By breaking down bones dug out of a German cave, a cutting-edge Canadian laboratory has made the puzzling discovery that some Stone-Age Europeans stuck to a hunter-gatherer diet 2,000 years after their neighbours took up farming.

Agriculture first appeared around 8,500 BC in present-day Syria and Turkey. Based on archaeological sites scattered across Europe, many scientists have assumed that communities there abruptly stopped foraging for food starting around 3,000 years later when farming began to be introduced by peoples migrating from the east.

“It’s within one or two generations that all people in the area adopt the new lifestyle,” says Olaf Nehlich, a researcher at the University of British Columbia who co-authored the new research.

But isotope analysis at a UBC lab of ancient bones from a cave in Germany revealed dietary signatures that told a different story.

“What we have here…is a unique situation where we have one group sticking around side by side with farming people for more than a thousand years,” says Nehlich -- 50 generations or more.

The discovery raises the question of whether the remains of other holdout hunter-gatherer communities are waiting to be discovered by archaeologists – and by extension, whether agriculture was really an innovation so attractive that it swept ancient peoples by storm.

“It’s a really unique case,” says Nehlich. “We might need to look deeper into situations like this to find more evidence from other sites to show that this (switch to farming) might be not that abrupt in all areas.”

The scientists analyzed bones from 29 individuals that were extracted from the Blätterhöhle archaeological site in western Germany, near Hagen. Blätterhöhle is a long, skinny cave that holds the jumbled remains of humans that lived in the Mesolithic and Neolithic—the middle and end of the Stone Age, ranging from 9,000 years ago to 3,000 years ago.

The lab at UBC was able to analyze nitrogen, carbon, and sulfur isotopes in the teeth and other bones, a breadth of analysis only offered by a few other labs worldwide. Isotope analysis can show what kind of diet those humans adopted. A German lab also sequenced mitochondrial DNA from the remains.

The analysis showed three distinct groups, two of which were expected. Some of the older, Mesolithic bones had carbon and nitrogen isotope signatures suggesting a diet of wild animals, or hunting and gathering. Some of the newer, Neolithic bones had Nitrogen isotopes suggesting a diet of farmed crops and pastured animals.

But some of the newer, Neolithic bones had carbon, nitrogen and sulfur isotope signatures offering clear evidence of a diet low in plants and livestock and high in freshwater fish – fisher-hunter-gatherers. And carbon dating of those bones dated them to 2,000 years after the appearance of the farming group.

Clearly, the two groups lived side by side, since they buried their dead in the same location.

But the researchers have no idea what their interactions were. The genetic analysis merely suggests that the two groups did not interbreed.

“So far we have no evidence of any violent behavior between these two groups. It seems to be a friendly relationship, side by side,” says Nehlich.

“Maybe in the future when the excavations start again at that site we may be able to find graves and other things to get a better idea of the social structure and the social relationship between these two groups.”

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