Britons may have been trading wheat thousands of years earlier than researchers previously believed.
The recent findings suggest hunger-gatherers that walked the Earth 8,000 years ago were shockingly sophisticated, and were not as isolated as past studies have suggested, Reuters reported. Miniscule amounts of wheat DNA at a Stone Age site off the coast of England reveal there was most likely communication between local hunter-gatherers and the farmers that eventually developed into modern people.
The wheat DNA proved to date back to between 2,000 and 8,000 years ago, which was at least 400 years before the people inhabiting England grew cereals.The fact that there was no wheat pollen in the samples suggests the crops were not grown locally.
"This is a smoking gun of cultural interaction between primitive hunter-gatherers in Britain and farmers in Europe," co-author Robin Allaby of the University of Warwick told Reuters. "It will upset archaeologists. The conventional view of Britain at the time was that it was cut off. We can only speculate how they got wheat -- it could have been trade, a gift or stolen."
The researchers also pointed out there have been other signs of this type in contact, including the bones of domesticated pigs in German Stone Age hunter-gatherer settlements.
"There are trade networks that pre-date agriculture," Greger Larson, an American archaeologist at Oxford University who was not involved in the study, told Reuters.
Larson praised the researchers for performing extensive fact checks to keep misinterpretation and contaminated DNA out of the picture.
"[The findings] "will make us re-evaluate the relationships between farmers and hunter-gatherers," Larson told Reuters.
There research was published in a recent edition of the journal Nature.
