Climate-driven environmental changes around 8,200 years ago favoured increases in cetacean strandings and Mediterranean hunter-gatherers exploited them.

Marcello A Mannino,Marcello Piperno,Carmine Collina,Vittoria Schimmenti,Antonio Tagliacozzo,Olaf Nehlich,Sebastiano Tusa,Rosaria Di Salvo,Ivana Fiore,Michael P Richards,Sahra Talamo

doi:10.1038/srep16288

Abstract

Cetacean mass strandings occur regularly worldwide, yet the compounded effects of natural and anthropogenic factors often complicate our understanding of these phenomena. Evidence of past stranding episodes may, thus, be essential to establish the potential influence of climate change. Investigations on bones from the site of Grotta dell’Uzzo in North West Sicily (Italy) show that the rapid climate change around 8,200 years ago coincided with increased strandings in the Mediterranean Sea. Stable isotope analyses on collagen from a large sample of remains recovered at this cave indicate that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers relied little on marine resources. A human and a red fox dating to the 8.2-kyr-BP climatic event, however, acquired at least one third of their protein from cetaceans. Numerous carcasses should have been available annually, for at least a decade, to obtain these proportions of meat. Our findings imply that climate-driven environmental changes, caused by global warming, may represent a serious threat to cetaceans in the near future.

Highlights

This cave was occupied sporadically from the Late Pleistocene, but regularly only by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic agro-pastoralists during the whole of the early Holocene (Fig. 2)
In Trench F (Supplementary Table 2), the stratigraphically most reliable trench studied in detail, 87% (n = 1 06) were found in the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition stratigraphic units (F-12, F-13 and F-14)
Of the Number of Identified Specimens (NISP) attributable to Cetacea (Supplementary Table 1): 24.1% were only identifiable to order, 68.3% are Delphinidae and 7.6% belong to Mysticeti or large Odontoceti (e.g. Balaeonoptera sp. or Physeter macrocephalus)[5]

Summary

Introduction

This cave was occupied sporadically from the Late Pleistocene, but regularly only by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic agro-pastoralists during the whole of the early Holocene (Fig. 2) It is, a key site for the study of the changes in human culture and subsistence economy that took place at that time in the Mediterranean[5,6,7,8,9,10]. The Mesolithic-Neolithic ‘transition phase’ was the last period when the subsistence economy was solely based on hunting and gathering The original aim of this research was to undertake isotope analyses on human and faunal bone collagen from Grotta dell’Uzzo to reconstruct the diet of the hunter-gatherers and early agro-pastoralists who occupied the cave. The results of our isotopic work pushed us to investigate further the zooarchaeology of the site and the cetacean bone assemblage, which will be presented before the geochemical analyses

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Conclusion