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When you think about past cultures and their foods, one of the first things that comes to mind is bountiful fish harvests and feasts, right?
But you might be surprised to know that many ancient cultures either rejected fish and shellfish all together, or they ate so little, that it was undetectable by bulk collagen isotope analysis.
A recent paper written on the late Bronze Age Balearic diet discussed this very topic.
At this point, it must be stressed that previous δ13C and δ15N analyses (Van Strydonck et al. 2005) clearly indicated that the diet in the Balearic Islands during the prehistory was not predominantly based on marine resources. This lack of a clear evidence of consumption of marine foods has also observed in other studies from Majorca (Davis 2002; Garcia et al. 2004) and the Mediterranean region in general (Craig et al. 2006), all of them during prehistoric times, although that does not mean that human groups did not consume a small amount of it.
So, why did that happen?
Well, one popular Twitter account called “Stone Age Herbalist” who’s known for discussing topics like this and sharing interesting information on ancient herbs and cultures, suggested it could be this:
My guess is that seafood became associated with the Mesolithic HGs and relying on raised domestic animals and crops was a marker of identity which took root and held, perhaps as a taboo, like English people not eating horse meat. […] it’s some kind of agricultural food taboo, other people around the world have prohibitions on seafood. Probably in this case it originated to separate themselves from the local HGs, we are the people of the soil, you the people of the sea etc.
That’s an interesting theory…
Especially when you think about how there were several other cultures who either didn’t eat fish at all or stopped suddenly and became strictly meat-eaters.
The Scottish Pictish are a perfect example of these staunch meat-eaters who refused to eat seafood… but their reasoning was different…
Curtis-Summers and her team found that during the site’s subsistence farming period (roughly 550 to 700 A.D.), its Pictish inhabitants dined primarily on barley, beef, lamb, pork and venison. Fresh and saltwater fish were conspicuously absent from the group’s diet.
“Pictish sea power is evident from archaeological remains of naval bases, as at Burghead, and references to their ships in contemporary annals, so we know they were familiar with the sea and would surely have been able to fish,” says Curtis-Summers.
Rather than attributing this surprising dietary omission to poor fishing skills, the researchers theorize that the Picts may have intentionally avoided consuming fish for cultural and spiritual reasons.
“We … know from Pictish stone carvings that salmon was a very important symbol for them, possibly derived from earlier superstitious and folklore beliefs that include stories about magical fish, such as the ‘salmon of knowledge,’ believed to have contained all the wisdom in the world,” explains Curtis-Summers. “It’s likely that fish were considered so special by the Picts that consumption was deliberately avoided.”
And that’s not all. Five thousand years ago, ancient Britons suddenly swapped out their high protein fish and shellfish diet for a European meat and high carbohydrate diet.
The change from coquilles St Jacques to lamb and couscous is recorded in the bones: this is because humans are, quite literally, what they eat.
Michael Richards at the University of Bradford, and colleagues from Belfast and Oxford, report in Nature that they measured carbon isotope ratios in the bones of 164 Neolithic humans and compared the findings with 19 fragments of skeleton from Mesolithic or middle stone age skeletons.
This gave them a chance to compare diets from 9000 to 5,200 years ago, with later appetites from 5,200 to 4,500 years ago.
The contrast was dramatic. Mesolithic bones showed the signature of a moderate to strong seafood diet, a taste confirmed by the Mesolithic shellfish middens of western Scotland.
But all the new stone age bones, whether from coastal or inland sites, revealed an earthy enthusiasm for plants and animals. “Marine foods, for whatever reason, seem to have been comprehensively abandoned,” they report.
The belief is that around about the time stone age Britons abandoned the hunter-gatherer existence and started sticking up big stone monuments, they also adopted crops, animals and farming methods from across the English channel.
But what about the Vikings from Greenland? This group traveled from Iceland to Greenland around the year 1000.
They lived very successfully for about 400 years, and then as if out of nowhere in the 14th century they just mysteriously vanished.
Without warning, the Greenland Vikings were no more.
So, what happened to these amazing people?
Where did they go?
Were they swallowed by an earthquake or hit by a torquing comet?
Nobody can really say for certain what happened to them, but everyone’s got a theory.
The mysterious disappearance sparked a lot of rumors, from climate change and poor land management to pirate attacks and even starvation.
One theory explores an idea that part of the reason the Greenland Viking vanished was because they refused to eat fish.
This controversial fish/starvation theory comes from a book written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dr. Jared Diamond, who claims the Greenland Vikings were wiped off the face of the earth in part because they wouldn’t( or couldn’t) eat fish, and eventually starved to death.
Collapse of The Greenland Norse:
Every archaeologist who comes to excavate in Greenland refuses initially to believe the incredible claim that the Greenland Norse didn’t eat fish, and starts out with his or her own idea about where all those missing fish bones might be hiding.
Could the Norse have strictly confined their munching on fish to within a few feet of the shoreline, at sites now underwater because
of land subsidence? Could they have faithfully saved all their fish bones for fertilizer, fuel, or feeding to cows? Could their dogs have run off with those fish carcasses, dropped the fish bones in fields chosen with foresight to be ones where future archaeologists would rarely bother to dig, and carefully avoided carrying the carcasses back to the house or midden lest archaeologists subsequently find them?
But this theory is not accepted by most experts.
Accordingly, the Vikings were not just dumb, they also had dumb luck: They discovered Greenland during a time known as the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from about 900 to 1300. Sea ice decreased during those centuries, so sailing from Scandinavia to Greenland became less hazardous. Longer growing seasons made it feasible to graze cattle, sheep and goats in the meadows along sheltered fjords on Greenland’s southwest coast. In short, the Vikings simply transplanted their medieval European lifestyle to an uninhabited new land, theirs for the taking.
But eventually, the conventional narrative continues, they had problems. Overgrazing led to soil erosion. A lack of wood—Greenland has very few trees, mostly scrubby birch and willow in the southernmost fjords—prevented them from building new ships or repairing old ones. But the greatest challenge—and the coup de grâce—came when the climate began to cool, triggered by an event on the far side of the world.
Most archeologist today laugh off the “fish/starvation” theory, and instead they believe Greenland Vikings were either wiped off the face of the earth due to some sort of climate catastrophe or were overrun by the Inuits.
But nobody knows for certain what really happened to the Greenland Vikings, so this ancient mystery lives on…
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