Obsessed with butter

Buttering toast, the Irish way...

In 2015 an article entitled "Milking the megafauna: Using organic residue analysis to understand early farming practice" was published in the Journal of Environmental Archaeology by Jessica Smyth and Richard P. Evershed... 

The authors of the paper analysed residues found in nearly 500 cooking pots from Neolithic Ireland dated to the period 4,000 to 2,500 BC...

Ninety per cent of the residues tested for fat origin were found to be dairy fats, with ten per cent found to be meat fats (beef or mutton) or a mixture of milk and meat...

Dr Smyth, who led the study, said: "We know from previous research that dairying was an important part of many early farming economies, but what was a big surprise was the prevalence of dairy residues in Irish pots.  It looks to have been a very important food source".

Dr Smyth also said: "We know that settlements were small in the Irish Neolithic, usually one or two houses, so it’s likely that early farming groups had just one or two animals supporting the household with their products, which were perhaps part of a wider community herd"...

"Such results are even more significant given the fact that domesticated animals such as cattle, sheep and goats had to be physically shipped to Ireland as part of the process, as these animals were not native to the island"...

It just so happened that when this paper got published, I read an article in Irish Times about a paper written by UCD professor of archaeology Liam Downey and environmental archaeologist Dr Ingelise Stuijts about the history of "banbidh" (Irish for white foods) in Ireland...

They collated and analysed the data about food consumed in Ireland from the time of the earliest documentary sources up to the late 17th century...

They concluded that despite "extraordinarily high number of cattle in Ireland and an abundance of fish in the Irish waters, ordinary Irish people ate very little beef or fish".

Research had found that people lived primarily on dairy products. The Irish favourite food was butter. But there was also drinking milk, and buttermilk, and fresh curds, and old curds, and something called “real curds,” and whey mixed with water to make a refreshing sour drink...

In 1690, one British visitor to Ireland noted that the natives ate and drank milk "above twenty several sorts of ways and what is strangest for the most part love it best when sourest". 

He was referring to bainne clabair (thick milk), something between old milk and sour cream.

In the 12th c. vision of MacConglinne, he traveled to "the Land of Food" where he saw a delicious drink made up of "very thick milk, of milk not too thick, of milk of long thickness, of milk of medium thickness, of yellow bubbling milk, the swallowing of which needs chewing"...

Medieval British military advisors proposed that the best way to suppress Irish rebellions "would be just to kill all the cows because the majority of the population lived all summer on their cows’ milk"...

The second most important food were cereal products. The ordinary Irish people "ate tons of bread and porridge".

As for meet, it seems that "beef was most commonly consumed by the higher ranks of society, while pork was eaten by the common people..."

It is not surprising then that people so obsessed with butter, cheese and milk valued cattle above all else, to the point of being completely obsessed with them...

Fergus Kelly in his books "A Guide to Early Irish Law" and "Early Irish Farming" talks about cattle as currency in the early medieval Ireland. He gives the list of types of cattle used for payment and their relative value...

The basic unit was a milking cow, usually with her calf.  Different ancient texts give different exchange rates for different types, but they were all given as a fraction of the value of the milking cow. Example:

In-calf cow = two-thirds of a milking cow

Three-year-old heifer = half of milking cow

Two-year-old heifer = one third of milking cow

Yearling heifer = one quarter of milking cow

Yearling bullock = one eighth of milking cow

In one law text, there is an equal value given for a milking cow, a cumal (female slave), an ounce of silver and 2 sét (jewels)...

Cattle was so valued by the Irish, that Cattle raiding and plundering was an intrinsic part of the Old Irish (Scotish) way of life. To the extent that the most important old Irish epic is called Táin Bó Cúailnge which means "the driving-off , stealing, of cows of Cooley".

This epic which is more commonly known as "The cattle raid of Cooley" is a masterpiece of the early Irish literature. And as its name tells us it is a story about a cattle raid. A cattle raid ordered by the Queen Medb of Connacht who wanted to steal the champion bull of Ulster.

