A forager–herder trade-off, from broad-spectrum hunting to sheep management at Aşıklı Höyük, Turkey

Abstract

Aş ıklı Höyük is the earliest known preceramic Neolithic mound site in Central Anatolia. The oldest Levels, 4 and 5, spanning 8,200 to approximately 9,000 cal B.C., associate with round-house architecture and arguably represent the birth of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic in the region. Results from upper Level 4, reported here, indicate a broad meat diet that consisted of diverse wild ungulate and small animal species. The meat diet shifted gradually over just a few centuries to an exceptional emphasis on caprines (mainly sheep). Age-sex distributions of the caprines in upper Level 4 indicate selective manipulation by humans by or before 8,200 cal B.C. Primary dung accumulations between the structures demonstrate that ruminants were held captive inside the settlement at this time. Taken together, the zooarchaeological and geoarchaeological evidence demonstrate an emergent process of caprine management that was highly experimental in nature and oriented to quick returns. Stabling was one of the early mechanisms of caprine population isolation, a precondition to domestication.caprine domestication | zooarchaeology | stabling deposits T he Neolithic brought fundamental transformations to human society and humans' place in natural systems. Early villages reorganized rapidly around new ways of extracting food from the environment, and animal and plant management seem to lie at the heart of many of these changes. The initial conditions of village community evolution are elusive, however, because late forager and forager-producer transition sites are few, in contrast to the abundant records of the later Neolithic. Known exceptions in central Turkey are the early occupations at Aşıklı Höyük in Cappadocia, the ninth millennium occupations at Pınarbaşı and Boncuklu in the Konya Basin (1, 2), and the late Epipaleolithic occupations in Pınarbaşı Rockshelter in Konya and Direkli Cave in Kahramanmaraş (3,4).Few of the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) communities display precocious histories of animal management, although plant cultivation was widespread. Regional contrasts in the early PPN testify to the volatile and locally variable nature of "neolithization" across the Middle East (1, 5-21). Only later in the PPN were certain staple animal foods truly domesticated, some in energetically powerful combinations with plants that would fuel the expansion of Neolithic systems into other world regions.Like the opposing faces of Janus, there are two temporal aspects from which one may view Neolithic origins. Comparisons to the more recent have received the bulk of archaeologists' attention thanks to an abundance of data on the later PPN and historic stock-keeping practices. Looking to the early Neolithic from a deeper past, the Epipaleolithic, is the view less often taken. Comparison data are less easy to come by, but the advantage of this forward-looking view is its consistency with the direction of evolution itself. As revolutionary as neolithization and the emergence of village communities may have been, the Epipaleolithic and PPN ...

Zooarchaeological Evidence for Early Neolithic Colonization at Franchthi Cave (Peloponnese, Greece)

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The Evolution of Animal Domestication

“…Each step along the trajectory, from wild prey to game management, to herd management, to directed breeding, may not have been guided by a desire to completely control the animals' life history but instead to increase the supply of a vanishing resource. In this way, animal domestication (e.g., sheep; Stiner et al 2014) mirrors the process of unintentional entanglement associated with plant domestication as humans first foraged, and then through increased reliance on the resource, became trapped in positive feedback cycles of increasing labor and management of plant species that were evolving in response to human innovations (Fuller et al 2010a). For animals, as human interference in their life cycles intensified, the evolutionary pressures for a lack of aggression would have led, as Belyaev demonstrated (Trut 1999, Trut et al 2009, to an acquisition of the same domestication syndrome traits found in the commensal domesticates despite having entered the human niche through completely separate trajectories.…”

Core questions in domestication research

“…Tending plants and animals and storing resources they produce may find expression in the built environment (appearance of corrals, storage pits, or silos, the presence of manure and its use as a fuel or building material) that may be used to trace the increasingly close relationships between humans and managed resources (72,73). Greater investment in resource management may strengthen notions of ownership over resources and the catchment areas in which they are grown and harvested, resulting in more tightly defined and defended territories (74).…”