Wild cereal grain consumption among Early Holocene foragers of the Balkans predates the arrival of agriculture
- Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
- University of York, United Kingdom
- University of Rome Tor Vergata"", Italy
- University of Belgrade, Serbia
- Institute for Anthropological Research, Romania
- Institute of Archaeology, Serbia
- University of Wisconsin, United States
Abstract
Forager focus on wild cereal plants has been documented in the core zone of domestication in southwestern Asia, while evidence for forager use of wild grass grains remains sporadic elsewhere. In this paper, we present starch grain and phytolith analyses of dental calculus from 60 Mesolithic and Early Neolithic individuals from five sites in the Danube Gorges of the central Balkans. This zone was inhabited by likely complex Holocene foragers for several millennia before the appearance of the first farmers ~6200 cal BC. We also analyzed forager ground stone tools for evidence of plant processing. Our results based on the study of dental calculus show that certain species of Poaceae (species of the genus Aegilops) were used since the Early Mesolithic, while ground stone tools exhibit traces of a developed grass grain processing technology. The adoption of domesticated plants in this region after ~6500 cal BC might have been eased by the existing familiarity with wild cereals.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting file
Article and author information
Author details
Emanuela Cristiani
Funding
H2020 European Research Council (639286)
- Emanuela Cristiani
National Science Foundation (BCS-0235465)
- T Douglas Price
- Dušan Borić
NOMIS Stiftung
- Dušan Borić
Wellcome Trust (209869_Z_17_Z)
- Anita Radini
British Academy (SG-42170 and LRG-45589)
- Dušan Borić
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2021, Cristiani et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 2,161
- views
-
- 292
- downloads
-
- 12
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Wild cereal grain consumption among Early Holocene foragers of the Balkans predates the arrival of agriculture
eLife 10:e72976.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72976
Further reading
-
- Developmental Biology
- Ecology
Organisms require dietary macronutrients in specific ratios to maximize performance, and variation in macronutrient requirements plays a central role in niche determination. Although it is well recognized that development and body size can have strong and predictable effects on many aspects of organismal function, we lack a predictive understanding of ontogenetic or scaling effects on macronutrient intake. We determined protein and carbohydrate intake throughout development on lab populations of locusts and compared to late instars of field populations. Self-selected protein:carbohydrate targets declined dramatically through ontogeny, due primarily to declines in mass-specific protein consumption rates which were highly correlated with declines in specific growth rates. Lab results for protein consumption rates partly matched results from field-collected locusts. However, field locusts consumed nearly double the carbohydrate, likely due to higher activity and metabolic rates. Combining our results with the available data for animals, both across species and during ontogeny, protein consumption scaled predictably and hypometrically, demonstrating a new scaling rule key for understanding nutritional ecology.
-
- Ecology
Advances in tracking technologies have revealed the diverse migration patterns of birds, which are critical for range mapping and population estimation. Population trends are usually estimated in breeding ranges where birds remain stationary, but for species that breed in remote areas like the Arctic, these trends are often assessed in over-wintering ranges. Assessing population trends during the wintering season is challenging due to the extensive movements of birds in these ranges, which requires a deep understanding of the movement dynamics. However, these movements remain understudied, particularly in the mid-latitudes, where many Arctic breeders overwinter, increasing uncertainty in their ranges and numbers. Here, we show that the Arctic breeding raptor Rough-legged buzzard, which overwinters in the mid-latitudes, has a specific wintering strategy. After migrating ca. 1500 km from the Arctic to mid-latitudes, the birds continue to move throughout the entire over-wintering period, traveling another 1000 km southwest and then back northeast as the snowline advances. This continuous movement makes their wintering range dynamic throughout the season. In essence, this movement represents an extension of the quick migration process, albeit at a slower pace, and we have termed this migration pattern ‘foxtrot migration’, drawing an analogy to the alternating fast and slow movements of the foxtrot dance. These results highlight the potential errors in range mapping from single mid-winter surveys and emphasize the importance of this migration pattern in assessing the conservation status of bird species. Understanding this migration pattern could help to correctly estimate bird populations in over-wintering ranges, which is especially important for species that nest in hard-to-reach regions such as the Arctic.
