As far as developments in history that have shaped human destiny go, agriculture is a pretty big one. About 6,000 years ago, humanity figured out how to cultivate food where we want it (for the most part; the kinks are still being worked out) rather than wandering from place to place and relying on what we could find to sustain us. And we haven’t looked back since or so the story went.

But a recent paper in PNAS brings some evidence to challenge the prevailing notion that farming immediately and completely changed everything about human society, from diets to economies to tool usage. The authors suggest that hunting and gathering persisted even after farming had been established. They deduce as much from the presence of specific lipid biomarkers left inside ceramic vessels that date from the time that plants and animals were first domesticated.

The contents of paleolithic diets can be inferred from analysis of the stable isotopes in human bones found at archeological sites. The Western Baltic region of Northern Europe is rich in such sites, and isotopic analysis of bones from them has indicated that marine foods—which were obviously hunted and gathered—were abandoned as soon as domesticated terrestrial food sources were introduced.

The shapes of, and designs on, pottery retrieved from the sites also changed rapidly with the advent of farming, with flat or rounded based vessels replacing earlier pointy-bottomed ones. This seems to corroborate the idea of a "Neolithic revolution," involving cultural innovations like new forms of pottery and stone tools that traveled as a package deal along with farming and the new economic practices it required. Combined, they totally transformed the societies they encountered.

It makes sense that pottery would be essential in an early agricultural society—to manipulate the liquid byproducts of cultivating animals and grains, like milk and beer, respectively, and to store any agricultural surplus. It makes so much sense, in fact, that the mere presence of new forms of pottery at an archeological site has been interpreted to indicate that there was farming going on.

But there are plenty of examples of pottery usage by foragers, and ceramic containers often contain surprisingly well-preserved material that dates from their original use. In order to try to clarify how quickly and completely agriculture changed societies, Craig et al. determined the stable isotope composition of surface deposits and absorbed lipids from 133 ceramic vessels spanning sites that date from late forager to early farming. They found that approximately 20 percent of the vessels were used to store and process marine and freshwater foodstuffs, and that this pattern held even after farming practices had infiltrated the region.

The authors conclude that the domestication of animals and plants did not thus cause an instant and radical disappearance of the hunter-gatherer way of life. The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation would almost certainly agree.

PNAS, 2011. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1107202108 (About DOIs).