Mesoamericans drank fermented cacao pulp 3000 years ago.
Pasta alle vongole
Some 160,000 years ago, with the Earth in the middle of an Ice Age, a group of modern-looking humans lived in a cave a few kilometers from the sea near the southern tip of Africa. There they huddled around hearths, chipped stone bladelets, and perhaps decorated their bodies or objects with a red pigment. The site, Pinnacle Point near Mosselbaai in South Africa, has just been unveiled to the public, and it is touted as the earliest evidence of human coastal settlement, and of our use of the sea’s resources as food. Yes, because our human troop in the cave also feasted on shellfish and other seafood. Anthropologists think that many similar sites existed, but that their remains have been washed away as sea level rose with the melting of the glaciers. The Pinnacle Point cave is now a sea cliff, 15 metres above the waves of the Indian Ocean.
The excavators of the site think that during the Ice Age savannah productivity was low, and human populations set out in search of better places to live, eventually finding them in coastal areas — which are now submerged, which is why no similar sites of this antiquity have ever been found. Shellfish would then have become a critical source of food, and the study contends that humans then followed these resources out of Africa, moving along the Indian Ocean coast to the Red Sea, the Middle East, and beyond…
As far as the cold waters of the North Sea, in fact. Fast forward to just a few thousand years ago: the late Mesolithic in northern Europe. In places like Britain and Denmark, humans still have a basically marine diet. Then agriculture comes, either in the form of knowledge or of farmers, and suddenly — the evidence is that the change was very rapid — the eating habits of 150,000 years are gone. That’s gotta hurt. In particular, what did people do about vitamin D, which is plentiful in seafood but in cereals, well, not so much. Vitamin D is made in the skin when it is exposed to sunlight. As Razib points out at Gene Expression, we know that genes for skin pigmentation have been strongly selected. Is it the sudden transition to low vitamin D foods in the Neolithic that accounts for the paleness of northern European skins?
Linking archaeology and agrobiodiversity
It was probably a silly thing to say. A couple of days ago I briefly mentioned the models that researchers have built, based on present-day genetic data on Europeans, to understand the rate and pattern of human movement into the continent during the Neolithic. And I made the throw-away comment that I wasn’t aware of similar models for crops. I sort of instantly regretted it, and last night did some googling.
At first I thought perhaps I was right after all. I found a recent (2006) paper whose abstract says:
Thus far, no attempts have been made to track the movement of the founder genetic stocks of the first crop plants from their core area based on the genetic structure of living plants.
Further on, though, the authors say they’ve done just that for wheat. And I also found reference to a “Domestication of Europe” project which sought
to determine the extent to which phylogeographical analysis of modern landraces of barley and wheat, combined with examination of ancient DNA in preserved specimens, can reveal genetic information pertaining to the spread and establishment of cereal cultivation from its points of origin in Southwest Asia into and through Europe.
I think the project must have run from 2003-2006. The Glyn Daniel Laboratory for Archaeogenetics at Cambridge was one of the labs involved, and some of the work, and other related research projects, is described on its website.
So there are people out there trying to link up the archaeology and human genetics of agricultural spread in Europe with the genetics of crops and livestock. Is it too early for a Grand Synthesis?
The spread of agriculture into Europe
You may recall a post a few days back on how domestic pig keeping spread into Europe. Well, Razib over at Gene Expression, a genetics blog, has a post today which includes a map of the spread of agriculture north and west from the Middle East. He points out that current thinking is that either the practice of agriculture did the spreading (cultural diffusion), or people themselves (demic diffusion) — or both. Both was what the pig work implied, of course. Human genetic studies suggest that Neolithic people have made a fairly low (maybe 20%) contribution to European ancestry, and Razib summarizes the current debate about whether that therefore refutes the hypothesis that movement of people was involved in the spread of agriculture, as well as that of ideas. Bottom line: it probably doesn’t.
He also links to a recent paper that calculates a figure for the rate of movement ((Tracing the Origin and Spread of Agriculture in Europe. Pinhasi R, Fort J, Ammerman AJ. 2005. PLoS Biology Vol. 3, No. 12. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030410)): 1 km/year, give or take. That was arrived at by interpolating radiocarbon dates of Neolithic archaeological sites across Europe, and it fits very well with the results of models using human genetic data. ((As far as I’m aware, however, nobody’s done anything similar with crops.)) An interesting way to think about that speed of movement is that it is roughly a one-day walk per generation.
Earliest known rice?
It’s late, and I really should get to bed, but I cannot ignore my duty to inform you of a paper just published in Nature. Fire and flood management of coastal swamp enabled first rice paddy cultivation in east China by Y. Zong, Z. Chen, J. B. Innes, C. Chen, Z. Wang and H. Wang describes how, 7,700 years ago, people in the lower reaches of the Yangtze converted brackish swamps into rice paddies that remained pretty productive for a couple of hundred years until the sea upped and swallowed the area. There’s a lot more to be gleaned from the paper, which is probably behind a paywall (I can’t check) but will nevertheless be picked up around the world. I’ll look out for a story in the China Daily tomorrow.
Later … Nothing I could see in the paper here, but the LA Times and National Geographic have more.