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"Rowley-Conwy, Peter"
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Foraging and farming as niche construction: stable and unstable adaptations
All forager (or hunter–gatherer) societies construct niches, many of them actively by the concentration of wild plants into useful stands, small-scale cultivation, burning of natural vegetation to encourage useful species, and various forms of hunting, collectively termed ‘low-level food production’. Many such niches are stable and can continue indefinitely, because forager populations are usually stable. Some are unstable, but these usually transform into other foraging niches, not geographically expansive farming niches. The Epipalaeolithic (final hunter–gatherer) niche in the Near East was complex but stable, with a relatively high population density, until destabilized by an abrupt climatic change. The niche was unintentionally transformed into an agricultural one, due to chance genetic and behavioural attributes of some wild plant and animal species. The agricultural niche could be exported with modifications over much of the Old World. This was driven by massive population increase and had huge impacts on local people, animals and plants wherever the farming niche was carried. Farming niches in some areas may temporarily come close to stability, but the history of the last 11 000 years does not suggest that agriculture is an effective strategy for achieving demographic and political stability in the world's farming populations.
Journal Article
Farmers at the Frontier
All farming in prehistoric Europe ultimately came from elsewhere in one way or another, unlike the growing numbers of primary centers of domestication and agricultural origins worldwide. This fact affects every aspect of our understanding of the start of farming on the continent because it means that ultimately, domesticated plants and animals came from somewhere else, and from someone else. In an area as vast as Europe, the process by which food production becomes the predominant subsistence strategy is of course highly variable, but in a sense the outcome is the same, and has the potential for addressing more large-scale questions regarding agricultural origins. Therefore, a detailed understanding of all aspects of farming in its absolute earliest form in various regions of Europe can potentially provide a new perspective on the mechanisms by which this monumental change comes to human societies and regions. In this volume, we aim to collect various perspectives regarding the earliest farming from across Europe. Methodological approaches, archaeological cultures, and geographic locations in Europe are variable, but all papers engage with the simple question: What was the earliest farming like? This volume opens a conversation about agriculture just after the transition in order to address the role incoming people, technologies, and adaptations have in secondary adoptions. The book starts with an introduction by the editors which will serve to contextualize the theme of the volume. The broad arguments concerning the process of neolithisation are addressed, and the rationale for the volume discussed. Contributions are ordered geographically and chronologically, given the progression of the Neolithic across Europe. The editors conclude the volume with a short commentary paper regarding the theme of the volume.
eBook
Epipalaeolithic animal tending to Neolithic herding at Abu Hureyra, Syria (12,800–7,800 calBP): Deciphering dung spherulites
Excavations at Abu Hureyra, Syria, during the 1970s exposed a long sequence of occupation spanning the transition from hunting-and-gathering to agriculture. Dung spherulites preserved within curated flotation samples from Epipalaeolithic (ca. 13,300–11,400 calBP) and Neolithic (ca. 10,600–7,800 calBP) occupations are examined here alongside archaeological, archaeobotanical, and zooarchaeological data to consider animal management, fuel selection, and various uses of dung. Spherulites were present throughout the entire sequence in varying concentrations. Using a new method to quantify spherulites, exclusion criteria were developed to eliminate samples possibly contaminated with modern dung, strengthening observations of ancient human behavior. Darkened spherulites within an Epipalaeolithic 1B firepit (12,800–12,300 calBP) indicate burning between 500–700°C, documenting early use of dung fuel by hunter-gatherers as a supplement to wood, coeval with a dramatic shift to rectilinear architecture, increasing proportions of wild sheep and aurochsen, reduced emphasis on small game, and elevated dung concentrations immediately outside the 1B dwelling. Combined, these observations suggest that small numbers of live animals (possibly wild sheep) were tended on-site by Epipalaeolithic hunter-gatherers to supplement gazelle hunting, raising the question of whether early experiments in animal management emerged contemporaneously with, or pre-date, cultivation. Dung was used to prepare plaster floors during the Neolithic and continued to be burned as a supplemental fuel, indicating that spherulites were deposited via multiple human- and animal-related pathways. This has important implications for interpretations of archaeobotanical assemblages across the region. Spherulite concentrations dropped abruptly during Neolithic 2B (9,300–8,000 calBP) and 2C (8,000–7,800 calBP), when sheep/goat herding surpassed gazelle hunting, possibly corresponding with movement of animals away from the site as herd sizes increased. As hunter-gatherers at Abu Hureyra began interacting with wild taxa in different ways, they set in motion a remarkable transformation in the ways people interacted with animals, plants, and their environment.
