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Clues into the mysterious lives of southern Scandinavia and northern Germany’s first farmers have been revealed in a new archaeological study.
These ancient people were part of the Funnel Beaker Culture which emerged in the region about 6,000 years ago and persisted until new technologies emerged about 4,800 years ago.
Grinding stones from a Middle Neolithic (3270–2920 BCE) settlement were analysed in the study. The settlement, called Oldenburg LA 77, is in far-north Germany about 260km northwest of Berlin and only 50km from the Danish island of Lolland.
The sandy island on the southwestern coast of the Baltic Sea used to be a wetland area.
Archaeologists analysed ancient plant remains preserved on grinding stones from the period for clues about the diet of these people.
‘Grinding stones are truly archives for preserving information about plant foods,’ says Jingping An, a research assistant at the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1266 in Kiel, Germany and first author of the paper which appears in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. ‘Even a small fragment of them can carry plenty of plant microfossils, including starch grains and phytoliths.’ Phytoliths are tidy structures found in plant tissue high in silicon.
The researchers found both cultivated and wild plant microfossils on the grinding stones.
Among them were wheat, barley, and fruits of wild grasses, knotweeds, acorns and tubers. They may even have found wild legume seeds.
‘Charred wild plants have been documented by archaeobotanical analyses of soil samples from this Neolithic village, but this study further confirms their consumption by looking directly into food processing,’ says study head Wiebke Kirleis.
The researchers say that the finds show that the ancient people knew how to enrich their diet.
Oldenburg LA 77 represents a shift in social arrangements in Germany at the time. Farmers were moving from isolated farmsteads into small villages.
The results of the new study also show a difference between its inhabitants and other Stone Age farmers in other parts of the region.
Frydenlund is another Funnel Beaker Culture settlement on Denmark’s island Funen where only wild plant remains are found on grinding stones. While the Oldenburg LA 77 people were grinding cereals into coarse fragments or fine flour, the Frydenlund farmers were probably eating cereals as gruel or porridge.
‘It is particularly interesting to see that the first farmers had similar interests in consuming wild plant foods, but differed in how they prepared their cereals,’ Kirleis says.
‘Indeed, the existing studies seem to indicate that the early farmers in Northern Germany and Denmark may have had different preferences for meals with cereals’ adds An. ‘Food preparation and cooking for the first farmers, therefore, were complex and diverse as shown by the evidence they left behind.’
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