The safe consensus view would be that this is a period of subsistence experimentation and nothing more. That explains the variability of farming and husbandry practices, move on. I'm not so sure. Another wretched pay-per-obscurity.
Seen in Popular Archaeology
Cynthianne Debono Spiteri, Rosalind E. Gillis, Mélanie Roffet-Salque, Laura Castells Navarro, Jean Guilaine, Claire Manen, Italo M. Muntoni, Maria Saña Segui, Dushka Urem-Kotsou, Helen L. Whelton, Oliver E. Craig, Jean-Denis Vigne, and Richard P. Evershed "Regional asynchronicity in dairy production and processing in early farming communities of the northern Mediterranean" PNAS 2016 ; published ahead of print November 14, 2016, doi:10.1073/pnas.1607810113 [Link]
Abstract
In the absence of any direct
evidence, the relative importance of meat and dairy productions to
Neolithic prehistoric Mediterranean
communities has been extensively debated.
Here, we combine lipid residue analysis of ceramic vessels with
osteo-archaeological
age-at-death analysis from 82 northern
Mediterranean and Near Eastern sites dating from the seventh to fifth
millennia BC
to address this question. The findings
show variable intensities in dairy and nondairy activities in the
Mediterranean region
with the slaughter profiles of
domesticated ruminants mirroring the results of the organic residue
analyses. The finding of
milk residues in very early Neolithic
pottery (seventh millennium BC) from both the east and west of the
region contrasts
with much lower intensities in sites of
northern Greece, where pig bones are present in higher frequencies
compared with other
locations. In this region, the slaughter
profiles of all domesticated ruminants suggest meat production
predominated. Overall,
it appears that milk or the by-products of
milk was an important foodstuff, which may have contributed
significantly to the
spread of these cultural groups by
providing a nourishing and sustainable product for early farming
communities.
This builds on previous analysis of sieve sherds... via the Wall Street Journal, 2013>
See also Salque et al, 2013 "Earliest Evidence of Cheese Making in the Sixth Millennium..."
Such a treat for me to read this: "sieve sherds".
ReplyDeleteI've been looking at ancient global roots of words, and found *xya to be shed(water), shade(light) & shield; and was trying to match *xyua to 'through' as in a basket filter, I never even thought of a ceramic *sieve*. Thanks.
Maybe dairy farming also entered Europe from the Maghreb. Archaeological evidence of dairying in Libya c. 7kya, and then northwestern Mediterranean and British Isles not so long after. Plus introgression of African cattle mtDNA haplogroups into European cattle in these regions. 'Butter' in Hausa is 'man shanu'; we see similar word root in Welsh ('menyn'); Old Portuguese: 'manteiga'; Galician: 'manteiga'; Mirandese: 'manteiga'; Asturian: 'mantega'; Spanish: 'manteca'; Aragonese: 'manteca'; Catalan: 'mantega'. The Iberian variants are hypothesised to be derived from Celtiberian. I would suggest an ultimate origin in Afroasiatic/Chadic.
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