Pioneer farming in southeast Europe during the early sixth millennium BC: Climate-related adaptations in the exploitation of plants and animals

PloS One
Maria IvanovaElena Marinova

Abstract

The Old World farming system arose in the semi-arid Mediterranean environments of southwest Asia. Pioneer farmers settling the interior of the Balkans by the early sixth millennium BC were among the first to introduce southwest Asian-style cultivation and herding into areas with increasingly continental temperate conditions. Previous research has shown that the bioarchaeological assemblages from early farming sites in southeast Europe vary in their proportions of plant and animal taxa, but the relationship between taxonomic variation and climate has remained poorly understood. To uncover associations between multiple species and environmental factors simultaneously, we explored a dataset including altitude, five bioclimatic and 30 bioarchaeological variables (plant and animal taxa) for 57 of the earliest farming sites in southeast Europe using Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA). An extension of correspondence analysis, CCA is widely used in applied ecology to answer similar questions of species-environment relationships, but has not been previously applied in prehistoric archaeology to explore taxonomic and climatic variables in conjunction. The analyses reveal that the changes in plant and animal exploitation which occurr...Continue Reading

References

Aug 5, 2009·Doklady Biological Sciences : Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Biological Sciences Sections·G I Naumov
Dec 29, 2010·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Alan L Olmstead, Paul W Rhode
Jul 17, 2013·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Amy BogaardElisabeth Stephan
Mar 27, 2015·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Anna Szécsényi-NagyKurt W Alt
Jun 9, 2016·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Zuzana HofmanováJoachim Burger
Feb 22, 2018·Nature·Iain MathiesonDavid Reich

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Methods Mentioned

BETA
PCA

Software Mentioned

Prodromos
Canonical Correspondence Analysis ( CCA
PAST
CCA
QGIS
NMDS

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