Dental pieces of sheep discovered in the Cueva de El Toro tested for this study. Credit: Alejandro Sierra, UABAt the dawn of the Neolithic era, rounding up communities in the Southern Iberian Peninsula embraced numerous livestock management tactics, changing feeding, breeding, and migration practices to meet their eco-friendly and production requirements.This is suggested by a study led by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) that has reconstructed the feeding practices of the first herding neighborhoods occupying the Cueva de El Toro (Antequera, Malaga) 7,200 years ago, with the aim of exploring their feeding strategies and the socioeconomic factors that could have affected them.The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, included scientists from the Department of Prehistory of the UAB, as well as from the University of La Laguna (Tenerife), Milà i Fontanals Institution of Humanities Research (IMF-CSIC), the University of Cardiff, and the Natural History Museum of Paris.The farming economy in the Iberian Peninsula during the Neolithic duration established really rapidly, between 7,600 and 7,400 years back. Nevertheless, specific details on the herding strategies of the very first Neolithic communities, particularly in the south, is limited, primarily due to the difficulty of examining these management practices in the same location and in such a brief historical duration of time.Natural environment of the El Toro Cave. Credit: Dimas Martin-SocasThe study has had the ability to rebuild their animals management practices, consisting of those of altitudinal movement, in the exact same website and with a very accurate time resolution. By methods of high-resolution radiocarbon dating of eight dental specimens from the Cueva de El Toro and the analysis of steady carbon and oxygen isotopes in the enamel, researchers were able to confirm that the animals were handled in the cave during a period of just 240 years, throughout the Neolithic growth throughout the Iberian Peninsula, and to develop their feeding patterns.Discoveries and ImplicationsThe outcomes reveal that the herding neighborhoods used various breeding patterns– in the winter, spring, and autumn– thereby managing the reproduction of their herds; they fed the animals various plants throughout the yearly cycle, with some animals consuming species typical of saline locations in the summertime and had them graze at different elevations and in mountainous areas. This large variability suggests that, most likely, each sheep was rounded up in a different way, which it was possible to use different patterns within one same flock.These discoveries question the previous perception of homogeneity in the management of animals at the beginning of the Neolithic in the western Mediterranean and reinforce the hypothesis of the complexity of the first Neolithic populations of southern Iberia. “The various herding strategies that we have actually discovered fit in the financial design proposed for the Neolithic neighborhoods of southern Iberia, which have been considered as highly mobile herding neighborhoods,” says Alejandro Sierra, a scientist at the UAB who coordinated the study.The irregularity determined might be described as an adaptive response of the very first agricultural and farming societies for not unassociated and diverse reasons, such as much better access to resources, modifications in weather conditions, or the dominant socio-economic characteristics of each area. In this sense, the research study released “may have wider implications for understanding the versatility of the very first agricultural and farming neighborhoods at the beginning of the Neolithic duration in the Iberian Peninsula,” says María Saña, a researcher at the UAB and coordinator of the research.Reference: “Shepherding the past: High-resolution information on Neolithic Southern Iberian animals management at Cueva de El Toro (Antequera, Málaga)” by Alejandro Sierra, Vanessa Navarrete, Roger Alcàntara, María Dolores Camalich, Dimas Martín-Socas, Denis Fiorillo, Krista McGrath and Maria Saña, 3 April 2024, PLOS ONE.DOI: 10.1371/ journal.pone.0299786.
