Pioneer farming in southeast Europe during the early sixth millennium BC: Climate-related adaptations in the exploitation of plants and animals (original) (raw)
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New research on crop diversity of the early farmers in southeastern Europe (ca. 6400 − 5700 bce)
Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, 2023
Pelagonia is a mountain valley in North Macedonia that was densely occupied by early farming communities in the second half of the 7th and early 6th millennium bce. Archaeobotanical analysis is being done on material from three sites there, Vrbjanska Čuka, Veluška Tumba and Vlaho. This paper presents the results of archaeobotanical analyses of remains from Pelagonia, which represent some of the oldest directly dated remains of cereals and pulses in Europe, and discusses the results on crop diversity among Early Neolithic communities within the region. The crop spectrum was broad, with five cereal species and several varieties, two pulses and potentially two oil crops. The diversity is slightly narrower than the one found in southwestern Asia, Greece and Bulgaria as Cicer arietinum (chickpea), Lathyrus sativus (grass pea) and Vicia ervilia (bitter vetch) were not present or very rare, and Triticum Aestivum/durum (naked wheat) was only found in small amounts, probably because the early farmers were adapting their choices of crops to the different climatic conditions in Pelagonia. On the micro-regional level we have observed that the diversity and importance of certain crops may vary in relation to the 8.2 ka bp climate cooling event, as well as due to local environmental or cultural factors, showing the need for finer scale analyses beyond the level of site or phase.
Since their domestication in the Mediterranean zone of Southwest Asia in the eighth millennium BC, sheep, goats, pigs and cattle have been remarkably successful in colonizing a broad variety of environments. The initial steps in this process can be traced back to the dispersal of farming groups into the interior of the Balkans in the early sixth millennium BC, who were the first to introduce Mediterranean livestock beyond its natural climatic range. Here, we combine analysis of biomolecular and isotopic compositions of lipids preserved in prehistoric pottery with faunal analyses of taxonomic composition from the earliest farming sites in southeast Europe to reconstruct this pivotal event in the early history of animal husbandry. We observe a marked divergence between the (sub)Mediterranean and temperate regions of Southeast Europe, and in particular a significant increase of dairying in the biochemical record coupled with a shift to cattle and wild fauna at most sites north of the Balkan mountain range. The findings strongly suggest that dairying was crucial for the expansion of the earliest farming system beyond its native bioclimatic zone. The wild progenitors of the main domestic animals in the Old World are endemic to regions with Mediterranean climate and are adapted to withstand prolonged hot summer droughts and mild but wet winters 1, 2. Since domes-tication, farmers have brought sheep, goats, pigs and cattle to an enormous variety of environments, from semi-deserts to sub-arctic regions. Their present-day distribution, pushed out to the boundaries of the world inhabitable by humans, was mediated through human protection and breeding of animals that thrive under conditions often not tolerated by their wild ancestors. The first steps in this process can be traced back to the farming pioneers of the Balkans who penetrated beyond the borders of the sub-Mediterranean zone of Europe in the early centuries of the sixth millennium BC. How the first Balkan herders succeeded in extending the habitat of their livestock is an intriguing question with pivotal importance for the early history of human-animal relationships. During the later seventh and early sixth millennia BC permanent farming settlements, similar to contemporary sites in the core areas of domestication in southwest Asia, became established in the (sub-)Mediterranean southern Balkans 3, 4. The spread of farming economy into the temperate northern parts of the peninsula, however, was accompanied by pronounced changes, including higher (probably seasonal) residential mobility, smaller community sizes and a loss of sophistication in architecture and material culture 5–8 , a phenomenon which has been designated in the archaeological literature as " the First Temperate Neolithic ". Although the adaptation of herding economy to new bioclimatic conditions has been recognised as a major component of this phenomenon 8–14 , the human strategies which promoted it have remained uncertain.
Quaternary Science Reviews, 2014
In this paper we estimate the degree to which the range and proportion of wild plant foods are underrepresented in samples of charred botanical remains from archaeological sites. We systematically compare the differences between central European Neolithic archaeobotanical assemblages that have been preserved by charring compared to those preserved by waterlogging. Charred archaeobotanical assemblages possess on aggregate about 35% of the range of edible plants documented in waterlogged samples from wetland settlements. We control for the ecological availability of wetland versus terrestrial wild plant foods on assemblage composition and diversity, and demonstrate that the significantly broader range of wild plant food taxa represented is primarily a function of preservation rather than subsistence practices. We then consider whether observed fluctuations in the frequency of edible wild taxa over time can also be attributed to preservation, and demonstrate that it cannot; and thus conclude that there are significant changes in plant food diets during the Neolithic that reflect different strategies of land use and, over time, a decreasing reliance on foraging for wild plant foods. The wild species included in our analyses are not spatially restricteddthey are common throughout central Europe. We maintain, therefore, that our results are relevant beyond our study area and more generally illustrate the challenges of attempting to reconstruct the relative importance of wild plant foodsdand thus plant diet breadthdin Neolithic archaeobotanical assemblages from charred data alone.
