and 900 AD, saw Slavic, Turkish and other peoples on the move, re-settling Eastern Europe and gradually making it predominately Slavic. Moreover, the second phase of migration of Germanic people took place then: Langobards, Angles, Saxons, Jutes. See also: Avars, Huns, Arabs, Vikings, Varangians. The last phase of the migrations saw the coming of the Hungarianss to Pannonia.
German historians of the 19th century refered to these Germanic migrations as the Völkerwanderung, the migrations of the peoples.
Other migrations that happened later in the history of Europe generally did not give rise to new states (except for Turkey, for example) and comprised mainly temporary invasions. The huge chaotic warbands of the Crusades are an example.
The Jewish diaspora across Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East formed from voluntary migrations and pogroms.
At the end of the Middle Ages, the Gypsies arrived to Europe (into Iberia and the Balkans) from the Middle East and earlier from the Indus river.
The movement of population, however, has continued under the form of immigration/emigration.
Migrations and climate cycles
The modern field of climate history is suggesting that the successive waves of Eurasian nomadic movement through history have had their origins in climatic cycles that have expanded or contracted pastureland in the center of Asia, Mongolia and the Altai. Population pressures have rippled outwards, with each group of peoples displaced by pressure from the group behind, eventually to disperse in the highlands of Anatolia, the plains of Hungary, in Mesopotamia or the rich crops of China.Polynesian migration
If the art of open-sea navigation involves the most confident and courageous use of the available technologies of boat-building, combined with the most sophisticated understanding of currents and prevailing winds, then the Polynesians, beginning with the Lapita culture, have been the most successful humans in the art of navigation, for the Norse adventurers in the North Atlantic and the Arab traders in the Indian Ocean were not permanent colonizers. The Lapita people were from Austronesia, probably New Guinea. Their arts of navigation brought them to the Solomon Islands ca. 1600 BCE, then to Fiji and Tonga. By the beginning of the first millennium BCE, most of Polynesia was a loose web of thriving cultures settled on island coasts and depending on the sea, who left traces of pottery styles derived from Lapita wares. By ca 500 BCE Micronesia was occupied as well. The Lapita culture identified on the basis of potsherds is named for the archaeological site of Lapita in New Caledonia where they were first identified. Other means of tracing Polynesian migration patterns are through linguistics, and in the newer science that analyzes characteristic genetic alleles of the modern populations, which offers evidence that is largely corroborative of the linguistic and archaeological evidence, with some surprises.Modern migrations
See also
Initially taken from parts of the 1911 Encyclopaedia
