neolithic diet

[Toddy]

From surf to turf

Recent research from Bristol University appears to show that when farming became established in the UK, fish was no longer a part of the common diet.

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2014/february/from-surf-to-turf.html

cheers,
Toddy

 

[rik_uk3]

Good link Mary, pees on the parade of the follower of some of the 'old age' diets though? or is that the palio diet? It makes sense when you think about it though, milk really is a great food source.

 

[Toddy]

It's an incredibly nutritious part of the diet.

Me ? I'm out of it either way round. I'm allergic to fish, and I just can no longer digest most dairy products
Makes you wonder though just how they managed the change in diet. Afaik, there's only me, my grandmother and a second cousin who can't eat dairy in the family, and another second cousin who can't eat fish either.
Fish I have never fancied eating, but I do miss butter and cheese

There are old stories about Celts (that was the word used, please let's not start another debate) not eating fish, so it maybe had roots in the Neolithic ?

Choosing to eat, or not to eat, certain food is one thing; to lay claim to some spurious authority that it's somehow 'right' for us because of an under-researched prehistorical precedent, is no better than the grapefruit or the banana diet

Truthfully, I believe that we are omnivores who discovered that cooking could make almost anything palatable

atb,
M

 

[Elen Sentier]

Thanks for the link, Mary, very early prehistoric diets are something I find very interesting. Do you happen to have any links on paleolithic and mesolithic diets? Also more stuff on pastoralists would be good too ... something between hunter-gatherer and farmer, where (for instance) reindeer are followed and milked without being farmed as later beasts were, and while there was still a lot of movement in life rather than stuck in one filed/farm.

 

[petrochemicals]

pythagoras wouldn't eat beans because he believed they where poisonous, and some research shows him to be correct, but I think pulses are ok.

can't say I'm a fam of milk, a bit of cheese is ok, but like the advert says the person who decided to milk a cow was twisted. I don't think your missing much.

As for the fish, how long do you think the fish in a river would sustain a populace ? Only because we don't eat them there are any way in my opinion

 

[Toddy]

I think our world view of fish is skewed in this overpopulated island bit of the world.

We have good clear written evidence, and both prehistorical and historical research to back that up, that our rivers were full of fish, in season.
The Clyde was so full of salmon that a man could walk dry shod across their backs from one side of the river to the other. Mackeral and herring were so plentiful that entire fleets of fishing boats worked the inshore waters. English, Welsh, and Irish rivers and seas were every bit as rich too.

Over population and over-exploitation leaves a dreadful desert of some places

'Pastoral' economies are not really well represented in the UK, Elen. What we do have is transhumance. This is where the cattle, sheep and goats were herded up past the farm land in late Spring to benefit from the Summer grazings. Pigs were allowed panage in woodlands, etc.,
Basically the farm steading might be 'home' but the access to the shielings was just as crucial to the economy. Lot of cheese and butter made on the hills and brought down, along with fattened animals to sustain folks through the Winter.

It's a Europe wide custom that is no longer practiced in the UK but is still normal in places like the Alps.

cheers,
M

 

[rik_uk3]

Look in your fridge and see the milk based products there, from milk to cheese to yoghurt, for the majority of people milk plays a big part of their diet and a nice part for the majority. The 'old' diets still have impact upon what most eat today, we roast meat, boil a stew of meat and or vegetables, eat cheese, drink milk, yoghurt, various pickles, steam/fry fish, steam/roast/boil vegetables etc. We are luckier now than ever in history to have such a wonderful range of food to fit all budgets and the gizmo's to prepare the different dishes.

Lets hope it lasts.

 

[Toddy]

Richard's right and, it's beyond seasonality now.

That was the defining bit in the diet in the past. The seasons really, really mattered. Now we can have fresh strawberries on Christmas day, fresh milk all year round, eggs all year round, fresh saladings all year round, citrus fruits that won't even grow here are cheap and easily available, all year round.

Maybe that's the diet that we really ought to follow....the Seasonal one ?

cheers,
Mary

 

[Elen Sentier]

'Pastoral' economies are not really well represented in the UK, Elen. What we do have is transhumance. This is where the cattle, sheep and goats were herded up past the farm land in late Spring to benefit from the Summer grazings. Pigs were allowed panage in woodlands, etc.,
Basically the farm steading might be 'home' but the access to the shielings was just as crucial to the economy. Lot of cheese and butter made on the hills and brought down, along with fattened animals to sustain folks through the Winter.

It's a Europe wide custom that is no longer practiced in the UK but is still normal in places like the Alps.

cheers,
M

Yes I know about the recent past of seasonal grazing, high/low pastures, shielings etc in Britain and one of my friends near here is "the" man on keeping pigs in the wood, teaches it, etc. I'm thinking back to pre-Ice Age stuff, or perhaps pre-6000 yrs ago in parts of Britain. And for when reindeer still ran wild here. For me, anything later than about 4000 yrs ago is modern. I'm always looking for more leads on pre-farming diets ...

 

[Toddy]

Tbh I don't think they needed to, but you never know what will turn up.
Hey, maybe the pre homo sapiens sapiens did some mammoth herding

I'm inclined to the theory that mankind is, if not inherantly lazy, because we aren't, inclined to think on the most advantageous way of being well fed and comfortable.

