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)