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> archaeologists had long assumed that the introduction of farming during the Neolithic era meant that early humans largely abandoned such foods from the sea A

> archaeologists had long assumed that the introduction of farming during the Neolithic era meant that early humans largely abandoned such foods from the sea Always hard to tell if researchers are really as dull as these press releases make them to seem, or it's just academia's form of clickbait. Did anyone in their right mind really think that people went "ok, we've found a very labor intensive way to have food available for a relatively short period of a year, conditional on lots of factors like the weather, pests, disease, etc... time to put the kibosh on all other processes of generating caloric intake that we've honed for millennia!"

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mikrl 3y ago
Could it be evidence of cultural change? Most of the ethnicities we associate with Europeans are Indo-European in origin: pastoral, patriarchal nomads who swept down from the steppe in the distant past. If the pre-Indo-Europeans disappeared quickly enough or were culturally overwhelmed, it makes sense that unfamiliar foods from the sea would be ignored by agriculture oriented steppe people.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  This is really at least partially an answer. Clearly foraged foods lived on, but genetics has shown us that pre-agricultural, hunter gatherer Europeans were very genetically quite distinct from post-agricultural (and post Indo-European migration) populations, and we know that they were not Indo-European speakers, too. So it's also quite likely their cultures were lost and along with them at least some of the foods they ate. Which is not to say that people living in these places didn't continue to eat seaweed, because they did.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  You’re a bit mixed up here. A few millennia before the Indo-Europeans was the farming expansion out of Anatolia, and that already had a dramatic impact on the ethnic landscape in Europe. Moreover, the early steppe-oriented Indo-Europeans were not major practitioners of farming but pastoralists, and they only settled into farming once they merged with the settled agriculture communities that were already there in Europe.
  - mikrl 3y ago
    Ah my mistake. But still, two radically different food producing paradigms meeting an established hunter-gatherer population could lead to some of the traditional foraged foods from the region being ignored. I don’t know if seaweed is eaten or even prevalent in the seas around Anatolia, but steppe based cultures who drive herds would be likely to ignore it IMO
pfannkuchen 3y ago
On top of that, the creation of agriculture was almost certainly extremely granular. There is a spectrum of foraging to farming. You go out in the forest and take some fruits back. Some of the discarded fruit seeds end up growing trees near your settlement. Someone eventually realizes that having fruit trees close by is really convenient, and they start planting seeds intentionally. This was probably done for a very, very long time without it being the dominant source of food.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  It's actually not clear at all that this is the case in Western Europe. Agriculture came with sweeping genetic and archaeological changes. There's quite a bit of evidence for population replacement in large parts of Europe as agriculture moved in, rather than existing hunter gatherers adopting farming. If you look at the more recent history of the agricultural settlement of other parts of the world, it's not too different. North America the most recent, but parts of Africa as well. Hunter gatherers have low population densities over often very large territories, and are sensitive to disruptions in animal migrations; but when they're able to forage and hunt reliably their diets are actually often much better than agricultural populations and involve less overall labour. So they don't necessarily just give it up because somehow agriculture is better. ... and even the proto-Indo-European pastoralists of the steppe continued to forage wild grains and plants (rather than plant wheat like their neighbours to the west) for almost a millennia after domesticating horses and cattle. David Anthony gets into this in "Horse, Wheel, Language". And it wasn't because they didn't know how, they just preferred not to. Settling down to plant crops has trade-offs. (I say this as a person with a pile of pre-winter garden chores I'm procrastinating...)

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mikrl 3y ago

Could it be evidence of cultural change? Most of the ethnicities we associate with Europeans are Indo-European in origin: pastoral, patriarchal nomads who swept down from the steppe in the distant past. If the pre-Indo-Europeans disappeared quickly enough or were culturally overwhelmed, it makes sense that unfamiliar foods from the sea would be ignored by agriculture oriented steppe people.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
This is really at least partially an answer. Clearly foraged foods lived on, but genetics has shown us that pre-agricultural, hunter gatherer Europeans were very genetically quite distinct from post-agricultural (and post Indo-European migration) populations, and we know that they were not Indo-European speakers, too. So it's also quite likely their cultures were lost and along with them at least some of the foods they ate. Which is not to say that people living in these places didn't continue to eat seaweed, because they did.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
You’re a bit mixed up here. A few millennia before the Indo-Europeans was the farming expansion out of Anatolia, and that already had a dramatic impact on the ethnic landscape in Europe. Moreover, the early steppe-oriented Indo-Europeans were not major practitioners of farming but pastoralists, and they only settled into farming once they merged with the settled agriculture communities that were already there in Europe.
- mikrl 3y ago
  Ah my mistake. But still, two radically different food producing paradigms meeting an established hunter-gatherer population could lead to some of the traditional foraged foods from the region being ignored. I don’t know if seaweed is eaten or even prevalent in the seas around Anatolia, but steppe based cultures who drive herds would be likely to ignore it IMO

pfannkuchen 3y ago

On top of that, the creation of agriculture was almost certainly extremely granular. There is a spectrum of foraging to farming. You go out in the forest and take some fruits back. Some of the discarded fruit seeds end up growing trees near your settlement. Someone eventually realizes that having fruit trees close by is really convenient, and they start planting seeds intentionally. This was probably done for a very, very long time without it being the dominant source of food.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
It's actually not clear at all that this is the case in Western Europe. Agriculture came with sweeping genetic and archaeological changes. There's quite a bit of evidence for population replacement in large parts of Europe as agriculture moved in, rather than existing hunter gatherers adopting farming. If you look at the more recent history of the agricultural settlement of other parts of the world, it's not too different. North America the most recent, but parts of Africa as well. Hunter gatherers have low population densities over often very large territories, and are sensitive to disruptions in animal migrations; but when they're able to forage and hunt reliably their diets are actually often much better than agricultural populations and involve less overall labour. So they don't necessarily just give it up because somehow agriculture is better. ... and even the proto-Indo-European pastoralists of the steppe continued to forage wild grains and plants (rather than plant wheat like their neighbours to the west) for almost a millennia after domesticating horses and cattle. David Anthony gets into this in "Horse, Wheel, Language". And it wasn't because they didn't know how, they just preferred not to. Settling down to plant crops has trade-offs. (I say this as a person with a pile of pre-winter garden chores I'm procrastinating...)