Crop manuring and intensive land management by Europe’s first farmers

TLDR

The spread of farming from western Asia to Europe had profound long‑term social and ecological impacts, yet the specific nature of Neolithic land management practices and the dietary contribution of early crops remains unclear. This study presents stable‑isotope determinations of charred cereals and pulses from 13 Neolithic sites across Europe to investigate early farmers’ land‑management and dietary practices. The authors performed stable‑isotope analysis on charred cereal and pulse remains from these sites. The isotopic data reveal that early farmers employed livestock manure and water management to boost crop yields, that intensive manuring tightly linked plant cultivation and animal herding, and that conventional paleodietary interpretations underestimate the contribution of crop‑derived protein to early farmer diets. The sites span a chronological range of 5900–2400 cal B.C.

Abstract

The spread of farming from western Asia to Europe had profound long-term social and ecological impacts, but identification of the specific nature of Neolithic land management practices and the dietary contribution of early crops has been problematic. Here, we present previously undescribed stable isotope determinations of charred cereals and pulses from 13 Neolithic sites across Europe (dating ca. 5900-2400 cal B.C. ), which show that early farmers used livestock manure and water management to enhance crop yields. Intensive manuring inextricably linked plant cultivation and animal herding and contributed to the remarkable resilience of these combined practices across diverse climatic zones. Critically, our findings suggest that commonly applied paleodietary interpretations of human and herbivore δN values have systematically underestimated the contribution of crop-derived protein to early farmer diets.