Immediate replacement of fishing with dairying by the earliest farmers of the northeast Atlantic archipelagos

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.

Using Stable Isotopes and a Bayesian Mixing Model (FRUITS) to Investigate Diet at the Early Neolithic Site of Carding Mill Bay, Scotland

“…Our results are in contrast to previous interpretations of bulk bone isotope data that suggested a complete absence of marine resources in the Neolithic diet (Richards et al 2003;Richards and Schulting 2006;Cramp et al 2014), but are in agreement with the archaeological record for the site.…”

“…Several stable isotope and lipid biomarker studies have been used to argue for a rapid and permanent shift in Scotland from a diet rich in marine protein in the Mesolithic, to one wholly reliant on terrestrial resources in the Neolithic (Richards et al 2003;Richards and Schulting 2006;Cramp et al 2014). However, issues with using stable isotope analyses to detect potentially much more subtle changes in diet have been highlighted by Milner et al (2004), Bonsall et al (2009), and Charlton et al (2016); namely that the use of linear interpolation between terrestrial and marine δ 13 C end-members to estimate marine resource consumption in humans has a large error of up to 20%, and that faunal baselines must be better defined when dealing with humans that may have consumed marine resources.…”

“…Alternative approaches to reconstructing diet have been utilized in response to the issues associated with analyzing human bone collagen. For example, Cramp et al (2014) used lipid biomarkers to detect dairy products in Neolithic pot sherds from the Outer Hebrides. In the absence of marine biomarkers, they concluded that dairying completely replaced fishing in the Neolithic.…”

Widespread exploitation of the honeybee by early Neolithic farmers

“…These findings clearly counter any arguments for a late intro duction of the honeybee into the British Isles 8,25 . Interestingly, however, investigations of nearly 1,200 Mesolithic and Neolithic vessels from Ireland, Scotland and Fennoscandia 26,27 have failed to reveal any con clusive evidence of beeswax (Supplementary Information section 3). Given that organic residue preservation in these regions is excellent, the lack of beeswax would seem to establish the ecological limit of A. mellifera at that time.…”

Difference in Death? A Lost Neolithic Inhumation Cemetery with Britain’s Earliest Case of Rickets, at Balevullin, Western Scotland

“…The lack of any significant marine component in the diet may also have been a contributory factor, since consumption of oily fish could have provided an alternative source of vitamin D even for an individual kept indoors or covered up. Neolithic communities in the region appear to have engaged in dairy farming from the beginning of the period (Cramp et al 2014), and a lack of calcium, which can contribute to the development of skeletal rickets deformities (Brickley & Ives 2008, 93), is therefore also unlikely unless the individual was denied access to cow's milk. The putative aetiology for the rickets must include the presence of a period of nutritional stress as suggested by the incremental dentine δ 15 N profile.…”