Journal Article
Distinguishing Wild Boar from Domestic Pigs in Prehistory: A Review of Approaches and Recent Results
New methods permit archaeologists to distinguish between wild boar and domestic pigs with greater confidence than has been hitherto possible. Metrical methods are the most commonly used; these are reviewed. Assemblages containing a wider range of measurements (as measured by the coefficient of variation [V]) than is found in one population suggest that two populations of different-sized pigs were present, probably indicating separate wild and domestic populations with little or no interbreeding. These assemblages, sometimes taken to indicate animals 'intermediate' between wild and domestic, are clear evidence of full domestication. Other traditional means of diagnosing domestication based on age at death (the killing of many young animals) and biogeography (the export of the animal beyond its natural range, especially to islands) are particularly problematic when applied to pigs. New methods include the frequency of Linear Enamel Hypoplasia, which may increase due to domestication-induced stress, the study of diet through isotopes and dental microwear, and the examination of population histories through ancient and modern DNA and geometric morphometrics. These are all promising but should not be considered in isolation: many problems remain.
Journal Article
Cattle Management for Dairying in Scandinavia’s Earliest Neolithic
New evidence for cattle husbandry practices during the earliest period of the southern Scandinavian Neolithic indicates multiple birth seasons and dairying from its start. Sequential sampling of tooth enamel carbonate carbon and oxygen isotope ratio analyses and strontium isotopic provenancing indicate more than one season of birth in locally reared cattle at the earliest Neolithic Funnel Beaker (EN I TRB, 3950-3500 cal. B.C.) site of Almhov in Scania, Sweden. The main purpose for which cattle are manipulated to give birth in more than one season is to prolong lactation for the production of milk and dairy-based products. As this is a difficult, intensive, and time-consuming strategy, these data demonstrate complex farming practices by early Neolithic farmers. This result offers strong support for immigration-based explanations of agricultural origins in southern Scandinavia on the grounds that such a specialised skill set cannot represent the piecemeal incorporation of agricultural techniques into an existing hunter-gatherer-fisher economy.
Journal Article
Worldwide phylogeography of wild boar reveals multiple centers of pig domestication
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from 686 wild and domestic pig specimens place the origin of wild boar in island Southeast Asia (ISEA), where they dispersed across Eurasia. Previous morphological and genetic evidence suggested pig domestication took place in a limited number of locations (principally the Near East and Far East). In contrast, new genetic data reveal multiple centers of domestication across Eurasia and that European, rather than Near Eastern, wild boar are the principal source of modern European domestic pigs.
Journal Article
Ancient DNA, pig domestication, and the spread of the Neolithic into Europe
The Neolithic Revolution began 11,000 years ago in the Near East and preceded a westward migration into Europe of distinctive cultural groups and their agricultural economies, including domesticated animals and plants. Despite decades of research, no consensus has emerged about the extent of admixture between the indigenous and exotic populations or the degree to which the appearance of specific components of the \"Neolithic cultural package\" in Europe reflects truly independent development. Here, through the use of mitochondrial DNA from 323 modern and 221 ancient pig specimens sampled across western Eurasia, we demonstrate that domestic pigs of Near Eastern ancestry were definitely introduced into Europe during the Neolithic (potentially along two separate routes), reaching the Paris Basin by at least the early 4th millennium B.C. Local European wild boar were also domesticated by this time, possibly as a direct consequence of the introduction of Near Eastern domestic pigs. Once domesticated, European pigs rapidly replaced the introduced domestic pigs of Near Eastern origin throughout Europe. Domestic pigs formed a key component of the Neolithic Revolution, and this detailed genetic record of their origins reveals a complex set of interactions and processes during the spread of early farmers into Europe.
Journal Article
Scotland's first farmers: new insights into early farming practices in North-west Europe
Thirty years after the discovery of an Early Neolithic timber hall at Balbridie in Scotland was reported in Antiquity, new analysis of the site's archaeobotanical assemblage, featuring 20 000 cereal grains preserved when the building burnt down in the early fourth millennium BC, provides new insights into early farming practices. The results of stable isotope analyses of cereals from Balbridie, alongside archaeobotanical and stable isotope results from three other sites, indicate that while cereals were successfully cultivated in well-established plots without manuring at Balbridie, a variety of manuring strategies was implemented at the other sites. These differences reinforce the picture of variability in cultivation practices across Neolithic North-west Europe.
Journal Article