Animal dung and the beginnings of sheep domestication in the Near East?
There's an exciting paper out today in PNAS on Aşıklı Höyük , an early sedentary pre-pottery Neolithic site in central Anatolia, occupied a millennia earlier than that site oft discussed on this blog, Çatalhöyük . This paper by Stiner et al. is a great example of research that brings together work from different archaeological specialists to produce a coherent story, supported by multiple lines of evidence. The argument is based around the zooarchaeological analysis of animal remains, which demonstrates a shift over the occupation of the site from a broad spectrum of wild species, to a dominance of sheep by 8200 cal BC. However it is the geoarchaeological analysis that arguably provides direct evidence of deliberate animal management, and as a micromorphologist with a special interest in all things coprolite and dung related , I am very happy to see that this technique is one of the highlights of the paper! (Phytoliths also get a mention!). The researchers identify accumulation...