By Bruce Bower
Northern Europe’s agricultural revolution got off to a fishy start. Although farmers brought animal raising and plant growing to the region around 6,000 years ago, a healthy taste for the freshwater fish and marine life favored by local foragers lasted for at least several hundred years, a new study finds.
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Based on chemical signatures of food residue from ancient cooking pots, farming’s introduction modified but did not radically transform diets in what’s now southern Sweden, northern Germany and Denmark, say archaeologist Oliver Craig of the University of York in England and his colleagues. That’s consistent with a gradual transition from fishing, hunting and gathering to farming, the scientists report in a paper published online October 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Although farming was introduced rapidly across this region of northern Europe, it may not have caused a dramatic shift from hunter-gatherer life,” Craig says.