Sheep and goats (caprines) were domesticated in Southwest Asia in the early Holocene, but how and in how many places remain open questions. This study investigates the initial conditions and ...trajectory of caprine domestication at Aşıklı Höyük, which preserves an unusually high-resolution record of the first 1,000 y of Neolithic existence in Central Anatolia. Our comparative analysis of caprine age and sex structures and related evidence reveals a local domestication process that began around 8400 cal BC. Caprine management at Aşıklı segued through three viable systems. The earliest mode was embedded within a broad-spectrum foraging economy and directed to live meat storage on a small scale. This was essentially a "catch-and-grow" strategy that involved seasonal capture of wild lambs and kids from the surrounding highlands and raising them several months prior to slaughter within the settlement. The second mode paired modest levels of caprine reproduction on site with continued recruitment of wild infants. The third mode shows the hallmarks of a large-scale herding economy based on a large, reproductively viable captive population but oddly directed to harvesting adult animals, contra to most later Neolithic practices. Wild infant capture likely continued at a low level. The transitions were gradual but, with time, gave rise to early domesticated forms and monumental differences in human labor organization, settlement layout, and waste accumulation. Aşıklı was an independent center of caprine domestication and thus supports the multiple origins evolutionary model.
Aşıklı Höyük is the earliest known preceramic Neolithic mound site in Central Anatolia. The oldest Levels, 4 and 5, spanning 8,200 to approximately 9,000 cal B.C., associate with round-house ...architecture and arguably represent the birth of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic in the region. Results from upper Level 4, reported here, indicate a broad meat diet that consisted of diverse wild ungulate and small animal species. The meat diet shifted gradually over just a few centuries to an exceptional emphasis on caprines (mainly sheep). Age-sex distributions of the caprines in upper Level 4 indicate selective manipulation by humans by or before 8,200 cal B.C. Primary dung accumulations between the structures demonstrate that ruminants were held captive inside the settlement at this time. Taken together, the zooarchaeological and geoarchaeological evidence demonstrate an emergent process of caprine management that was highly experimental in nature and oriented to quick returns. Stabling was one of the early mechanisms of caprine population isolation, a precondition to domestication.
The first Neolithic settlements in Southwest Asia began with a dual commitment to plant cultivation and a sedentary lifestyle. The benefits that foragers-turned-farmers gained from this commitment ...came with some inescapable constraints, setting new evolutionary pathways for human social and economic activities. We explore the developmental process at the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of Aşıklı Höyük in central Anatolia (Turkey), specifically the relationship between internal dynamics and external influences in early village formation. Feedback mechanisms inherent to the community were responsible for many of the unique developments there, including domestication of a variant of free-threshing wheat and the early evolution of caprine management, which gave rise to domesticated stock. Gradual change was the rule at Aşıklı, yet the cumulative transformations in architecture, settlement layout, and caprine management were great. The many strands of evidence reveal a largely local (endemic) evolution of an early Pre-Pottery Neolithic community. However, burgeoning inequalities stemming from production surplus such as livestock likely stimulated greater regional interaction toward the end of the sequence.
Human interference with the life cycle of wild ruminant species in the 10th-9th millennia BCE was essential to the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ in the Near East. Being a process of learning by doing, ...initial ruminant management must have been challenging to both founder flocks and people, but information about potential problems is hitherto lacking in the archaeological record. Here we report on a skeletal condition affecting joint health in small bovids. Detailed examination of the bone surfaces of astragalus of modern and Goitered gazelles as well as wild and domestic sheep revealed circumscribed mesoscopic lesions that we classified into five stages based on their size and properties. Our study demonstrates that intra-articular bone damage is significantly more pronounced in animals living confined to enclosures. Similar non-physiologic conditions have been evidenced in juvenile and adult sheep from early Neolithic contexts throughout Anatolia and interpreted as evidence for locomotor stress due to restricted mobility and stabling on-site. Still in the course of the early Neolithic, joint health improved significantly, implying a better mastering of sheep management over the centuries. In conclusion, pathologic profiling yields the potential for tracing initial management of captive ruminants. Apart from Southwest Asia, the methodological approach presented here seems appropriate for detecting similar developments in the human-animal relationship of behaviorally comparable medium- and large-sized herbivore taxa in other parts of the Old and New Worlds.
