8,000-Year-Old Food Residue Reveals What The Neolithic Diet Was Really Like
Libcom.Org/Out of The WoodsTurns out meat and dairy didn’t actually play a very large role in the human diet some 8,000 years ago.
Researchers from the University of Bristol shed new light on the culinary habits of Neolithic people living near the Danube River in southeastern Europe 8,000 years ago.
In a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, experts explained how they analyzed more than 200 pottery shards that were 8,000 years old – with stunning results. While the humans of this period were generally thought to have subsisted on a primarily meat-and-dairy diet, the researchers found far more fish than they were expecting.
For this subset of Neolithic people, which lived in an area between modern-day Romania and Serbia called the Iron Gates region of the Danube, seafood was indeed still popular despite their transition to farming and land-based foods.
“The findings revealed that the majority of Neolithic pots analyzed here were being used for processing fish or other aquatic resources,” said Dr. Lucy Cramp, lead researcher of the study. “This is a significant contrast with an earlier study showing the same type of pottery in the surrounding region was being used for cattle, sheep for goat meat and dairy products.”
“It is also completely different to nearly all other assemblages of Neolithic farmer-type pottery previously analyzed from across Europe (nearly 1,000 residues) which also show predominantly terrestrial-based resources being prepared in cooking pots, even from locations near major rivers or the coast.”
In the end, we still don’t know why this particular subset of Neolithic people retained such a fish-heavy diet, but there are some theories. The plummeting of the Danube River’s sturgeon population, for instance, or simply a change in how the fish was prepared, remain the most likely answers.
