Gregory's ServerAt the Blätterhöhle cave in what is now Germany, researchers found the remains of three different ancient communities.
The first were hunter-gatherers, based on both their genomes and the stable isotopes in their teeth and bones, which revealed a diet of wild game. The second group also belonged to the same genetic population as the first, but ate a diet heavy in freshwater fish. And the third were agriculturalists, descended primarily from those Anatolian farmers but with some hunter-gatherer ancestors as well. This last group ate a diet heavy in domesticated animals.
So three very different communities, with different but overlapping ancestries and very different ways of life, lived side-by-side, sometimes intermarrying, and using the same cave to bury their dead. And, based on radiocarbon dating, they continued to do so for 2,000 years after the arrival of agriculture.
It’s hard to square 2,000 years of co-existence with Diamond’s Just So story about the inexorable and mechanical expansion of farming at the expense of hunter-gatherers.
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In Britain, agriculture arrived about 6,000 years ago with those Neolithic farmers. As at Blätterhöhle, they intermarried with the local hunter-gatherers, eventually absorbing that community.
But, several centuries after agriculture arrived, the evidence for farming starts to drop off in the archeological record and doesn’t reappear for almost another thousand years. Chris Stevens and Dorian Fuller argued in the journal Antiquity in 2012 (sorry, no full text link) that “cereal cultivation was abandoned throughout many parts of the British Isles in favour of increased reliance on pastoralism and wild resources during the Middle to Late Neolithic.”
People seem to have abandoned the growing of crops like wheat in favor of gathering wild hazelnuts, the shells of which show up in large quantities at sites throughout this period, and herding domesticated animals. Stevens and Fuller note that this period also coincides with population decline, which they suggest was driven by a worsening climate but which I wonder might not have been a product of the plague (genetic evidence for which shows up all across Europe around this time).
But the authors also note that this is the period during which monumental stone architecture, like Stonehenge, was constructed. So clearly the people of Britain were still able to coordinate and mobilize for massively complex undertakings, even if they had abandoned agriculture for a long while. It’s hard to square a thousand-year abandonment of agriculture by a sophisticated and energetic society with a teleological story about agriculture’s inevitable advance and structural advantages over foraging.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/abs/did-neolithic-farming-fail-the-case-for-a-bronze-age-agricultural-revolution-in-the-british-isles/DDC019088534FB8D35AF356D346842E1
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In Britain, agriculture arrived about 6,000 years ago with those Neolithic farmers. As at Blätterhöhle, they intermarried with the local hunter-gatherers, eventually absorbing that community.
But, several centuries after agriculture arrived, the evidence for farming starts to drop off in the archeological record and doesn’t reappear for almost another thousand years. Chris Stevens and Dorian Fuller argued in the journal Antiquity in 2012 (sorry, no full text link) that “cereal cultivation was abandoned...