Video: Britons may have imported wheat long before farming it
Prehistoric people living on the British Isles were more than hunter-gatherers: they were bakers, too, a discovery suggests. They seem to have been eating wheat for millennia before it was cultivated in the region.
A find of plant DNA challenges the assumption that the grain didn't arrive until agriculture took hold there around 4000 BC. People were in fact enjoying flour imported from mainland Europe some 2000 years before this.
"Rather than being cut off as the commonly held view states, these hunter-gatherers had trade links to distant agricultural communities," says Robin Allaby from the University of Warwick, UK.
Allaby and his team's claim is based on a discovery at an undersea site around 12 kilometres from the Isle of Wight, off the coast of southern England. In the Mesolithic Age – some 10,000 to 5000 years ago, before farming emerged – the area was above the waves and was the site of a shipyard. Using pioneering techniques to analyse the sediment dug from beneath the sea floor, they found plentiful wheat DNA from this era – 2000 years earlier than any other signs of wheat previously found in the UK.
However, the lack of the pollen in the samples suggests that nobody was growing wheat here. And as the closest wheat-farming communities were probably in southern Europe or the Near East, getting a loaf of bread would have required a substantial trek. Occasional examples of trade across Europe from this time do exist, but this is the first evidence that hunter-gatherers were willing to travel long distances for rare foodstuffs.
Fond of flat bread
The fact that no husks or seed casings turned up in the mud suggests that these communities got their wheat in the form of flour. So it is likely that the boat builders had a fondness for flat breads to complement their protein-rich diet of game and foraged nuts and plants, says Allaby.
Dorian Fuller from University College London believes that the rare grain was probably a status symbol rather than an important part of hunter-gatherers' diets. Much like the spice trade that flourished in more recent times, the exotic and distant origins would have made wheat highly desirable for those looking to show off.
Valuable foodstuffs were often the first commodities to be traded over long distances, as later crops – African sorghum arriving in India and wheat in China, for instance – bear out. Fuller sees no reason why it would be any different for Mesolithic communities.
Pete Rowley-Conwy of Durham University, UK, is deeply sceptical of the new finding, which flies in the face of the accepted view of how grain cultivation and consumption spread throughout Europe, though. "It is not impossible," he says, "but the distances involved make the whole idea extremely unlikely."
He is unwilling to throw out a consensus from thousands of previous finds, based on just one study.
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1261278
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