Farming in Europe spread at different rates and by different routes. Areas of great forest that spread across central and northern Scandinavia and east to the Ural mountains saw a much slower change than, for example, the area stretching from the Hungarian Plain westwards as far as northern France, where users of Linear pottery swiftly occupied the good cultivable soils.

From around 4500 BC things began to change to the north and west of this ‘frontier zone’ as the new influences began to interact with older, established ways. In northern Europe long burial mounds were built, which seem to mimic the longhouses built for the living by the Linear pottery users. Simple megalithic tombs (made from large stones) were constructed around the Baltic Sea, where hunter-gatherers were assimilating new ways of living, beginning to produce their own foodstuffs instead of subsisting entirely on wild resources. They began to clear forest for cultivation, leaving behind them as evidence quantities of distinctive flint axes. Elaborate new forms of pottery were made, including drinking vessels and bottle-shaped flasks. In Denmark this process is first seen around 3900 BC. During this period the light plough began to be used in northern Europe.