Getting out of the mire of a farmyard and up into clean fresh air and lush grazing and producing fat and protein rich butter and cheese that would feed folks through Winter, must have been a case in point

Reindeer remains aren't widespread in the UK in any quantity. I suspect that it's seasonality again.
Despite the fellow in the cairngorms who seems determined to insist that herds of them roamed the highlands.....tree cover was much, much wider in the past, and reindeer are kind of site specific to arctic and subarctic tundra areas....the cairngorms aren't 'really' arctic much of the time and the glens certainly aren't. It's also not that big an area compared to the continental massif that allows huge areas for foraging.
The ice melted late here, reindeer were always on a sticky wicket once cut off from the continent. Short window of time before they were wiped out.

cheers,
Toddy

 

[petrochemicals]

sea water fish though toddy, the seas and shores hold alot more opportunity than the uplands, I'm sure you could fish a river bare in a short time. Its why the forragers always think a rivers a good place to find food, it is if theres no one else about, but it's nothing like our ancestors.

I might be lactose intollerant thinking about it.

Rik_uk3, I've checked, none of my beer has milk in it.

 

[Toddy]

Only in season though. When the salmon runs were full, they were so commonplace that the poor apprentices in London tried to get them (and oysters) limited in their diets

Instead of all those bears they show salmon fishing in Canada, think about family groups of people

cheers,
M

 

[boatman]

Mesolithic diets could include enough carbohydrates to affect teeth with caries being seen in some skulls. Possibly too many hazelnuts. Fishing may well have been too time consuming for the heavily worked early farmers with perhaps a prejudice against wild food. Neolithic villages handy for fishing could well have vanished beneath the waves or into the mire of rivers shifting their courses.

As for the salmon runs we could easily have a Mesolithic culture as rich as that of the NW Americans but if all was represented in carved wood and other ephemeral material we might not even know it ever existed.

I believe that Francis Pryor has suggested that early pastoral farming was an indigenous development. It is surprising though how quickly the Neolithic farming package spread across the whole island.

 

[British Red]

The Clyde was so full of salmon that a man could walk dry shod across their backs from one side of the river to the other.
M

No, you couldn't. For any number of scientific reasons, that is utter romantic twaddle.

 

[Toddy]

Yes, yes, yes, literally it couldn't ....but I know this river, it's on my doorstep and what is now a scoured channel was a wide shallow river, fordable by foot for great lengths of it, that ran from the Firth right up into the into the heart of southern Scotland, with dozens of burns and rivelets running into it.

Even now, just post industrialisation, we can see the salmon in the river. Just look over the bridge or down at the weir and there they are. Pre industrialisation they ran in their millions.
Look at some of the images of the salmon runs in Canada, and that would have been here too. The Clyde, the Spey, the Dee, the Forth, the Don......every river running down to the sea then still does so now, and there are salmon in all of them.
I learned to guddle wee trout as a child, for my father scorned the man who left a fish with it's mouth ripped apart with a hook; it was said that a man could just lift the fish out of the river with his hands....I've done it. No reason they couldn't have done it back then.

Interesting the turf and surf bit though; we're kind of taught that fishing was a mainstay until something like this research comes up and folks have to reassess the evidences they have.

cheers,
M

 

[British Red]

Yes but lets not romanticise it. Given the relative neutral buoyancy of a fishes swim bladder, its unlikely that a fish could even support a pound weight above its own body weight. So a 10 stone human would need to be resting on 140 Salmon simultaneously. Given the size of a salmon, a human foot couldn't span more than two, and of course at certain stride points all the weight is on one foot...meaning the salmon must be not only contiguous shore to shore - but at least 70 deep - and indeed in a continuous weight bearing vertical stack. Now such a vertical stack would mean that the dorsal fin......

 

[Toddy]

BR....it was a common description in the past of a river so full of fish....Capt. John Smith said it of rivers in the New World too,
"English adventurer Capt. John Smith reported seeing such multitudes he claimed he could walk across the river on their backs dry-shod."

It's a phrase that was well understood at the time....nowadays we don't have that in the UK ......and the Clyde at least runs a lot less than 70cms at times under Bothwell Bridge.....folks who try to commit sideways there can just end up with broken legs It was shallower in Glasgow too and could easily be forded until Golborne built stone barriers, groynes, in from the sides so that the trapped the silt and scoured out a deeper central channel.
http://www.engineering-timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem.asp?id=1237

That said, the increase in the numbers of the salmon and trout in our local rivers, right in the centre of the central belt, with all the concommitant pollution and fishing folks, is rather heartening

cheers,
M

 

[British Red]

Its true of most game - there's more deer in the UK now than in the days of Billy the ba... (William the conq')

 

[Toddy]

That's certainly true in Scotland. The reckoning is 60,000 too many red deer on the hills last I heard.

M

 

[Toddy]

Further reading for those interested in the topic

Hunters in Transition: Mesolithic Societies of Temperate Eurasia and their Transition to Farming (New Directions in Archaeology) Zvelebil, Marek., Cambridge University Press; (2009)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hunters-Tra...2334154&sr=8-1&keywords=Hunters+in+transition

cheers,
M