Wild cereal grain consumption among Early Holocene foragers of the Balkans predates the arrival of agriculture
- Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
- University of York, United Kingdom
- University of Rome Tor Vergata"", Italy
- University of Belgrade, Serbia
- Institute for Anthropological Research, Romania
- Institute of Archaeology, Serbia
- University of Wisconsin, United States
Abstract
Forager focus on wild cereal plants has been documented in the core zone of domestication in southwestern Asia, while evidence for forager use of wild grass grains remains sporadic elsewhere. In this paper, we present starch grain and phytolith analyses of dental calculus from 60 Mesolithic and Early Neolithic individuals from five sites in the Danube Gorges of the central Balkans. This zone was inhabited by likely complex Holocene foragers for several millennia before the appearance of the first farmers ~6200 cal BC. We also analyzed forager ground stone tools for evidence of plant processing. Our results based on the study of dental calculus show that certain species of Poaceae (species of the genus Aegilops) were used since the Early Mesolithic, while ground stone tools exhibit traces of a developed grass grain processing technology. The adoption of domesticated plants in this region after ~6500 cal BC might have been eased by the existing familiarity with wild cereals.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting file
Article and author information
Author details
Emanuela Cristiani
Funding
H2020 European Research Council (639286)
- Emanuela Cristiani
National Science Foundation (BCS-0235465)
- T Douglas Price
- Dušan Borić
NOMIS Stiftung
- Dušan Borić
Wellcome Trust (209869_Z_17_Z)
- Anita Radini
British Academy (SG-42170 and LRG-45589)
- Dušan Borić
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- George H Perry, Pennsylvania State University, United States
Version history
- Received: August 11, 2021
- Accepted: November 30, 2021
- Accepted Manuscript published: December 1, 2021 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: January 21, 2022 (version 2)
- Version of Record updated: January 25, 2022 (version 3)
Copyright
© 2021, Cristiani et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Wild cereal grain consumption among Early Holocene foragers of the Balkans predates the arrival of agriculture
eLife 10:e72976.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72976
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