Food remains in ancient cooking pots suggest farming caught on slowly

[xchrom]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/24/food-ancient-cooking-pots-farming

Our ancestors' move from hunter-gathering to farming happened gradually rather than abruptly, food residues found in 6,000-year-old cooking pots suggests.

Evidence from pots found around the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe shows farmers at the beginning of the Neolithic period continued to cook the same types of food foraged by their immediate hunter-gatherer ancestors. The finding challenges the traditional view that farming quickly and completely replaced the more ancient lifestyle.

Archaeologists from the University of York and the University of Bradford studied 133 pots from farming communities in 15 different sites in Denmark and Germany. The team analysed the chemical structures of fats, oils and waxes that had been released from cooking and had soaked into the ceramic. The researchers also studied crusts of burnt food that had been preserved on the inside of the vessels.

The results, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the pots of the early farming period had been used to cook aquatic animals such as seals, freshwater and marine fish.

[izquierdista]

1. I'll go with the alternate hypothesis

That in addition to being a secret agent, Julia Child was also a Time Lord and would pop back to the Neolithic to instruct various tribes in how to prepare duck a l'orange and a mean cassoulet.

[Raschel]

2. And they knew their fish wasn't mislabeled, or full of cesium.

[TheMadMonk]

3. Um, this pattern was still prevalent amongst gentry in Victorian times.

And echos remain in the behaviour of sports shooters/hunters.

[Boojatta]

4. Shocking! Ancient Egyptians didn't clear forests in Northern Europe to practice agriculture there!

"Evidence from pots found around the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe"

Were we supposed to think that ancient city-states that became empires conquered people who always had agriculture before they were conquered?

[krispos42]

5. "Take this dohickey... it's called a 'plow', and strap it to the back of a donkey

"Now walk in a straight line across that field while staring at the donkey's pooper chute from sunrise to sunset. Do that all day for several weeks in a row, throw in some food you could have otherwise eaten, and wait all summer. TRUST ME, in the fall, you'll have lots more than if you had wandered around the hills all summer, hunting and gathering."