The area around the black sea is super interesting for archaeology of early history (10000BCE - 2000BCE) imo, since it is quite understudied in comparison to the usual suspects in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Western Europeans also tend to forget about it. I have a feeling that there are many low-hanging fruit to be discovered which will fundamentally change the way we think about the significance of the area a lot.
Take for example these (short) excerpts from an archaeological paper [0] from 2018 that discusses the farming strategy of large cities in the area from around 4000BCE. It seems to support the idea (again, my unscientific gut feel) that the spreading of agriculture from what we would today call the "Middle-East" to Europe happened by means of replacing people instead of people adopting new strategies (settling the so-called "pots or people" debate [1]).
[1] https://youtu.be/JTY9K1Q_Sbg?t=290 (apart from the specific timestamp, it's a fantastic talk about the origin and genetic makeup of Europeans in general)
Stanislav Drobyshevsky finally nicely explained for me how no one actually lived in caves but people lived and migrated on plains, from Central Europe all the way to Siberia: https://youtu.be/IihGveExaqU (English subtitles aren't great but they are there). They also took their hunting practices with them to where locals previously hunted different animals.
Take for example these (short) excerpts from an archaeological paper [0] from 2018 that discusses the farming strategy of large cities in the area from around 4000BCE. It seems to support the idea (again, my unscientific gut feel) that the spreading of agriculture from what we would today call the "Middle-East" to Europe happened by means of replacing people instead of people adopting new strategies (settling the so-called "pots or people" debate [1]).
[0] https://indo-european.eu/2018/07/cereal-cultivation-and-proc...
[1] https://youtu.be/JTY9K1Q_Sbg?t=290 (apart from the specific timestamp, it's a fantastic talk about the origin and genetic makeup of Europeans in general)