“To ‘seafood’ or not to ‘seafood’?” An isotopic perspective on dietary preferences at the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in the Western Mediterranean

Abstract

Stable isotope investigations of the Prehistory of the Western Mediterranean have increased exponentially during the last decade. This region has a high number of Mesolithic and Neolithic carbon and nitrogen isotope ratio data available compared with other world areas, resulting from the interest in the "transition" between hunter-gathering and farming. This type of analysis is important as one of the few tools that give direct information on the poorly understood dietary transition from hunter-gatherer to agro-pastoralist subsistence in the Mediterranean Basin. Carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis on bulk collagen are especially useful for exploring marine vs. terrestrial protein input and therefore assess marine resource exploitation by these two different lifestyles. Gathering together all isotopic data for these chronologies we show that the Western Mediterranean underwent a unique/distinct Neolithisation process. These data show a gradual dietary shift in aquatic resource consumption during the transition to farming that contrasts to elsewhere in Europe.

Long-term dietary change in Atlantic and Mediterranean Iberia with the introduction of agriculture: a stable isotope perspective

“…Isotopic analyses across Atlantic coastal areas of Europe have shown a marked dietary difference between Mesolithic foragers, with substantial consumption of marine foodstuffs, and Neolithic farmers, whose diets were essentially based on terrestrial resources (Lubell et al 1994;Richards and Hedges 1999;Richards et al 2003;Bonsall et al 2009;Schulting 2011). Similar results have been reported for the Iberian Peninsula, although considerable variability has been observed at the regional scale (Fontanals-Coll et al 2014;Guiry et al 2015;Peyroteo-Stjerna 2016;Salazar-García et al 2018). Indeed, since the early 2000s, there has been an extraordinary increase in palaeodietary studies based on stable isotope analysis of carbon and nitrogen in human bone collagen from Mesolithic and Neolithic populations in this region (e.g.…”

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Neolithic Life Reconstruction

“…Salazar-García et al 2018). In bone collagen, carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios help to detect the environment from which food resources are coming (e.g.…”

“…Although no ichthyological remains were found, aquatic resources are an isotopically detectable part of human diet during the Middle Neolithic, but high freshwater protein diets have only been detected in a few individuals, and this is still in dispute (Rey et al 2017). As demonstrated in other European regions, marine resources appear neglected at the beginning of the Neolithic (Richards and Schulting 2003;Salazar-García et al 2018). However, recent data from Southern France re-evaluated such hypotheses; stable isotope data on a few individuals support the consumption of marine protein (Provost et al 2017), and are compatible with previous work performed in the region on shells and fish remains (e.g.…”

Anthropic resource exploitation and use of the territory at the onset of social complexity in the Neolithic-Chalcolithic Western Pyrenees: a multi-isotope approach

“…Alt et al 2016;Salazar-García et al 2013), and Mediterranean Iberia (e.g. Fontanals-Coll et al 2015;Salazar-García et al 2018).…”