Ancient proteins from ceramic vessels at Çatalhöyük West reveal the hidden cuisine of early farmers

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Abstract

The analysis of lipids (fats, oils and waxes) absorbed within archaeological pottery has revolutionized the study of past diets and culinary practices. However, this technique can lack taxonomic and tissue specificity and is often unable to disentangle signatures resulting from the mixing of different food products. Here, we extract ancient proteins from ceramic vessels from the West Mound of the key early farming site of Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, revealing that this community processed mixes of cereals, pulses, dairy and meat products, and that particular vessels may have been reserved for specialized foods (e.g., cow milk and milk whey). Moreover, we demonstrate that dietary proteins can persist on archaeological artefacts for at least 8000 years, and that this approach can reveal past culinary practices with more taxonomic and tissue-specific clarity than has been possible with previous biomolecular techniques.

Abstract

Ancient diets have been reconstructed from archaeological pottery based on lipid remains, but these can lack specificity. Here, Hendy and colleagues analyze ancient proteins from ceramic vessels up to 8000 years old to produce a more nuanced understanding of ancient food processing and diet.

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Most cited references 56

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Earliest date for milk use in the Near East and southeastern Europe linked to cattle herding.

Richard P. Evershed, Sebastian Payne, Andrew Sherratt … (2008)

The domestication of cattle, sheep and goats had already taken place in the Near East by the eighth millennium bc. Although there would have been considerable economic and nutritional gains from using these animals for their milk and other products from living animals-that is, traction and wool-the first clear evidence for these appears much later, from the late fifth and fourth millennia bc. Hence, the timing and region in which milking was first practised remain unknown. Organic residues preserved in archaeological pottery have provided direct evidence for the use of milk in the fourth millennium in Britain, and in the sixth millennium in eastern Europe, based on the delta(13)C values of the major fatty acids of milk fat. Here we apply this approach to more than 2,200 pottery vessels from sites in the Near East and southeastern Europe dating from the fifth to the seventh millennia bc. We show that milk was in use by the seventh millennium; this is the earliest direct evidence to date. Milking was particularly important in northwestern Anatolia, pointing to regional differences linked with conditions more favourable to cattle compared to other regions, where sheep and goats were relatively common and milk use less important. The latter is supported by correlations between the fat type and animal bone evidence.

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First dairying in green Saharan Africa in the fifth millennium BC.

Julie Dunne, Richard P Evershed, Mélanie Salque … (2012)

In the prehistoric green Sahara of Holocene North Africa-in contrast to the Neolithic of Europe and Eurasia-a reliance on cattle, sheep and goats emerged as a stable and widespread way of life, long before the first evidence for domesticated plants or settled village farming communities. The remarkable rock art found widely across the region depicts cattle herding among early Saharan pastoral groups, and includes rare scenes of milking; however, these images can rarely be reliably dated. Although the faunal evidence provides further confirmation of the importance of cattle and other domesticates, the scarcity of cattle bones makes it impossible to ascertain herd structures via kill-off patterns, thereby precluding interpretations of whether dairying was practiced. Because pottery production begins early in northern Africa the potential exists to investigate diet and subsistence practices using molecular and isotopic analyses of absorbed food residues. This approach has been successful in determining the chronology of dairying beginning in the 'Fertile Crescent' of the Near East and its spread across Europe. Here we report the first unequivocal chemical evidence, based on the δ(13)C and Δ(13)C values of the major alkanoic acids of milk fat, for the adoption of dairying practices by prehistoric Saharan African people in the fifth millennium bc. Interpretations are supported by a new database of modern ruminant animal fats collected from Africa. These findings confirm the importance of 'lifetime products', such as milk, in early Saharan pastoralism, and provide an evolutionary context for the emergence of lactase persistence in Africa.

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Direct chemical evidence for widespread dairying in prehistoric Britain.

