Although archaeological findings show the synchronous collapses of major well-documented Chinese Neolithic cultures around 4000 cal. yr BP, the driving mechanism for the phenomenon is still unclear ...and debatable. Spatial climatic features in China spanning this time period suggest a generally cold-dry setting. This is evidenced by 130 well-dated geological records at 97 sites located in climatically and topographically diverse regions, with occurrences of some extreme hydrological events like severe floods in the Chinese Loess Plateau, and in basins of the lower Yellow River and the middle-to-lower Yangtze River. The weakening of the Asian Summer Monsoon (ASM) since the mid-Holocene would have made Neolithic subsistence living unfavourable by decreasing the warmth and wetness in arid and semi-arid regions. However, it might not have been the sole factor that destroyed the Neolithic cultures in the vast territories of China ca. 4000 cal. yr BP. Environmental alterations in the major cultural territories of China reacted in response to precipitation anomalies caused by high variability of the ASM and the westerlies, which were modulated by centennial- to inter-annual- scale driving factors such as solar insolation, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and El Niño-Southern Oscillations (ENSO). This most likely accounted for the nearly synchronous Chinese Neolithic cultural collapses.
Alasdair Whittle's new work argues powerfully for the complexity and fluidity of life in the Neolithic, through a combination of archaeological and anthropological case studies and current ...theoretical debate.
The book ranges from the sixth to the fourth millennium BC, and from the Great Hungarian Plain, central and western Europe and the Alpine foreland to parts of southern Britain.
Familiar terms such as individuals, agency, identity and structure are dealt with, but Professor Whittle emphasises that they are too abstract to be truly useful. Instead, he highlights the multiple dimensions which constituted Neolithic existence: the web of daily routines, group and individual identities, relations with animals, and active but varied attitudes to the past.
The result is a vivid, original and perceptive understanding of the early Neolithic which will offer insights to readers at every level.
"Whittle's general argument is persuasive and, more, to the point, stimulating. His case studies present a rational and balanced articulation between collective structure and individual action." - Journal of Anthropological Research
The Neolithic period in Europe was subject to marked climatic variations during the fourth millennium BCE in the Alpine arc, marking the transition between the recent Atlantic and the Subboreal. This ...phase is characterized by falling temperatures and rising humidity in the Northern Hemisphere. Within this phase, between 3700 and 3250 BCE, a more intense phase takes place, known as Rootmoos 2 or Piora 2. This phase is characterized by a significant drop in lake water levels. This climatic change had repercussions on lakeside dwellers, notably through the modification and adaptation of their diet and subsistence modes. Intestinal parasites (helminths), found by human and animals via parasitic markers, seem to respond over time to these climatic variations. At first sight, low lake level phases are characterized by significant proportions of Trichuris at the expense of Diphyllobothrium, as well as an increase in Fasciola. These phases therefore seem to favour parasites indicative of agropastoral activities. During periods of high lake levels, Diphyllobothrium increase in number, pointing to a higher frequency of fishing practices. In sum, during periods of cooler/wetter climate, Neolithic lakeside populations seem to focus more on fishing produce, which may be a response to a destabilization of previously established agropastoral systems, marking a return to more opportunistic behaviour with the exploitation of products from the direct environment. This pilot study tends to evaluate if the evolution of parasitic communities in the 4th millennium BCE could therefore be used to complete our understanding of the effects of climatic variations on societies, both as a direct consequence of environmental destabilization (effect on the hosts) and the result of the behavioural adaptation of the inhabitants, even if it is still difficult to determine the importance of the influence of each factor on these variations. Despite some remaining challenges in the current study, the integration of paleoparasitic data into broader paleoenvironmental models appears promising. Future research can continue to develop along this path.
•Compilation of all the available data for lacustrine sites dated for the 4th millennium BCE and from Central Europe lake-dwelling area.•Application of the seriograph method and a novel index to analyse intestinal parasitic spectrum diversity.•Evaluation of the intestinal parasitic spectrum response to climate variations and human opportunistic behaviour.
Abstract Abrupt radiocarbon ( 14 C) excursions, or Miyake events, in sequences of radiocarbon measurements from calendar-dated tree-rings provide opportunities to assign absolute calendar dates to ...undated wood samples from contexts across history and prehistory. Here, we report a tree-ring and 14 C-dating study of the Neolithic site of Dispilio, Northern Greece, a waterlogged archaeological site on Lake Kastoria. Findings secure an absolute, calendar-dated time using the 5259 BC Miyake event, with the final ring of the 303-year-long juniper tree-ring chronology dating to 5140 BC. While other sites have been absolutely dated to a calendar year through 14 C-signature Miyake events, Dispilio is the first European Neolithic site of these and it provides a fixed, calendar-year anchor point for regional chronologies of the Neolithic.
