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Could it be evidence of cultural change? Most of the ethnicities we associate with Europeans are Indo-European in origin: pastoral, patriarchal nomads who swep
by 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 agoThis 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 agoYou’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 agoAh 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