Stone Age Britons imported wheat

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/26/britain-history-idUSL5N0W04LC20150226

by luu • 11 years ago

41 29 11 years ago

dalke3• 11 years ago

Looks like the original article was published in the most recent Science, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6225/998 , so behind a paywall but available from my local library.

There are more details in the review at The Independent . http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/the-remarkab... .

anarchy8• 11 years ago

It seems like more and more we are learning just how smart we were in the deep past

venomsnake2• 11 years ago

I got that memo the first time I saw the pyramids. The engineers were technologically inferior, but new their craft and were smart.

agumonkey• 11 years ago

Here goes our technofetishistic era.

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

And knew their craft to the extent that is rarely seen today. When you only have few poor tools with which you work your whole life, and want to do big things, you end up knowing those tools as well as methods from inside out. Depth vs. breadth.

rowanseymour5• 11 years ago

I've read a couple of good books recently (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari being my favourite) which make a convincing case for human evolution having mostly finished sometime around 100,000 - 50,000BCE when we homo sapiens started migrating out of Africa. It's pretty amazing to think that there were human beings walking around back then who were at least as mentally developed, if not more, than we are today.

Torn• 11 years ago

What makes you think they might have been more mentally developed?

soneca• 11 years ago

I had this same insight a few years ago. That human beings with the exactly same brain capacity than ours existed 100,000 years ago. And we normally think about knowledge and realizations and things happening from 10,000 years ago at the most.

This openned my mind to realise the importance of some things we take for granted: learning tools and institutions, diversity (in depth and breadth), register of history and culture.

protomyth• 11 years ago

Given the surprise a lot of people have learning their were pre-columbian trade routes from the Arctic to South America, I am not sure we really teach much in the way of history.

goatforce5• 11 years ago

There was regular trade between Australia and Indonesia from the 1500's onwards, well before the Europeans turned up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makassan_contact_with_Australia

markvdb• 11 years ago

Much more recently, from around 1600 BCE, amber from the Baltic coast seems to have found its way into Egypt.

http://books.google.com/books?id=NAwGLzAfyhEC&printsec=front...

kiiski• 11 years ago

That link gives a 404 page.

dalke3• 11 years ago

Another example, from the article: "there has been other signs of contacts, including bones of domesticated pigs in Germany in Stone Age hunter-gatherer settlements. "There are trade networks that pre-date agriculture,""

Regarding the amber trade, see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Road .

shawabawa32• 11 years ago

It seems this is all based on a finding of "traces of wheat DNA"

Does that really suggest farming or trade? Couldn't it have just been wild wheat?

dalke3• 11 years ago

Quoting from the article:

The scientists also found DNA of oak, poplar and beech and of dogs or wolves, deer, grouse and auroch, a type of cow. There was no trace of wheat pollen in the samples, indicating that it was not grown locally.

shawabawa32• 11 years ago

Oops, not sure how I missed that paragraph

Stone Age Britons imported wheat

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