The dynamics of the origins and spread of farming are globally debated in anthropology and archaeology. Lately, numerous aDNA studies have turned the tide in favour of migrations, leaving only a few ...cases in Neolithic Europe where hunter-gatherers might have adopted agriculture. It is thus widely accepted that agriculture was expanding to its northern extreme in Sweden c. 4000 BC by migrating Funnel Beaker Culture (FBC) farmers. This was followed by intense contacts with local hunter-gatherers, leading to the development of the Pitted Ware Culture (PWC), who nonetheless relied on maritime prey. Here, we present archaeobotanical remains from Sweden and the Åland archipelago (Finland) showing that PWC used free-threshing barley and hulled and free-threshing wheat from c. 3300 BC. We suggest that these hunter-gatherers adopted cultivation from FBC farmers and brought it to islands beyond the 60th parallel north. Based on directly dated grains, land areas suitable for cultivation, and absence of signs of exchange with FBC in Sweden, we argue that PWC cultivated crops in Åland. While we have isotopic and lipid-biomarker proof that their main subsistence was still hunting/fishing/gathering, we argue small-scale cereal use was intended for ritual feasts, when cereal products could have been consumed with pork.
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’.
We present a high-resolution cross-disciplinary analysis of kinship structure and social institutions in two Late Copper Age Bell Beaker culture cemeteries of South Germany containing 24 and 18 ...burials, of which 34 provided genetic information. By combining archaeological, anthropological, genetic and isotopic evidence we are able to document the internal kinship and residency structure of the cemeteries and the socially organizing principles of these local communities. The buried individuals represent four to six generations of two family groups, one nuclear family at the Alburg cemetery, and one seemingly more extended at Irlbach. While likely monogamous, they practiced exogamy, as six out of eight non-locals are women. Maternal genetic diversity is high with 23 different mitochondrial haplotypes from 34 individuals, whereas all males belong to one single Y-chromosome haplogroup without any detectable contribution from Y-chromosomes typical of the farmers who had been the sole inhabitants of the region hundreds of years before. This provides evidence for the society being patrilocal, perhaps as a way of protecting property among the male line, while in-marriage from many different places secured social and political networks and prevented inbreeding. We also find evidence that the communities practiced selection for which of their children (aged 0-14 years) received a proper burial, as buried juveniles were in all but one case boys, suggesting the priority of young males in the cemeteries. This is plausibly linked to the exchange of foster children as part of an expansionist kinship system which is well attested from later Indo-European-speaking cultural groups.
The Corded Ware complex represents an archaeologically defined culture whose people inhabited large areas of Europe during the third millennium BC. Although Corded Ware graves are known also from ...Finnish territory – the northernmost area of Corded Ware expansion – these graves represent a special challenge and methodological problem for archaeological research. This is because unburnt bone material is generally not preserved in the acidic soils of Finland, and Finnish Corded Ware complex graves have typically been recognized mainly due to the occurrence of a Corded Ware assemblage (i. e. complete pottery vessels, adzes and ground-stone axes). Furthermore, since most Finnish Corded Ware grave discoveries have been made during the early and mid-20
century, they generally lack good-quality archaeological documentation. Despite these challenges, new insights into Finnish Corded Ware burials can be gained by thoroughly investigating the region’s burial customs and material culture as an entity and comparing them to the Corded Ware complex of the eastern Baltic region and beyond. Finnish Corded Ware graves not only follow the standard material culture and burial customs of the Central European Corded Ware complex but show additional evidence of wooden chambers and laid-out furs, and they may have occasionally even possessed small mounds. However, even though the material culture of the Finnish graves follows traditions present in the central European Corded Ware complex, the grave custom is far from uniform. Hence, Finnish Corded Ware graves represent a melting pot of ideas, ideologies and connections, likely reflecting differing origins of relocating people. Aside from being influenced by the Corded Ware populations of nearby regions, a close link to contemporary local hunter-gatherers seems to have been present, too.
Reconstructing stock herding strategies and land use is key to comprehending past human social organization and economy. We present laser-ablation strontium and carbon isotope data from 25 cattle ...(Bos taurus) to reconstruct mobility and infer herding management at the Swiss lakeside settlement of Arbon Bleiche 3, occupied for only 15 years (3384-3370 BC). Our results reveal three distinct isotopic patterns that likely reflect different herding strategies: 1) localized cattle herding, 2) seasonal movement, and 3) herding away from the site year-round. Different strategies of herding are not uniformly represented in various areas of the settlement, which indicates specialist modes of cattle management. The pressure on local fodder capacities and the need for alternative herding regimes must have involved diverse access to grazing resources. Consequently, the increasing importance of cattle in the local landscape was likely to have contributed to the progress of socio-economic differentiation in early agricultural societies in Europe.
In 2005 four outstanding multiple burials were discovered near Eulau, Germany. The 4,600-year-old graves contained groups of adults and children buried facing each other. Skeletal and artifactual ...evidence and the simultaneous interment of the individuals suggest the supposed families fell victim to a violent event. In a multidisciplinary approach, archaeological, anthropological, geochemical (radiogenic isotopes), and molecular genetic (ancient DNA) methods were applied to these unique burials. Using autosomal, mitochondrial, and Y-chromosomal markers, we identified genetic kinship among the individuals. A direct child-parent relationship was detected in one burial, providing the oldest molecular genetic evidence of a nuclear family. Strontium isotope analyses point to different origins for males and children versus females. By this approach, we gain insight into a Late Stone Age society, which appears to have been exogamous and patrilocal, and in which genetic kinship seems to be a focal point of social organization.