This lead to a bloody war between Ulster and Connacht which caused terrible devastation and many casualties on both sides. The most famous of these casualties was the Ulster hero Cú Chulainn, who died defending Ulster from the Connacht forces...

Táin Bó Cúailnge is traditionally set in the 1st century AD in an essentially pre-Christian "age of heroes". I think that the much better name for this period of the Irish history is the "age of armed shepherds"...

Shepherds had to be armed and skilled in battle if they wanted to protect their cattle from other armed shepherd who wanted to steal it. Eventually this must have lead to a formation of a warrior shepherd caste...

That this is probably what happened during the Irish Iron age can be seen from the emergence of the so called "cattle lords" or "cow lords" or "bóaire" in Irish. Bóaire was a freeman ranked below the noble grades but above the unfree...

He would own a share of land, which he inherited from members of his kin and which he could not sell without his kin's approval. He would normally have cattle given to him by a lord (the head of his clan) in exchange for entering into a clientship relationship...

The today Irish are still equally obsessed with milk and milk products...Especially butter...

Anyway, while I was reading all this, one question popped into my mind: is there anything special about the Irish, genetically, that makes them love milk so much?

After all, milk tolerance is not that common...Here is today's lactose tolerance distribution map. See how the maximum is in North Western Europe...Look how dark Ireland is...

So then I looked at the genetic maps and I noticed a strange correlation between R1b haplogroup distribution and the lactose tolerance distribution...I mean, look at Ireland...It's black...So I thought that these two things could be linked...

But then, while researching butter churns and cheese strains from Neolithic and Chalcholitic Central Europe, I came across the data that seems to point to the link between I2a and G2a haplogroups and the earliest cattle herding and milk processing cultures. I talked about this in my post "Milk, butter, cheese"...

Neolithic butter churn

Neolithic cheese strainer

I finished my above article still unsure whether it was I2a or R1b people who were the original milkmen...Well...Today I remembered this article about milk residues in Neolithic Irish cooking vessels...

All the vessels date to 4000-2500BC...Very very important...Why is this important? Because according to the latest genetic data, R1b people most likely didn't arrive to Ireland until mid 3rd millennium BC...

So who were the milking cow obsessed Neolithic Irish...I2a...Neolithic megalith builders...And milk drinkers...So is it possible that this is another indicator that the original lactose tolerance genes developed among the I2a people?

Did the Bronze, Iron, Medieval and Modern age R1b Irish get their love of milk and all things milky (and get the ability to process lactose) through mixing with the Neolithic I2a Irish? I think so...

Distribution of I2a and I2b haplogroups in Europe...

Burren

This is an amazing photo by Rob Shaw of the Poulnabrone (Irish: Poll na Brón) dolmen. Around 33 human remains were found buried underneath it which were dated to between 5800 BP (or is it calibrated BP?) and 5200 BP (or is it calibrated BP?)...

The dolmen is located in Burren, a barren limestone area in the north of the county Claire, West of Ireland...

Pollen analysis indicates that in the Mesolithic period the Burren looked completely different from today, with most of the uplands covered in a mixture of deciduous, pine and yew trees. No clear evidence of Mesolithic settlements or camp sites in the area has yet been discovered. 

However, by the Neolithic, c. 5100BP (5800 calibrated BP), settlers had clearly arrived and began changing the landscape through deforestation, likely by overgrazing and burning, and the building of stone walls. 

These people also constructed Megalithic sites like the Poulnabrone dolmen. In total 70 megalithic tombs were built in the Burren area...

Now the remains found in the Poulnabrone dolmen showed signs of arthritis, illness and malnutrition. In most cases the physical condition of the remains indicated lives spent in hard physical labour. Everyone died by the age of 30...So agriculture was not very successful, I would say...

Today I came across this interesting paper: "Farming and woodland dynamics in Ireland during the Neolithic"

In it we can read about "the Elm Decline", the decimation of the Irish elms which is thought to be a result of a disease which affected only elms. The event is dated to around 5100BP (5800 calibrated BP). 

Interestingly the earliest evidence of the Neolithic landnam (the clearance of forested land for (usually short-term) agricultural purposes) is from the period immediately after the Elm Decline. The effects of this land clearance can be seen in substantial reductions in arboreal pollen (frequently in all taxa) and correspondingly large increases in the non-arboreal pollen component. Basically trees were replace by grasses. 