Species distribution modelling of ancient cattle from early Neolithic sites in SW Asia and Europe
2012
Species distribution models are widely used by ecologists to estimate the relationship between environmental predictors and species presence and abundance records. In this paper, we use compiled faunal assemblage records from archaeological sites located across southwest Asia and southeast Europe to estimate and to compare the biogeography of ancient wild and early domestic cattle (Bos primigenius and Bos taurus). We estimate the contribution of multiple environmental parameters on the explanation of variation in abundance of cattle remains from archaeological sites, and find that annual precipitation and maximum annual temperature are significant predictors of abundance. We then formulate, test, and confirm a hypothesis that states the process of cattle domestication involves a change in the types of environmental ranges in which cattle exploitation occurred by applying a species distribution model to presence-only data of wild and domestic cattle. Our results show that there is an expansion of cattle rearing in more temperate environments, which is a defining characteristic of the European early Neolithic.
Close examination of the geographic position of Early Neolithic settlements in SE-Europe shows that the oldest sites are almost exclusively situated in some very specific biogeographic areas. These earliest Neolithic settlements are all concentrated in a region that Pavle Cikovac calls the Sub-Mediterranean-Aegean biogeographic region. It covers the northern and northwestern edge of the Aegean, including Thessaly, Greek Macedonia and Greek Thrace, and extends further into the Balkans, but only along the valleys of the Vardar (Axios), Struma (Strymon) and Mesta (Nestos) rivers. Surprisingly, although Thrace is the closest landscape to Anatolia, it does not contain any sites of the earliest phase of the Neolithic at all beyond the narrow zone of the northern Marmara. In the present paper we explain this remarkable situation in terms of the natural environment in this particular region of the southern Balkans. To begin, we propose that the lack of oldest Early Neolithic settlements in Thrace is related to the extreme microclimate of this region. As shown by modern vegetation analogues, Thracian oriental hornbeam-downy oak forests are exposed to stronger continental influence with frosts in the winter and average temperatures during the coldest months that are ca. 2–3 °C lower than those in the Central Balkans that have Sub-Mediterranean vegetation. In general terms, what we may expect is that the earliest Neolithic groups would first appear in regions with similarly mild conditions, on a yearly average, to those in the Mediterranean. Such mild conditions are indeed present in the Sub-Mediterranean biogeographic region. On the other hand, before moving further to the north along the north-south oriented river systems of the Central Balkans, the Neolithic economy based on agriculture and stockbreeding would first have to be adapted to the relatively harsh winters in the Balkans. In consequence, it would have been possible to apply the new Neolithic lifestyle in the neighbouring areas of Thrace, Walachia, Dobrudža and the Carpathian Basin only after a certain period of adaptation. Available 14 C-data show that the adaptation period is identical to the time-span of Rapid Climate Change (RCC: 6550-6050 calBC) as defined in previous studies.
Quaternary, 2022
Agriculture is a complex and dynamic socio-ecological system shaped by environmental, economic, and social factors. The crop resource pool is its key component and one that best reflects environmental limitations and socio-economic concerns of the farmers. This pertains in particular to small-scale subsistence production, as was practised by Neolithic farmers. We investigated if and how the environment and cultural complexes shaped the spectrum and diversity of crops cultivated by Neolithic farmers in the central-western Balkans and on the Hungarian Plain. We did so by exploring patterns in crop diversity between biogeographical regions and cultural complexes using multivariate statistical analyses. We also examined the spectrum of wild-gathered plant resources in the same way. We found that the number of species in Neolithic plant assemblages is correlated with sampling intensity (the number and volume of samples), but that this applies to all archaeological cultures. Late Neolithic communities of the central and western Balkans exploited a large pool of plant resources, whose spectrum was somewhat different between archaeological cultures. By comparison, the earliest Neolithic tradition in the region, the Starčevo–Körös–Criş phenomenon, seems to have used a comparatively narrower range of crops and wild plants, as did the Linearbandkeramik culture on the Hungarian Plain.
2004
for the evolution of agriculture, spatial expansion and population increase of humans during the Holocene, which facilitated the evolution of technically innovative societies. The agricultural practices enabled people to establish permanent settlements and expand urbanbased societies. Domestication of plants and animals transformed the profession of the early humans from hunting and gathering to selective hunting, herding and settled agriculture. The earliest archaeological evidences, found throughout the tropical and subtropical areas of southwestern and southern Asia, northern and central Africa and Central America, suggest rapid and large-scale domestication of plants and animals ca. 10,000-7000 cal years BP. This interval corresponds to an intense humid phase and equable climates, as observed in numerous paleo records across the regions. I suggest that domestication of plants and animals and subsequent beginning of agriculture were linked to climate amelioration in the early Holocene.