Marine exploitation and the arrival of farming: resolving the paradox of the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Denmark
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The transition to farming in the coastal environments of southern Scandinavia remains a key conundrum in European prehistory. This region was heavily exploited by Late Mesolithic communities of the Ertebølle culture, complex hunter-fisher-gatherers who flourished for some 1500 years prior to the arrival of farming at around 4000 BCE marking the start of the Neolithic period. Extensive genetic and isotopic analyses of skeletal remains suggests that the arrival of farming is marked by a rapid demographic change and that incoming populations of ‘farmers’ had little reliance on marine resources. In contrast, frequent archaeological finds of shell middens and fishing gear in the Early Neolithic supports evidence for continuity in the use of marine resources across the transition. To assess this apparent paradox, focusing on the Danish evidence, we explore the spatiotemporal trends in the density of some 1500 radiocarbon dates using new informatics tools and modelling strategies. We indeed find strong archaeological indicators of sustained and even intensified patterns of coastal exploitation across and beyond the transition; shell middens, fishing implements, and aquatic residues in ceramics continue well into the Neolithic. Using an agent-based demographic model, we demonstrate how small differences in fertility could rapidly dilute signals of coastal resource use in the context of a growing Neolithic population. More broadly, we suggest that complex palimpsests of archaeological remains and biological information from human remains can only usefully be interpreted through the lens of demography.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".