Reply to: No compelling evidence for early small-scale animal husbandry in Atlantic NW Europe.

Crombé, Philippe; Aluwé, Kim; Boudin, Mathieu; Snoeck, Christophe; Messiaen, Liesbeth; Teetaert, Dimitri

Contrary to Brusgaard et al., we believe these constitute, so far, the oldest examples of domesticated animals within a forager context and are definitely older than the dated sheep/goat bone from Hardinxveld. At Bazel all dated aurochs bones (n = 7)[2] are situated in the first half of the 5th millennium cal BC, the youngest one dating to between ca. 4600 and 4500 cal BC (1 sigma). The sheep/goat bones from Bazel do not overlap at all with other sites but form a very distinct group separated by at least 1 to 2‰ from the latter. This particularly holds for the sheep/goat remains from Bazel for which the differences in the carbon values with specimens from other sites in the loess area are too significant to be explained solely by size and/or age differences (Fig.

ANIMAL culture; DOMESTIC animals; STABLE isotope analysis; STRONTIUM isotopes

Scientific Reports, 2022, Vol 12, Issue 1, p1

2045-2322

Academic Journal

10.1038/s41598-022-05074-5