Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. The introduction of farming had far-reaching impacts on health, social structure and demography.
Although the spread of domesticated plants and animals has been extensively tracked, it is unclear how these nascent economies developed within different environmental and cultural settings. Using molecular and isotopic analysis of lipids from pottery, here we investigate the foods prepared by the earliest farming communities of the European Atlantic seaboard. Surprisingly, we find an absence of aquatic foods, including in ceramics from coastal sites, except in the Western Baltic where this tradition continued from indigenous ceramic using hunter-gatherer-fishers.
The frequency of dairy products in pottery increased as farming was progressively introduced along a northerly latitudinal gradient. This finding implies that early farming communities needed time to adapt their economic practices before expanding into more northerly areas.
Latitudinal differences in the scale of dairy production might also have influenced the evolution of adult lactase persistence across Europe. The motivations for the introduction of farming in Europe and the nature of the earliest farming communities are key topics in European prehistory.
Traditionally this issue has been often reduced to polarised hypotheses of demic diffusion versus acculturation to describe processes applicable to the whole of Europe.
