Immediate replacement of fishing with dairying by the earliest farmers of the NE Atlantic archipelagos
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Resource type
Journal article
Creator (person)
Cramp, Lucy J E
Jones, Jennifer
Sheridan, J A
Smyth, Jessica
Whelton, Helen
Mulville, J
Sharples, N M
Evershed, R P
Date published
February 12, 2014
Abstract
The appearance of farming, from its inception in the Near East around 12 000 years ago, finally reached the northwestern extremes of Europe by the fourth millennium BC or shortly thereafter. Various models have been invoked to explain the Neolithization of northern Europe; however, resolving these different scenarios has proved problematic due to poor faunal preservation and the lack of specificity achievable for commonly applied proxies. Here, we present new multi-proxy evidence, which qualitatively and quantitatively maps subsistence change in the northeast Atlantic archipelagos from the Late Mesolithic into the Neolithic and beyond. A model involving significant retention of hunter–gatherer–fisher influences was tested against one of the dominant adoptions of farming using a novel suite of lipid biomarkers, including dihydroxy fatty acids, ω-(o-alkylphenyl)alkanoic acids and stable carbon isotope signatures of individual fatty acids preserved in cooking vessels. These new findings, together with archaeozoological and human skeletal collagen bulk stable carbon isotope proxies, unequivocally confirm rejection of marine resources by early farmers coinciding with the adoption of intensive dairy farming. This pattern of Neolithization contrasts markedly to that occurring contemporaneously in the Baltic, suggesting that geographically distinct ecological and cultural influences dictated the evolution of subsistence practices at this critical phase of European prehistory.
Journal title
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences
Volume
281
Issue
1780
Publisher
Royal Society Publishing
ISSN
0962-8452
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