For this study, pieces of sheep teeth found in the Cueva de El Toro were sampled. Photo credit: Alejandro Sierra, UAB
At the beginning of the Neolithic, pastoral communities in the southern Iberian Peninsula adopted various livestock management tactics and modified breeding, feeding, and migration practices to meet their ecological and production needs.
This emerges from a study carried out by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), which reconstructed the feeding practices of the first pastoral communities that inhabited the Cueva de El Toro (Antequera, Malaga) 7,200 years ago, with the aim of studying their feeding strategies and the socioeconomic factors that may have influenced them.
The study, published in the journal PLUS ONEResearchers from the Department of Prehistory at UAB, as well as the University of La Laguna (Tenerife) and the humanities research institution Milà i Fontanals (IMF-CSIC), the University of Cardiff and the Natural History Museum of Paris.
The agricultural economy on the Iberian Peninsula developed very quickly during the Neolithic period, 7,600 to 7,400 years ago. However, specific information on the herding strategies of the first Neolithic communities, particularly in the south, is limited, mainly due to the difficulty of studying these management practices in the same location and in such a short archaeological period.
Natural environment of El Toro Cave. Photo credit: Dimas Martin-Socas
The study was able to reconstruct their animal husbandry practices, including altitude mobility, at the same location and with a very precise time resolution. Using high-resolution radiocarbon dating of eight tooth samples from Cueva de El Toro and analysis of stable carbon and oxygen isotopes in tooth enamel, researchers were able to confirm that the animals were kept in the cave for only 240 years, during the Neolithic expansion across the Iberian Peninsula , and to establish their dietary patterns.
Discoveries and implications
The results show that the herding communities used different breeding patterns – in autumn, winter and spring – and thus controlled the reproduction of their herds; They fed the animals different plants throughout the annual cycle, with some animals also consuming them species typical of salt areas in summer and let them graze at different altitudes and in mountainous areas. This large variability suggests that each sheep was probably kept in a different way and that it was possible to use different patterns within the same flock.
These discoveries challenge previous perceptions of homogeneity in livestock production at the beginning of the Neolithic in the western Mediterranean and support the hypothesis of the complexity of the first Neolithic populations in southern Iberia. “The different herding strategies we found fit into the economic model proposed for the Neolithic communities of southern Iberia, which are considered highly mobile herding communities,” says Alejandro Sierra, a researcher at UAB who coordinated the study.
The identified variability could be explained as an adaptive response of the first agrarian and farming societies for different and non-independent reasons, such as better access to resources, changes in climatic conditions or the prevailing socio-economic characteristics of each location. In this sense, the published study “could have broader implications for understanding the adaptive capacity of the first agrarian and farming communities at the beginning of the Neolithic period in the Iberian Peninsula,” says María Saña, researcher at UAB and coordinator of the research.
Reference: “Shepherding the past: High-resolution data on Neolithic southern Iberian livestock farming in Cueva de El Toro (Antequera, Málaga)” by Alejandro Sierra, Vanessa Navarrete, Roger Alcàntara, María Dolores Camalich, Dimas Martín-Socas, Denis Fiorillo, Krista McGrath and Maria Saña, April 3, 2024, PLUS ONE.
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0299786