This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Cold conditions may not have been responsible for the centuries-long pause in the spread of farming across south-eastern Europe during prehistory, according to a new study by the Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie (LEIZA) in Germany, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers found no evidence of extreme cold at the Greek archaeological site of Franchthi, nor any statistically significant link between local temperature fluctuations and changes in how people obtained their food.
The spread of farming into Europe was one of the major transformations of prehistory. From its origins in the Near East, agriculture reached Europe from around 7,000 B.C. At first, farming communities expanded only slowly.
Then, between about 6,600 and 6,000 B.C., their movement beyond Greece almost stopped for around 600 years. When expansion resumed, it happened quickly: within roughly 500 years, farming communities had spread along the Mediterranean coast as far as Portugal. One possible explanation has been a period of sudden and unpredictable cooling, including the abrupt climate change known as the 8.2-kiloyear event, around 8,200 years ago.
"This period coincided with rapid climate change, when particularly cold winters may have occurred," says Dr. Niklas Hausmann of LEIZA, who led the study. "Extreme cold could have reduced agricultural yields and made it harder for people to establish new settlements." But did these cold conditions actually occur where people were living—and did they affect their subsistence practices?
To find out, the researchers reconstructed local temperatures at Franchthi, a key archaeological site in the Peloponnese (Greece), and compared the results with archaeological evidence for the subsistence practices of the people who lived there. The team turned to an unusual source of climate information: the shells of 121 limpets (Patella sp.) recovered from Franchthi. The limpets had been eaten by the site's inhabitants, leaving their shells behind as food waste.
As the shells grow, they record information about the environmental conditions in which the animals lived. Using a specially developed laser-based technique, the researchers were able to identify the shells' seasonal growth phases precisely. They then analyzed oxygen isotopes in the shells to reconstruct seasonal temperature extremes during these growth phases.
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