V F Straker, S Dudd, G Docherty … (2003)

Domesticated animals formed an important element of farming practices in prehistoric Britain, a fact revealed through the quantity and variety of animal bone typically found at archaeological sites. However, it is not known whether the ruminant animals were raised purely for their tissues (e.g., meat) or alternatively were exploited principally for their milk. Absorbed organic residues from pottery from 14 British prehistoric sites were investigated for evidence of the processing of dairy products. Our ability to detect dairy fats rests on the observation that the delta(13)C values of the C(18:0) fatty acids in ruminant dairy fats are approximately 2.3 per thousand lower than in ruminant adipose fats. This difference can be ascribed to (i) the inability of the mammary gland to biosynthesize C(18:0); (ii) the biohydrogenation of dietary unsaturated fatty acids in the rumen; and (iii) differences (i.e., 8.1 per thousand ) in the delta(13)C values of the plant dietary fatty acids and carbohydrates. The lipids from a total of 958 archaeological pottery vessels were extracted, and the compound-specific delta(13)C values of preserved fatty acids (C(16:0) and C(18:0)) were determined via gas chromatography-combustion-isotope ratio mass spectrometry. The results provide direct evidence for the exploitation of domesticated ruminant animals for dairy products at all Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age settlements in Britain. Most significantly, studies of pottery from a range of key early Neolithic sites confirmed that dairying was a widespread activity in this period and therefore probably well developed when farming was introduced into Britain in the fifth millennium B.C.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Jessica Hendy:

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3718-1058

hendy@shh.mpg.de

Oliver E. Craig:

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4296-8402

oliver.craig@york.ac.uk

Eva Rosenstock:

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6693-4303

e.rosenstock@fu-berlin.de

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Nat Commun

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Nat Commun

Title: Nature Communications

Publisher: Nature Publishing Group UK (London )

ISSN (Electronic): 2041-1723

Publication date (Electronic): 3 October 2018

Publication date PMC-release: 3 October 2018

Publication date Collection: 2018

Volume: 9

Electronic Location Identifier: 4064

Affiliations

[1 ]ISNI 0000 0004 4914 1197, GRID grid.469873.7, Department of Archaeology, , Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, ; 07745 Jena, Germany

[2 ]ISNI 0000 0004 1936 9668, GRID grid.5685.e, BioArCh, Department of Archaeology, , University of York, ; York, YO10 5DD UK

[3 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2153 9986, GRID grid.9764.c, Institute of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology, , Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, ; D-24098 Kiel, Germany

[4 ]ISNI 0000 0004 1936 8948, GRID grid.4991.5, School of Archaeology, , University of Oxford, ; Oxford, OX1 2PG UK

[5 ]ISNI 0000 0004 1936 8948, GRID grid.4991.5, Target Discovery Institute, , University of Oxford, ; Oxford, OX3 7FZ UK

[6 ]ISNI 0000 0004 1936 8948, GRID grid.4991.5, Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, , University of Oxford, ; 1 South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3TG UK

[7 ]ISNI 0000 0000 9116 4836, GRID grid.14095.39, Institute of Prehistoric Archaeology, , Freie Universität Berlin, ; 14195 Berlin, Germany

[8 ]ISNI 0000 0004 1936 9887, GRID grid.273335.3, Department of Anthropology, , University at Buffalo, ; Buffalo, NY 14261–0026 USA

[9 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2288 9830, GRID grid.17091.3e, Department of Anthropology, , The University of British Columbia, ; Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1 Canada

[10 ]ISNI 0000 0001 0674 042X, GRID grid.5254.6, EvoGenomics, Natural History Museum of Denmark, , University of Copenhagen, ; 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark

[11 ]ISNI 0000 0001 0674 042X, GRID grid.5254.6, Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, , University of Copenhagen, ; 2200 Copenhagen, Denmark

Author information

Jessica Hendy http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3718-1058

Roman Fischer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9715-5951

David Orton http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4069-8004

Alexandre Lucquin http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4892-6323

Camilla Speller http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7128-9903

Meaghan Mackie http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0763-7592

Jesper V. Olsen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4747-4938

Matthew J. Collins http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4226-5501

Oliver E. Craig http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4296-8402

Eva Rosenstock http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6693-4303

Article

Publisher ID: 6335

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06335-6

PMC ID: 6170438

PubMed ID: 30283003

SO-VID: bafd56d2-22e5-4856-b6e9-b593427e3110

License:

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

History

Date received : 22 February 2018

Date accepted : 28 August 2018

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Ancient proteins from ceramic vessels at Çatalhöyük West reveal the hidden cuisine of early farmers

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Most cited references 56

Earliest date for milk use in the Near East and southeastern Europe linked to cattle herding.

First dairying in green Saharan Africa in the fifth millennium BC.

Direct chemical evidence for widespread dairying in prehistoric Britain.

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