Isotopic evidence for dietary variability among eastern Africa’s first pastoralists
Abstract
During the terminal Pleistocene through Holocene, changes in dietary diversity signaled fundamental shifts in the way humans related to food resources in many parts of the globe. To understand local and regional dietary variation across the transition to food production in Kenya and Tanzania, we compare isotopic values of biological tissues (tooth enamel and bone collagen) from 111 ancient foragers and herders dated ~9,500–230 B.P., alongside isotopic data from contemporary eastern Africans, and contextualize these findings with ancient leaf wax and ceramic lipid residues. Fisher-foragers had remarkably diverse approaches to subsistence, and the earliest pastoralists in Kenya’s Turkana Basin ~5,000 years ago retained dietary diversity amid major environmental and cultural changes. The shift to more specialized pastoralist diets did not occur until a millennium after the initial introduction of livestock.
Article Details
Journal Info
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
National Academy of Sciences
Authors (18)
Kendra L. Chritz
Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, University of British Columbia
Elizabeth A. Sawchuk
Department of Anthropology, Cleveland Museum of Natural History
Mary E. Prendergast
Department of Anthropology, Rice University
Scott A. Blumenthal
Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon
Thure E. Cerling
Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Utah
Julie Dunne
School of Chemistry, University of Bristol
Steven T. Goldstein
Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh
Katherine M. Grillo
Department of Anthropology, University of Florida
Anneke Janzen
Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee Knoxville
Purity Kiura
Department of Earth Sciences, National Museums of Kenya
Julia Lee-Thorp
School of Archaeology, Oxford University
Marta Mirazón Lahr
Fredrick K. Manthi
Emmanuel K. Ndiema
Fredrick Odede
Department of History and Archaeology, Maseno University
Thomas W. Plummer
Department of Anthropology, Queens College
Jensen Wainwright
Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon
Elisabeth A. Hildebrand
Department of Anthropology, Stony Brook University