Sheep in Early Neolithic settlements in South Iberia, insights from proteomics

Abstract

The presence of sheep (Ovis aries) and goat (Capra hircus) in the Iberian Peninsula Early Neolithic provides key information about livestock dispersion from the seminal regions of domestication towards Western Europe, involving synergic processes of husbandry, migration and cultural exchange. In this study, mass spectrometry based paleoproteomics is employed to identify caprines from osseous and dental archaeological materials collected at two paradigmatic Neolithic sites in the South-Western Iberian Peninsula, the caves of Dehesilla and Chica de Santiago. The radiocarbon dating places some of the specimens among the earliest Iberian sheep identified to date (circa 7500 cal BP), enriching the archaeological record of livestock management in an Iberian region in which well-dated Neolithic settlements remain scarce. The proteomic analysis updates previous identifications based on morphological criteria. The identifications support the relevance of sheep and its predominance over goat in the Early Neolithic levels of the two archaeological sites investigated. They also suggest that the seminal populations materially linked to the impressa pottery, that reached in the South of the Iberian peninsula at the end of the first half of the 8th millennium BP are associated with the management of sheep. This supports a scenario in which sheep spread rapidly within the preceding centuries from the Central Mediterranean to the Iberian Peninsula.