•A novel methodological approach based on pathologic profiles examines the human-animal relationship in the Neolithic.•The pathology relates to restricted mobility, which is a consequence of anthropogenic influence.•Pathologic profiling helps tracing and timing initial sheep husbandry in the Near-East.•This method bares the potential to identify management in medium and large sized herbivore taxa across the world.
The domestication of cattle, sheep and goats had already taken place in the Near East by the eighth millennium bc. Although there would have been considerable economic and nutritional gains from ...using these animals for their milk and other products from living animals-that is, traction and wool-the first clear evidence for these appears much later, from the late fifth and fourth millennia bc. Hence, the timing and region in which milking was first practised remain unknown. Organic residues preserved in archaeological pottery have provided direct evidence for the use of milk in the fourth millennium in Britain, and in the sixth millennium in eastern Europe, based on the delta(13)C values of the major fatty acids of milk fat. Here we apply this approach to more than 2,200 pottery vessels from sites in the Near East and southeastern Europe dating from the fifth to the seventh millennia bc. We show that milk was in use by the seventh millennium; this is the earliest direct evidence to date. Milking was particularly important in northwestern Anatolia, pointing to regional differences linked with conditions more favourable to cattle compared to other regions, where sheep and goats were relatively common and milk use less important. The latter is supported by correlations between the fat type and animal bone evidence.
In the beginning of the 8th millennium BCE, the people of Aşıklı Höyük dramatically changed how they constructed their buildings. People no longer constructed circular, semi-subterranean residential ...buildings and instead started to build above ground rectangular buildings. The long-term Aşıklı Höyük excavations help us understand the tempo and organization of this important evolutionary transition. This study advances discussion in three ways: 1) it provides a fine grained understanding of the diachronic shift in social and economic practices, 2) through broad horizontal excavation, this research provides new insights into the built environment, including the opportunity to understand the synchronic organization of residential and non-residential spaces, and 3) this study puts forth a detailed understanding of the evolutionary shift from circular-oval to rectangular architectural practices within a single residential setting. Collectively, the long-term research project at Aşıklı Höyük, with extensive horizontal excavations and detailed radiocarbon dating project, advances our understanding of the changing social and economic context of the transition from circular to rectangular residential buildings.
At Aşıklı Höyük, one of the earliest Pre-pottery Neolithic mound sites in Central Anatolia, a shift in animal utilization from broad-spectrum exploitation of diverse animal species to a concentration ...on managed caprines has been observed. Changes in the balance of meat to plant foods over the same time frame remain an open question. In this study, carbon and nitrogen isotopic analyses of bulk collagen and compound-specific nitrogen isotopic analysis of amino acids were undertaken for the human remains to elucidate the dietary impact of the hunting to herding transition over a span of about 1000 years. The results showed that animal protein consumption did not change very much as managed sheep became the main source of meat. The contribution of animal protein to the total human diet at Aşıklı Höyük is similar to comparison data on later Neolithic farmers in Anatolia measured in previous studies. The early development of ungulate management and the increasing focus on just a few prey species do not appear to have forced drastic changes in the extent human carnivory from the early Pre-pottery Neolithic to the early Pottery Neolithic. However, human individuals showed similar isotopic compositions within the same buildings at Aşıklı, suggesting variation in food consumption by household.
•This study reconstructs the diets of early pastoral societies in southwest Asia.•At Aşıklı Höyük, a shift of subsistence from hunting to sheep herding was observed.•Nitrogen isotopic analysis of amino acids provides new information on the rate of animal protein intake.•The animal protein consumption did not change despite major change from hunting economy to highly dependent on managed sheep.•The similarity of the human isotopiccompositions is greatest by building and suggests uniform diets within households.
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