Examples from Ce´ide Fields and Lough Sheeauns and the pollen record from Garrynagran, which lies immediately to the south of Ce´ide Fields show that landnam involved clearance and sustained farming activity over several centuries (c. 300 –500 years).

The farming was mainly animal herding. Grain was grown, but as a minor element in the farming economy. 

However, farming completely stops around 4500BP (5200 calibrated BP)...After this point we see evidence of woodland regeneration facilitated by low levels of farming and possibly more or less complete abandonment of farming in several parts of Ireland. By the end of this period 4000BP (4500 calibrated BP), blanket bog had already expanded or was about to undergo widespread expansion. At Ce´ide Fields, it already extended over the greater part of the fields that had been enclosed in the earlier Neolithic by stone walls.

So here is the question: Why did agriculture in Neolithic Burren last such a short period of time and why was it so unsuccessful that people literally starved and died young from diseases and malnutrition?

I don't know if what I will present here will answer this question or open even more questions, but here it goes:

This is the chart of the polar temperature variation in last 10,000 years

We can see that the temperature has been going up and down madly all the time and that for most of the time it was much higher than today. But I am not going to talk about climate change here. I want to talk about specific dramatic temperature rises and drops which occurred during the time of the Early Neolithic settlements in the Burren area. What I want to see is if the sudden changes in climate were responsible for the relatively short span and unsuccessfulness of the Neolithic agriculture in the Burren area.

Now in order to do this analysis we need to decide which archaeological dates should we match with  the above temperature chart dates. The archaeological dates are given in BP (before present) and calibrated BP...

Apparently, the BP dates retrieved using C14 carbon dating "are not identical to calendar dates". This "has to do with the fact that the level of atmospheric radiocarbon (carbon-14 or 14C) has not been strictly constant during the span of time that can be radiocarbon-dated". Uncalibrated radiocarbon ages can be converted to calendar dates by means of calibration curves "based on comparison of raw radiocarbon dates of samples independently dated by other methods, such as dendrochronology (dating on the basis of tree growth-rings) and stratigraphy (dating on the basis of sediment layers in mud or sedimentary rock)". 

The quotes are not here because I don't agree with calibration. There are here because calibration is not an exact science...And calibrated dates are not "the correct dates". They are just "better dates". I talked about the problems with C14 dates calibration in my article "Linkardstown cists". 

The problem with calibration is that calibration wildly changes the dates obtained by C14 carbon dating. As you can see from the above dates for the arrival of the first farmers to the Burren, calibration makes the dates 700 years earlier...700 years is a lot of time, especially when you want to correlate dates from one part of the world with dates from another, to determine the direction of population movement and cultural influence...But that's the best we have at the moment...

Let's plot the calibrated dates from the Burren onto the Polar temperature chart to see if we can spot anything interesting. 

And here is the important bit enlarged

You can see that our poor Neolithic Farmers arrived to the Burren right during the sudden cooling (green line) caused most likely by an eruption of the Hekla volcano on Iceland which happened around 5900BP. Volcano eruptions of Hekla type spew huge amount of ash into the atmosphere and cause basically nuclear winters...Not very good for agriculture...

They somehow get through this "bad patch" and are doing "ok" for a while (temperatures rising to the halfway point between the green and the purple line). When something else causes a temperature drop that makes the one caused by Hekla eruption look like a "minor bad weather spell". 

This time we can't blame Hekla for what's going on...We can blame the so Called "Piora Oscillation". The climate got progressively colder and damper and eventually made agriculture impossible. Which is why by the time this period is over, we see no traces of agriculture in the Burren any more. 

As the temperature starts to rise (after the purple line), the forests start to recover. 

But then around 5100BP we have another catastrophic climate change with huge temperature dip. We are talking about ice age conditions...

So what is this big dip? And, is it possible that this dip could be an indication that the calibration of the Irish C14 carbon dates is wrong? Have a look at what we get when we plot the actual C14 dates and not the calibrated ones on the above Ice Core Temperature chart.