Significance
Goats were among the first domestic animals and today are an important livestock species; archaeozoological evidence from the Zagros Mountains of western Iran indicates that goats were ...managed by the late ninth/early eighth millennium. We assess goat assemblages from Ganj Dareh and Tepe Abdul Hosein, two Aceramic Neolithic Zagros sites, using complementary archaeozoological and archaeogenomic approaches. Nuclear and mitochondrial genomes indicate that these goats were genetically diverse and ancestral to later domestic goats and already distinct from wild goats. Demographic profiles from bone remains, differential diversity patterns of uniparental markers, and presence of long runs of homozygosity reveal the practicing and consequences of management, thus expanding our understanding of the beginnings of animal husbandry.
The Aceramic Neolithic (∼9600 to 7000 cal BC) period in the Zagros Mountains, western Iran, provides some of the earliest archaeological evidence of goat (
Capra hircus
) management and husbandry by circa 8200 cal BC, with detectable morphological change appearing ∼1,000 y later. To examine the genomic imprint of initial management and its implications for the goat domestication process, we analyzed 14 novel nuclear genomes (mean coverage 1.13X) and 32 mitochondrial (mtDNA) genomes (mean coverage 143X) from two such sites, Ganj Dareh and Tepe Abdul Hosein. These genomes show two distinct clusters: those with domestic affinity and a minority group with stronger wild affinity, indicating that managed goats were genetically distinct from wild goats at this early horizon. This genetic duality, the presence of long runs of homozygosity, shared ancestry with later Neolithic populations, a sex bias in archaeozoological remains, and demographic profiles from across all layers of Ganj Dareh support management of genetically domestic goat by circa 8200 cal BC, and represent the oldest to-this-date reported livestock genomes. In these sites a combination of high autosomal and mtDNA diversity, contrasting limited Y chromosomal lineage diversity, an absence of reported selection signatures for pigmentation, and the wild morphology of bone remains illustrates domestication as an extended process lacking a strong initial bottleneck, beginning with spatial control, demographic manipulation via biased male culling, captive breeding, and subsequently phenotypic and genomic selection.
The diversity of archaeological evidence for the adoption of farming in Northern Europe has led to competing hypotheses about this critical shift in subsistence strategy. Through a review of the ...archaeological material alongside ethnographic evidence, we reconsider the Neolithic Transition in Southern Scandinavia, and argue for both continuity and change during the early Funnel Beaker Culture (c. 4000–3500 cal BC). A new model is proposed for understanding the processes of regional transition—one which allows for compromise between the dominant explanatory frameworks. We conclude that the first centuries of the Scandinavian Neolithic saw cultural and economic negotiation between the last foragers and the first farmers. This has major implications for the understanding of agricultural origins in Northern Europe.
‘New glume wheat’ (NGW) is an archaeobotanical type increasingly recognised at Neolithic–Bronze Age sites across Europe and Western Asia. NGW has been recognised via aDNA and morphological analyses ...of chaff remains as a member of the Triticum timopheevii wheat group, recent cultivation of which is known only from western Georgia. This study combines geometric morphometric (GMM) analysis of NGW grains with updated results from a parallel study of chaff dehiscence, to assess the taxonomic classification and domestication status of NGW from the Neolithic East Mound at Çatalhöyük (central Anatolia).
Results confirm close comparability of NGW with modern wheats from the group T. timopheevii, in a form which has remained remarkably similar over thousands of years. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that NGW was undergoing selection for domestication traits in terms of shattering behaviour and grain form during the 1150-year East Mound sequence. These findings are interpreted in the context of substantial archaeobotanical evidence for a broad-spectrum plant strategy at Çatalhöyük which mitigated the risk of resource failure and supported experimentation in cropping. Possible cultural and practical incentives are considered for investment in the crop, made despite the availability of a fully-domesticated glume wheat (emmer) with similar growing and processing requirements. Alongside this, the study demonstrates the sensitivity of GMM to differences between and within wheat species, with methodological findings that can inform future studies.
•Geometric morphometrics can identify charred archaeological wheat grains to species.•Morphometrics reinforces link between archaeological remains and Timopheev's wheats.•Within glume wheat species, grain shape can be linked to domestication status.•Timopheev's wheat underwent selection for domestication traits at Çatalhöyük.
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