Regional asynchronicity in dairy production and processing in early farming communities of the northern Mediterranean
- aDepartment of Archaeology, BioArCh, University of York, York YO10 5DD, United Kingdom;
- bPlant Foods in Hominin Dietary Ecology Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 04103 Leipzig, Germany;
- cInstitut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte und Archäologie des Mittelaters, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Schloss Hohentübingen, 72070 Tübingen, Germany;
- dUnité Mixte de Recherche 7209, Archéozoologie, Archéobotanique: Sociétés, Pratiques et Environnements, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Sorbonne Universités, 75005 Paris, France;
- eOrganic Geochemistry Unit, School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1TS, United Kingdom;
- fHuman and Social Sciences, Collège de France, 75005 Paris, France;
- gUnité Mixte de Recherche 5608, Travaux et Recherches Archéologiques sur les Cultures, les Espaces et les Sociétés, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université Toulouse–Jean Jaurès, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 31059 Toulouse, France;
- hSoprintendenza Archeologia della Puglia, Centro Operativo per l’Archeologia della Daunia, 71100 Foggia, Italy;
- iDepartament de Prehistòria Edifici B, Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, 08193 Barcelona, Spain;
- jDepartment of History and Ethnology, Democritus University of Thrace, Komotini 694100, Greece
See allHide authors and affiliations
Edited by Patricia L. Crown, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, and approved October 6, 2016 (received for review June 10, 2016)

Significance
This unique research combines the analyses of lipid residues in pottery vessels with slaughter profiles for domesticated ruminants to provide compelling evidence for diverse subsistence strategies in the northern Mediterranean basin during the Neolithic. Our findings show that the exploitation and processing of milk varied across the region, although most communities began to exploit milk as soon as domesticates were introduced between 9,000 and 7,000 y ago. This discovery is especially noteworthy as the shift in human subsistence toward milk production reshaped prehistoric European culture, biology, and economy in ways that are still visible today.
Abstract
In the absence of any direct evidence, the relative importance of meat and dairy productions to Neolithic prehistoric Mediterranean communities has been extensively debated. Here, we combine lipid residue analysis of ceramic vessels with osteo-archaeological age-at-death analysis from 82 northern Mediterranean and Near Eastern sites dating from the seventh to fifth millennia BC to address this question. The findings show variable intensities in dairy and nondairy activities in the Mediterranean region with the slaughter profiles of domesticated ruminants mirroring the results of the organic residue analyses. The finding of milk residues in very early Neolithic pottery (seventh millennium BC) from both the east and west of the region contrasts with much lower intensities in sites of northern Greece, where pig bones are present in higher frequencies compared with other locations. In this region, the slaughter profiles of all domesticated ruminants suggest meat production predominated. Overall, it appears that milk or the by-products of milk was an important foodstuff, which may have contributed significantly to the spread of these cultural groups by providing a nourishing and sustainable product for early farming communities.
Footnotes
↵1C.D.S., R.E.G., and M.R.-S. contributed equally to this work.
- ↵2To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: melanie.salque{at}bristol.ac.uk or gillis{at}mnhn.fr.
↵3Present address: School of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford, Bradford BD7 1DP, United Kingdom.
Author contributions: C.D.S., R.E.G., M.R.-S., O.E.C., J.-D.V., and R.P.E. designed research; R.E.G. performed the statistical archaeozoological analyses; C.D.S. and M.R.-S. performed the lipid residue analyses; C.D.S. and R.E.G. performed statistical analyses of the dataset; L.C.N., J.G., C.M., I.M.M., M.S.S., D.U.-K., and H.L.W. directed sampling of archaeological material, directed excavations, and helped with the archaeozoological studies or carried out lipid residue analyses; and C.D.S., R.E.G., M.R.-S., O.E.C., J.-D.V., and R.P.E. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1607810113/-/DCSupplemental.
Citation Manager Formats
Article Classifications
- Physical Sciences
- Chemistry
- Biological Sciences
- Anthropology