Now our Neolithic Farmers arrive to Ireland right after the previous big dip which coincides with the Piora Oscillation, some time before 5200BP. They enjoy relative prosperity. They build Newgrange between 5200BP and 5100BP...

But then, just when they are getting comfortable, about 200 years after they arrived, they hit the beginning of the giant temperature dip. And then everything goest to hell...The temperature plummets. The climate becomes so cold and wet that it makes agriculture impossible. The bogs cover the fields...

Even the "modern", multi core Ice Core Temperature charts, specially "tuned" to correct the "simplistic" chart above show this dip which starts around 5100BP:

Now I know that one of the main criticisms of these charts is that "you can't equate temperature variation data obtained on Greenland to temperature variation of the whole Earth". Fair enough, but Greenland is fairly close to Ireland, and we could be pretty sure that the Irish temperature variation was very similar to the one shown on the Greenland Ice Core Temperature charts...

Soooo...

Oh yeah. The Irish annals tell us that the first people that came to Ireland were Fomorians (The ones who came from across the sea). Then the flood came and Ireland was left depopulated. Then Partholon came. Then another flood came and Ireland was again left depopulated. Then Nemed came...

I talked about this in my post "Partholon and the great flood"...

Now if we plot the calibrated dates on the Greenland Ice Core Temperature chart we get

And if we plot the calibrated dates on the Greenland Ice Core Temperature chart we get

Now the second one actually matches the date of the arrival of the R1b Metalworkers to Ireland sometime after 4500BP. And the Irish annals say that it was Partholon who brought metalwork...

I think this is quite interesting...

So as I said at the beginning of my discussion, not sure if what I just presented here gives us any answers, or opens a lot more questions...

Giant's Ring

This is the so called Giant's Ring, a late Neolithic henge monument at Ballynahatty, near Shaw's Bridge, Belfast, Northern Ireland...

Inside the enclosure, east of the centre, is a small passage tomb with an entrance passage facing west...

The genetic data obtained from the female remains found inside the tomb, and dated to (3343–3020 cal. BC) shows "predominant ancestry from early farmers" and "haplotypic affinity with modern southern Mediterranean populations such as Sardinians".

Also "she shares higher levels of genetic drift with Early and MN samples from Spain rather than those from Germany...and arguing for the possible passage of farming to Ireland via a southern coastal route rather than via the migrations through central Europe".

From "Neolithic and Bronze Age migration to Ireland and establishment of the insular Atlantic genome" 

Now this is pointing at the neolithic people (first farmers) migrating into Europe following two routes, both starting in the Balkans: 

1. Up along Morava river to Danube and then up along Danube river into centra Europe and onward to North and Baltic seas and then further into Britain. 

2. Along north mediterranean coast via Italy, France, Spain and further into Ireland. 

Now according to the archaeological data presented in "Farming and woodland dynamics in Ireland during the Neolithic" the first farmers arrived to Ireland some time after "the great elm decline" which is pinned to around 3800BC. 

Now at that time, in the 4th millennium BC, the tourists wanting to travel along the north Mediterranean coast had two options: to walk, or to use the Neolithic seafaring trading routes that we know existed between Balkans and Iberia (via Sicily and Sardinia). I talked about this trading route in my post "Neolithic seafarers". 

So our girl (or one of her ancestors) probably travelled from Sardinia to Iberia by boat (probably along the coast, with stops along the way). And then continued on to Ireland by boat too (along the coast to Brittany and then via Cornwall to Ireland?) as there is no other way to get from Iberia to Ireland...

Interestingly, the same maritime trading/migration route along the North Mediterranean coast and then along the Atlantic coast was described in the Irish Annals as the route taken by the many Invaders of Ireland...Like Partholon who allegedly brought metalwork and cattle to Ireland...

I talked about the legends about Partholon and how it fits the archaeological data in my posts "Parthlon and the great flood" and "Or - Ireland's gold" and the rest of the posts from my series about the "Montenegrian tumuluses" (or Montenegrin tumuli as I discovered you should say in "proper English" 🙂)