Sedimentary DNA from a submerged site reveals wheat in the British Isles 8000 years ago
Early wheat movement into Britain
The transition into the New Stone Age, or Neolithic period, in Great Britain and Europe was characterized by a change from hunter-gatherers to farmers. However, the early stages of this transition are not well understood. Smith et al. studied archaeological remains at an 8000-year-old site that has been underwater ever since the Neolithic (see the Perspective by Larson). The finds include evidence of wheat (or a relative of wheat) 2000 years before the first documented farmers in Britain. It seems that trade may have preceded the adoption of farming.
Abstract
The Mesolithic-to-Neolithic transition marked the time when a hunter-gatherer economy gave way to agriculture, coinciding with rising sea levels. Bouldnor Cliff, is a submarine archaeological site off the Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom that has a well-preserved Mesolithic paleosol dated to 8000 years before the present. We analyzed a core obtained from sealed sediments, combining evidence from microgeomorphology and microfossils with sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) analyses to reconstruct floral and faunal changes during the occupation of this site, before it was submerged. In agreement with palynological analyses, the sedaDNA sequences suggest a mixed habitat of oak forest and herbaceous plants. However, they also provide evidence of wheat 2000 years earlier than mainland Britain and 400 years earlier than proximate European sites. These results suggest that sophisticated social networks linked the Neolithic front in southern Europe to the Mesolithic peoples of northern Europe.
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Published In
Science
Volume 347 | Issue 6225
27 February 2015
27 February 2015
Copyright
Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 15 September 2014
Accepted: 22 January 2015
Published in print: 27 February 2015
Acknowledgments
The authors thank A. Clapham for identification of Alnus glutinosa fragments, J. Z. M. Chan and G. L. Kay for assistance with operating the MiSeq platform, and the SplashCOS and Deucalion networks for continued support. O.S. was funded by Warwick Medical School. Sequence data were deposited at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory European Bioinformatics Institute, accession number PRJEB6766 (ERP006391). We acknowledge previous supporting work by J. Gillespie (Foram analysis), D. Tomalin (lithic analysis), J. Heathcote (micromorphology and depositional evidence), and in particular R. Scaife for his pollen analysis The cores are stored in the British Ocean Sediment Core Research Facility at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, UK. Access to the Bouldnor Cliff cores for further analysis is provided by the Maritime Archeology Trust.
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