The transition from foraging to farming was a key turning point in ancient socio-economies. Yet, the complexities and regional variations of this transformation are still poorly understood. This ...multi-proxy study provides a new understanding of the introduction and spread of early farming, challenging the notions of hierarchical economies. The most extensive biological and biomolecular dietary overview, combining zooarchaeological, archaeobotanical, dietary stable isotope and pottery lipid residue analyses is presented, to unravel the nature and extent of early farming in the 3rd millennium cal BCE in the northeast Baltic. Farming was introduced by incoming Corded Ware cultural groups (CWC), but some dietary segregation existed within these communities, with some having more access to domesticates, others incorporating more wild resources into their diet. The CWC groups coexisted in parallel with local hunter–fisher–gatherers (HFG) without any indication of the adoption of domesticates. There was no transition from foraging to farming in the 3rd millennium cal BCE in the NE Baltic. Instead, we see a complex system of parallel worlds with local HFGs continuing forager lifeways, and incoming farmers practising mixed economies, with the continuation of these subsistence strategies for at least a millennium after the first encounter with domesticated animals.
Die megalithischen Grabanlagen von Sion-‘Le Petit Chasseur I+III’ bieten eine einmalige Chance, Strukturen von sozialem Wandel über fast das gesamte 3. Jahrtausend v. Chr. hinweg kontinuierlich zu ...verfolgen und aufzuzeigen, wie eine lokale Bevölkerung die europaweiten ideologischen Veränderungen dieser Zeit rezipiert. Unsere Analyse der Funeralbauten, der anthropomorphen Stelen und der materiellen Hinterlassenschaften (die als drei unterschiedliche Quellengruppen anzusehen sind) führen uns das Ringen zwischen Tradition und Innovation vor Augen sowie die sukzessiven Adaptionen einer lokalen spätneolithischen Bevölkerung an die verschiedenen Zweige der Glockenbecher-Ideologie und dann der Frühbronzezeit. In der Folge vergleichen wir Sion mit der ähnlich strukturierten Fundstelle von Aosta-‘St.Martin-de-Corléans’ und stellen beide Komplexe in den weiteren europäischen Rahmen des 3. Jahrtausends v. Chr. Dieser Vergleich beginnt mit der Einwanderung von Jamnaja-Bevölkerungen der nordpontischen Steppen nach Ost- und Südosteuropa und endet mit der Entstehung des Glockenbecher-Phänomens im Westen der Iberischen Halbinsel. Dies alles ist Inhalt eines weiten Transformationshorizonts der Zeit zwischen 2900 und 2700 v. Chr. Spezifische Innovationen darin werden beschrieben und analysiert. Les monuments funéraires mégalithiques de Sion-«Petit-Chasseur I+III» offrent une chance unique de suivre en continu des mutations sociales durant presque tout le 3e millénaire av. J.-C. et de démontrer comme une population locale assimile les changements idéologiques contemporains survenus dans toute l'Europe. L'analyse des constructions funéraires, des stèles anthropomorphes et des vestiges matériels (à considérer comme trois groupes de sources distincts) révèle la lutte entre tradition et innovation ainsi que les adaptations successives de la population du Néolithique tardif aux différents courants de l'idéologie campaniforme, puis de celle du Bronze ancien. Par la suite, Sion est comparé au site d'Aoste-«St. Martin-de-Corléans», de structure similaire, et les deux ensembles sont replacés dans le cadre européen du 3e millénaire av. J.-C. Cette comparaison débute avec l'immigration en Europe orientale et méridionale de populations jamnaja des steppes situées au nord de la mer Noire et s'achève avec l'émergence du phénomène campaniforme dans l'ouest de la péninsule ibérique. Tout ceci fait partie d'un vaste horizon de transformation situé entre 2900 et 2700 av. J.-C. Des innovations spécifiques de cette période sont décrites et analysées. The megalithic cemetery of Sion-‘Le Petit Chasseur I+III’ offers a unique chance to analyse patterns of social change throughout most of the third millennium BC, and to demonstrate how a local population adjusts to the pan-European ideological changes of that period. Our analysis of the funeral monuments, the anthropomorphic stelae, and the material remains (which form three independent Quellengruppen) shows the tensions between tradition and innovation, and the successive adaptions of a local Late Neolithic population to the different branches of the Bell Beaker ideology and the Early Bronze Age. We compare Sion with the similar structured site of Aosta-‘St.Martin-de-Corléans’, and locate both complexes in the wider framework of Europe in the third millennium BC. The comparison extends to include the immigration of the Yamnaya populations from the northern Pontic steppes into east and southeast Europe, and ends with the emergence of the Bell Beaker phenomenon on the west of the Iberian Peninsula. This is all set into the wider transformation horizon between 2900 and 2700 BC. Specific innovations are described and analysed.
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