Neolithic dairy farming at the extreme of agriculture in northern Europe

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Sep 2014

The conventional ‘Neolithic package’ comprised animals and plants originally domesticated in the Near East. As farming spread on a generally northwest trajectory across Europe, early pastoralists would have been faced with the challenge of making farming viable in regions in which the organisms were poorly adapted to providing optimal yields or even surviving. Hence, it has long been debated whether Neolithic economies were ever established at the modern limits of agriculture. Here, we examine food residues in pottery, testing a hypothesis that Neolithic farming was practiced beyond the 60th parallel north. Our findings, based on diagnostic biomarker lipids and δ13C values of preserved fatty acids, reveal a transition at ca 2500 BC from the exploitation of aquatic organisms to processing of ruminant products, specifically milk, confirming farming was practiced at high latitudes. Combining this with genetic, environmental and archaeological information, we demonstrate the origins of dairying probably accompanied an incoming, genetically distinct, population successfully establishing this new subsistence ‘package’.

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Neolithic dairy farming at the extreme of agriculture in northern Europe

Articles on similar topics can be found in the following collections Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article - sign up in the box at the top right-hand corner of the article or click here References Subject collections Email alerting service rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org Research Cite this article: Cramp LJE et al. 2014 Neolithic dairy farming at the extreme of agriculture in northern Europe. Proc. R. Soc. B 281: 20140819. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.0819 Received: 4 April 2014 Accepted: 8 July 2014 Subject Areas: ecology, environmental science, evolution Authors for correspondence: Lucy J. E. Cramp e-mail: Volker Heyd e-mail: Present address: Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, 43 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UU, UK. Electronic supplementary material is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.0819 or via http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org. Neolithic dairy farming at the extreme of agriculture in northern Europe Lucy J. E. Cramp1,, Richard P. Evershed1, Mika Lavento2, Petri Halinen2, Kristiina Mannermaa2, Markku Oinonen3, Johannes Kettunen4,5, Markus Perola4,5, Paivi Onkamo6 and Volker Heyd7 1Organic Geochemistry Unit, School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, Cantocks Close, Bristol BS8 1TS, UK 2Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki, PO Box 59, Helsinki 00014, Finland 3Finnish Museum of Natural History, University of Helsinki, PO Box 64, Helsinki 00014, Finland 4Public Health Genomics Unit, National Institute for Health and Welfare, PO Box 104, Helsinki 00251, Finland 5FIMM, The Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland, University of Helsinki, PO Box 20, Helsinki 00014, Finland 6Department of Biosciences, University of Helsinki, PO Box 56, Helsinki 00014, Finland 7Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, 43 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UU, UK The conventional Neolithic package comprised animals and plants originally domesticated in the Near East. As farming spread on a generally northwest trajectory across Europe, early pastoralists would have been faced with the challenge of making farming viable in regions in which the organisms were poorly adapted to providing optimal yields or even surviving. Hence, it has long been debated whether Neolithic economies were ever established at the modern limits of agriculture. Here, we examine food residues in pottery, testing a hypothesis that Neolithic farming was practiced beyond the 60th parallel north. Our findings, based on diagnostic biomarker lipids and d13C values of preserved fatty acids, reveal a transition at ca 2500 BC from the exploitation of aquatic organisms to processing of ruminant products, specifically milk, confirming farming was practiced at high latitudes. Combining this with genetic, environmental and archaeological information, we demonstrate the origins of dairying probably accompanied an incoming, genetically distinct, population successfully establishing this new subsistence package. 1. Introduction Since the end of the last Ice Age, some 12 000 years ago, the high northern latitudes of the globe became permanently settled by humans of Late Palaeolithic and/or Mesolithic cultures. Their sole subsistence mode for millennia, and for most of them to the present day, was hunting, fishing and gathering, thereby making use of the plentiful wild resources. While there is no evidence for farming on the North American Continent and in Siberia above the 60th parallel north prior to the European colonization, earlier examples of agro-pastoral farming appear in Iceland in the ninth century AD Viking Age, and an episode (10 15th century AD) in southwest Greenland [1]. In order to make farming viable, these inhabitants of the high northern latitudes had to overcome extreme climatic and environmental conditions. The forced abandonment of the south Greenland settlements at the onset of the Little Ice Age [2] demonstrates the vulnerability of any productive subsistence economy to climate change at these high latitudes. Hence, it has long been doubted whether more ancient prehistoric subsistence economies based on agriculture would have been viable, especially given the limited adaptations in stock animals and domesticated plants, most of which originated in the warm and semi-arid climes of the Fertile Crescent of the Levant approximately 11 000 years ago [3]. However, at least in northwestern Europe, thanks to the warming effects of the Gulf & 2014 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. Stream, Early Neolithic fourth millennium settlers were reaching as far north as to between the 55th and 58.5th parallel, and probably intermittently beyond, establishing the sustainable farming economies in all of Britain, so (...truncated)


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Lucy J. E. Cramp, Richard P. Evershed, Mika Lavento, Petri Halinen, Kristiina Mannermaa, Markku Oinonen, Johannes Kettunen, Markus Perola, Päivi Onkamo, Volker Heyd. Neolithic dairy farming at the extreme of agriculture in northern Europe, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2014, 281/1791, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2014.0819