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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.

This study presents the results of a major data integration project bringing together primary archaeozoological data for over 200,000 faunal specimens excavated from seventeen sites in Turkey spanning the Epipaleolithic through Chalcolithic periods, c. 18,000-4,000 cal BC, in order to document the initial westward spread of domestic livestock across Neolithic central and western Turkey. From these shared datasets we demonstrate that the westward expansion of Neolithic subsistence technologies combined multiple routes and pulses but did not involve a set ‘package’ comprising all four livestock species including sheep, goat, cattle and pig. Instead, Neolithic animal economies in the study regions are shown to be more diverse than deduced previously using quantitatively more limited datasets. Moreover, during the transition to agro-pastoral economies interactions between domestic stock and local wild fauna continued. Through publication of datasets with Open Context (opencontext.org), this project emphasizes the benefits of data sharing and web-based dissemination of large primary data sets for exploring major questions in archaeology (Alternative Language Abstract S1).

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Cetaceans were an important food and raw material resource for the South American hunter-gatherer-fisher (HGF) communities of Tierra del Fuego. Historic ethnographic evidence suggests that relatively mobile HGF groups came together in large numbers to exploit carcasses from individual cetacean stranding events. Substantial accumulations of whale bones within shell middens in the Lanashuaia locality of the Beagle Channel suggests that these social aggregation events may also have occurred in pre-historic periods. The difficulty in assigning taxonomic identifications to the fragmentary whale remains, however, made it difficult to explicitly test this hypothesis. Here, we applied two different biomolecular techniques, collagen peptide mass fingerprinting (ZooMS) and ancient mitochondrial DNA analysis to 42 archeological bone fragments from the Lanashuaia locality to provide accurate species identifications. There was a clear correspondence between ZooMS and DNA results, identifying five different cetacean species (Southern bottlenose, blue, humpback, right, and sei whale) as well as human and sea lion remains. The biomolecular results were not conclusively consistent with HGF social aggregation, revealing an unexpectedly diverse range of cetaceans within the Lanashuaia middens. However, the results could not fully refute the hypothesis that cetacean remains can be used as anthropic markers of aggregation events, as the observed species and haplotypes revealed potential shared exploitation of some whale resources between midden sites. Crown