CATEGORY: diets/paleo
TECHNICAL: **
SUMMARY:

This is an interesting little document that I found quite a long
time ago. It attempts to shatter the myth that neolithic humans (in
Europe) were primarily plant eaters. This is significant when one
considers the arguments made by vegans/vegetarians that human beings
are, and have always been, primarily herbivores.
Many on this list know that I staunchly believe that humans
consumed a majority of animal based food and not vegetable foods. This
does not mean I advocate a meat-only diet. It does, however, mean that
I encourage the consumption of mostly fiberous veggies (and herbs, etc.),
and getting a majority of calories from protein and fat sources.
If this research proves to be correct, then it indicates
something that is pretty important from an evolutionary point of view.
Namely, that humans (of european origin/background) may not have had as
much time to adapt to a grain based diet as expected. The previous
estimate was about 20,000 years. This document argues otherwise (4,000 -
2,000 years).
Should that be the case, then it's very unlikely we've had time
to adjust to such a quick change in diet (from animal to grain). And,
that adds fuel to the argument that grains are contributing
significantly to the increase in diseases of degeneration so prominent
today...

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British Archaeology, no 12, March 1996: Features
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Bone analysis suggests Neolithic people preferred meat, writes Mike
Richards. `First farmers' with no taste for grain

The Neolithic period is traditionally associated with the beginning
of farming, yet in Britain - by contrast with much of the rest of Europe -
the evidence has always been thin on the ground. Where are the first
farmers' settlements? Where are the fields?

The almost complete absence of this kind of evidence has led some
archaeologists, over recent years, to question the view that people in
Britain actually grew most of their food in the 4th and 3rd millennia BC.
Now, a scientific study of Neolithic human bone seems to point in the same
revisionist direction.

The small-scale study - the first of its kind - of the bones of about
23 Neolithic people from ten sites in central and southern England,
suggests that these `first farmers' relied heavily on animal meat for
food, or on animal by-products such as milk and cheese, and that plant
foods in fact formed little importance in their diet. The bones date from
throughout the Neolithic, c 4100BC - c 2000BC.

The study was based on the idea that our bodies are made up of
organic and inorganic components derived from the foods we have eaten.
There are a number of ways of tracing the original food source of some of
our tissues, and one way is to look at the relative ratios of certain
elements, known as `stable isotopes', in bone protein.

These stable isotopes can tell us a number of things about what a
person's diet has been for most of their life. One particular isotope can
tell us whether humans were getting most of their food from plant or
animal sources. Generally speaking, this is done by comparing human
isotope values to animal isotope values. If the human values are more like
that of a herbivore (eg, horses or cattle) they are eating a great deal of
plant food, and if they are more like carnivores (eg, wolves or foxes),
they are eating more meat.

A number of human bones from the Iron Age and from Romano-British
sites were also tested, and their isotope values were a little higher than
those of herbivores. This is as we might expect, as there is little doubt
that in these periods people practised relatively intense cereal
agriculture, and only supplemented their diet with meat. The Neolithic
results, however, were surprisingly different. They were as high, and
sometimes even higher, than stable isotope values of carnivores. This
suggests the Neolithic people had relatively little plant food in their
diet and instead were consuming large amounts of meat. It could also mean
they were eating a lot of animal by-products, like milk and cheese, as
these are indistinguishable from meat itself using stable isotopes.

So what, then, was the Neolithic economy based on? Animal remains
from Neolithic sites are generally of domestic species (eg, cattle and
pig) rather than wild, and cattle from Neolithic sites such as Hambledon
Hill in Dorset are actually larger than the cattle typically found in the
Iron Age. This evidence may suggest an animal-dependent economy - indeed,
one in which animals were well treated and kept for a long time - and, as
the Neolithic specialist Andrew Sherratt has suggested, the British
Neolithic may have been characterised by a `secondary products
revolution', with animal husbandry and an emphasis on animal milk and
cheese, instead of by an `agricultural revolution' and the growing of
crops.

Grain and agricultural implements have, of course, been found at
Neolithic sites in Britain. The isotope results do not rule out some
limited grain production and consumption; but they suggest it did not form
a significant portion of the diet. The sites where grain has been found
generally seem to have been used mainly for ritual purposes, and it is
possible (as archaeologists such as Richard Bradley and Julian Thomas have
argued) that in Britain, on the edge of Europe, grain was grown, or even
imported from the continent, only for ritual purposes. Agricultural
implements may also have assumed a largely ritual significance.

There are, however, potential difficulties with stable isotope
analysis. The main concern is whether the animal stable isotope data used
as a benchmark are accurate for the specific British Neolithic sites
tested. In the study, we took `average animal values' from a large
database, held at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, covering all
Europe over the past 10,000 years. It may be that there are regional
variations in plant and animal isotope values of which we are, as yet,
unaware. Research, however, continues - and if our preliminary results are
confirmed, we may be able to scrap the notion of Neolithic
agriculturalists in Britain once and for all.

Mike Richards is a PhD student at the Research Laboratory for Archaeology
in Oxford

:cool: TJ :cool: