TORONTO – New research from the University of British Columbia has found that some of our early ancestors may not have changed from hunters and gatherers to farmers quite as quickly as previously believed.
Farming – believed to have been introduced to European culture from the Near East, in areas that are present-day Israel, Iran, Iraq, and southeast Turkey – had reached Europe by 5500 BC. It had been believed that this transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers happened rather quickly.
However, new analyses of isotopes and genetic material from a cave in Europe has revealed that hunter-gatherer cultures existed alongside farming cultures for about 2,000 years in that area. Incredibly, the research also found that the two cultures never mixed.
You are what you eat
Olaf Nenhlich, a post doctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia whose research is also funded by the German Science Foundation, analyzed bones found in a cave in 2007 called Blatterhöhle in northwest Germany.
The bones spanned between 9,000 BC and 3,000 BC. This meant that various cultures existed in the same area between this time span.
Nehlich analyzed the organic compounds stored within the bones.
“This tells us about what these people ate during their lives,” said Nehlich. “We can read out of this information from the skeletal findings, where these individuals lived and what they ate.”
Nehlich, who specializes in studying isotopes in researching paleo-diets, studied the bones from Blatterhöhle and made a surprising discovery: there were three types of groups in the cave.
“Our history is not as straightforward as we think,” said Nehlich.
The early group of neolithic bones were typical, revealing that humans from this period were hunter-gatherers.
However, two other populations were found: one of Neolithic farmers, but the other, surprisingly, was of Neolithic hunter-gatherers which subsisted mainly on freshwater fish.
Why these two cultures lived alongside each other and subsisted so differently still isn’t understood.
“There will be more material analyzed from that site,” said Nehlich. “We will expand our study to other potential and interesting sites to see if there are certain environmental conditions that lead to this behaviour.”
Comments