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 (GSTs) 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 GSTs 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.
Keywords: Mesolithic foragers; dental calculus; ecology; none; plant biology; plant foods; stone tools.
Before humans invented agriculture and the first farmers appeared in southwestern Asia, other ancient foragers (also known as hunter-gatherers) in southeastern Europe had already developed a taste for consuming wild plants. There is evidence to suggest that these foragers were intensely gathering wild cereal grains before the arrival of agriculture. However, until now, the only place outside southwestern Asia this has been shown to have occurred is in Greece, and is dated around 20,000 years ago. In the past, researchers proposed that forager societies in the Balkans also consumed wild cereals before transitioning to agriculture. But this has been difficult to prove because plant foods are less likely to preserve than animal bones and teeth, making them harder to detect in prehistoric contexts. To overcome this, Cristiani et al. studied teeth from 60 individuals found in archaeological sites between Serbia and Romania, which are attributed to the Mesolithic and Early Neolithic periods. Food particles extracted from crusty deposits on the teeth (called the dental calculus) were found to contain structures typically found in plants. In addition, Cristiani et al. discovered similar plant food residues on ground stone tools which also contained traces of wear associated with the processing of wild cereals. These findings suggest that foragers in the central Balkans were already consuming certain species of wild cereal grains 11,500 years ago, before agriculture arrived in Europe. It is possible that sharing knowledge about plant resources may have helped introduce domesticated plant species in to this region as early as 6500 BC. This work challenges the deep-rooted idea that the diet of hunter-gatherers during the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods primarily consisted of animal proteins. In addition, it highlights the active role the eating habits of foragers might have played in introducing certain domesticated plant species that have become primary staples of our diet today.
© 2021, Cristiani et al.