According to a group of scientists led by Dr Robin Allaby from the University of Warwick, wheat reached Britain approximately 8,000 years ago – two millennia before the introduction of farming.
DNA evidence shows cultural connections between Britain and Europe 8,000 years ago.
Dr Allaby and his colleagues found evidence for a variety of wheat known as einkorn at Bouldnor Cliff, an underwater archaeological site off the Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom.
“The most plausible explanation for the wheat reaching Bouldnor Cliff is that Mesolithic Britons maintained social and trade networks spreading across Europe,” they said.
“These networks might have been assisted by land bridges that connected the south east coast of Britain to the European mainland, facilitating exchanges between hunters in Britain and farmers in southern Europe.”
The einkorn DNA was collected from sediment that had previously formed the land surface, which was later submerged due to melting glaciers.
Dr Allaby, who is the senior author of the paper published in the journal Science, said that the einkorn discovery indicates that Mesolithic Britain was less insular than previously understood and that inhabitants were interacting with Neolithic southern Europeans.
“The material remains left behind by the people that occupied Britain as it was finally becoming an island 8,000 years ago, show that these were sophisticated people with technologies thousands of years more advanced than previously recognized,” said co-author Dr Garry Momber from the Maritime Archaeology Trust in Southampton, UK.
“The DNA evidence corroborates the archaeological evidence and demonstrates a tangible link with the continent that appears to have become severed when Britain became an island.”
“8,000 years ago the people of mainland Britain were leading a hunter-gatherer existence, whilst at the same time in southern Europeans farming was gradually spreading across Europe,” Dr Allaby said.
“Common throughout Neolithic Southern Europe, einkorn is not found elsewhere in Britain until 2,000 years after the samples found at Bouldnor Cliff.”
He added: “for the einkorn to have reached this site there needs to have been contact between Mesolithic Britons and Neolithic farmers far across Europe.”
“The land bridges provide a plausible facilitation of this contact. As such, far from being insular Mesolithic Britain was culturally and possibly physically connected to Europe.”
“The role of these simple British hunting societies, in many senses, puts them at the beginning of the introduction of farming and, ultimately, the changes in the economy that lead to the modern world.”
“This find is the start of a new chapter in British and European history,” said Prof Vincent Gaffney of the University of Bradford, UK.
“Not only do we now realize that the introduction of farming was far more complex than previously imagined. It now seems likely that the hunter-gather societies of Britain, far from being isolated were part of extensive social networks that traded or exchanged exotic foodstuffs across much of Europe.”
The study also demonstrates that scientists can now analyze genetic material preserved deep within the sediments of the lost prehistoric landscapes stretching between Britain and Europe.
Prof Mark Pallen from the University of Warwick said: “we chose to use a metagenomics approach in this research even though this has not commonly been used for environmental and ancient DNA research. This means we extracted and sequenced the entire DNA in the sample, rather than targeted organism-specific barcode sequences. From this we then homed in on the organisms of interest only when analyzing DNA sequences.”
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Oliver Smith et al. 2015. Sedimentary DNA from a submerged site reveals wheat in the British Isles 8000 years ago. Science, vol. 347, no. 6225, pp. 998-1001; doi: 10.1126/science.1261278
