Mesolithic cereal trade in Europe?

This week's Science includes in ancient sedimentary DNA study by Oliver Smith, Robin Allaby and colleagues from sediments from an archaeological site sealed beneath the English Channel, with evidence that wheat was decomposing on this Mesolithic site 8000 years ago. Such a claim is obvioulsy a big deal for archaeologists, it is counter to our accepted narrative of the introduction of cereals with Neolithic farming immigrants around 6000 years ago. No surprisingly it has received science media attention, both in Science and in New Scientist, as well as a learned commentary from Gregor Larson; and despite a busy teaching week I have been asked for comments. Here I give my full extended comment. While I agree that we really need more evidence to clinch this from additional sites, and I would prefer directly radiocarbon dated grains, I also don't think this requires a complete overhaul of what we know about the introduction of sustained farming around 4000 BC.

This paper is methodologically impressive. They have developed a robust phylogenetic approach to cautiously ID sedimentary aDNA. The deposits seem well dated and sealed by rising sea-levels. So we are left with the challenge of fitting this to our world view as archaeologists. 

This report is sure to be heavily debated, and I guess many archaeologists will reject this out of hand. But that is perhaps like the ostrich with its head in the sand. I would certainly be happier with an AMS-dated cereal grain, but this new evidence tells us we need to be actively looking for those Pre-Neolithic traded grains.

I suppose this will reopen the debate about claims for Mesolithic cereal pollen grains, which have been claimed from sites here and there in Britain and France. Most archaeologists have rightly tended to follow the critical assessment of these, represented for example by the writings of Prof Behre, a senior archaeobotanist and doyen of anthropogenic pollen indicators (e.g. Behre 2007). I expect new scrutiny of such finds, as they could also relate to a pioneer phase of small scale cereal adoption.

From Larson 2015

This find does not mean the Neolithic needs to redated. The Neolithic in Britian is well dated to about 4000 BC which sees a rapid rise in human population together with evidence for emmer wheat, barley and livestock. This follows a spread of agricultural populations, uniformly with big demographic booms across central and western Europe (e.g work by Shennan et al. in Nature Comms, 2013). This I think is still clear. But the New wheat DNA from the English channel requires us to think in terms of small scale pioneers operating beyond the frontier of farming spread and trading with Foragers, and beyond that foragers trading with each other. Mesolithic foragers were well adapted to their environments given their population density so this would not have been about trading food as needed calories but about foodstuffs that were rare, exotic and valuable. I would guess these early cereals would have been symbolically charged as exotica much like spices in much later times. In regions with obsidian we know Mesolithic populations had long distance trade networks. This new evidence suggests long distance networks also moved perishables, including edibles.

I think we can see this as on par with the food "globalization" episodes in much later prehistory, such as the Bronze Age. When sorghum and other African crops arrived in India 4000 years ago, or wheat arrived in China in the third millennium BC, these edibles proceeded any other material evidence for trade. This implies long distance small scale exchanges in exotica, including what seem to us today as mundane edibles, were highly valued, presumably in part because of the symbolic associations with distance and the exotic. I have written about this in a few places, e.g Fuller et al 2011 in Antiquity or Boivin et al 2012 in World Archaeology (blogged here).

So perhaps what we are seeing is evidence for an early Holocene equivalent-- the Neolithic grain as the tastey exotica in a the Mesolithic world