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October 12 2003
at 11:27AM |
By Guy Gugliotta
About 6 000 years ago, people living in what is
now Britain, stopped eating fish and shifted to cattle, sheep, pigs and goats in
an abrupt and mysterious transformation that may offer new insights into the
complex reasons why ancient peoples periodically changed their way of
life.
The dietary switch occurred as part of a Neolithic Revolution, a
set of radical pre-Bronze Age changes that included the introduction of
domesticated plants and animals, development of pottery and a distinctive type
of ritual burial widespread in mainland Europe.
"All this stuff appears,
but why did people suddenly stop doing the things they did before?" asked
archaeologist Michael Richards, of the University of Bradford. "In most Old
World areas, it was much more gradual. Why not in Britain? This is the big
question."
| 'Why did people suddenly stop doing the things they did before?' |
Changes in diet usually signal major upheavals in ancient societies. Scholars track the pace of these shifts, looking for clues to why civilisations rise and fall or change when and where they do.
Richards, reporting with two colleagues last month in the journal Nature, analysed bones from 183 ancient Britons for distinctive carbon signatures that reveal whether an individual ate mostly fish or meat.
The researchers found a "unanimous result", the article said. People who died more than 6 000 years ago lived on fish, while those who died after that were all meat-eaters. Richards said the findings should end the debate over whether the adoption of domesticated plants and animals in Britain was gradual or sudden.
"It spread like wildfire," he said. The team found the same result in the same window of time at sites stretching from southern England to northern Scotland, covering a distance of more than 640km.
"There are several explanations of why it could have happened so fast," Richards said. "One is that it's much better to have control over your food supply - it's much more secure than when you're at the mercy of wild food."
But he noted that ancient Britons had no apparent reason to abandon a sophisticated culture that used hooks, lines, nets, weirs and fish traps to create a diet that embraced everything from freshwater "panfish" to large, deep-sea predator species.
Richards suggested that the shift might have occurred as part of a widespread cultural shift "tied in with the pottery, the change of beliefs which resulted in these tombs and other new things. It all comes together at the same time".
When domestic animals were introduced across the English Channel, he said, they may have been accompanied by a cultural revolution, or, more prosaically, an invasion.
The shift to animal husbandry in Britain is different from the gradual pace of agricultural expansion from the Middle East, where the Neolithic Revolution began about 10 500 years ago with the domestication of grains and animals. "The theory is that it spreads gradually across Europe and Asia over an extended period of time," said archaeological chemist Patrick McGovern, of the University of Pennsylvania Museum for Archaeology and Anthropology.
The attractions of agriculture are obvious in the archaeological record. A population with a stable food supply multiplies rapidly and organises in ways that encourage collective action and innovation - the beginnings of civilisation.
But agriculture has its disadvantages. Several major scourges sprang from domesticated animals, including smallpox (cattle), anthrax (sheep) and flu (pigs). And reliance on single crops does not necessarily promote good health.
"There's a trade-off," Richards said. "With domesticated plants and animals, we can produce so much food that we multiply much more quickly."
Neolithic sites show "a lot more bones" than older sites, he added. "But the bones look a lot less healthy." - Independent Foreign Service
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