{"id":2044722,"date":"2019-04-24T10:44:29","date_gmt":"2019-04-24T14:44:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/?p=2044722"},"modified":"2019-04-24T10:44:29","modified_gmt":"2019-04-24T14:44:29","slug":"urine-salts-domestication-of-animals-2044722-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/urine-salts-domestication-of-animals-2044722-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Ancient pee indicates when we started keeping sheep and goats"},"content":{"rendered":"
Ancient pee suggests humans made a big leap in their domestication of animals starting about 10,450 years ago.<\/p>\n
At the beginning of that time period, people hunted game to obtain meat, says study coauthor Mary Stiner. By about 1,000 years later, community members were managing herds of sheep and goats for food, the team found.<\/p>\n
Anthropologists consider the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding to be a crucial turning point in the history of humanity.<\/p>\n
“We have been working very hard to understand the evolution and origins of these domestication relationships,” says Stiner, professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona.<\/p>\n
“This happens long before you have an animal or plant truly transformed by interactions with people,” Stiner says. “In this time period, we’re working on the problem of the entry-level context of the human-animal relationship.”<\/p>\n
Dung and other evidence<\/h3>\n
To reconstruct the scale and pace of change during the first phases of animal domestication, lead author Jordan Abell, then an undergraduate in geosciences, figured out a way to use urine salts left by humans and animals at an ancient site in Turkey to calculate how the density of animals and humans changed over time.<\/p>\n
“And we thought, well, humans and animals pee…”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
“This is the first time, to our knowledge, that people have picked up on salts in archaeological materials and used them in a way to look at the development of animal management,” says Abell, now a graduate student at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.<\/p>\n
Scholars think the intensive food production that started about 11,000 years ago\u2014a time period called the Neolithic Revolution\u2014allowed cities to grow, led to technological innovation, and eventually enabled human civilization as we know it today.<\/p>\n
Scientists knew people at the site had captive animals because of accumulations of dung and other evidence. However, reconstructing the scale and pace at which humans were domesticating sheep and goats was difficult using just bone fragments and fossilized dung, Abell says.<\/p>\n
The researchers wondered what other clues a bunch of animals onsite might have left behind. Coauthor Susan Mentzer of the University of T\u00fcbingen in Germany previously found chemical compounds in the soil that might be from urine.<\/p>\n
“And we thought, well, humans and animals pee, and when they pee, they release a bunch of salt,” Abell says. “At a dry place like this, we didn’t think salts would be washed away and redistributed.”<\/p>\n
Researchers work on the western Section of the archeological dig at A\u015f\u0131kl\u0131 H\u00f6y\u00fck, Turkey. (Credit: G\u00fcne\u015f Duru\/A\u015f\u0131kl\u0131 H\u00f6y\u00fck Project Archive)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Urine salts<\/h3>\n
The various levels of the archeological dig at A\u015f\u0131kl\u0131 H\u00f6y\u00fck span the time before human settlement through the time when the settlement was abandoned\u2014a period of about 1,000 years.<\/p>\n