Life in the Valley: Isotopic Evidence for Year-round Sheep Pasturing at Gadachrili Gora, Late Neolithic Southern Caucasus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Early animal husbandry emerged in the Fertile Crescent during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (10th–9th millennium BCE) and spread rapidly across Southwest Asia, albeit with regional variation. In the Southern Caucasus, evidence for neolithisation appears only in the early 6th millennium BCE, 2,000–3,000 years later. The sudden appearance of Neolithic settlements in this region is often linked to the migration of people with domesticated plants and animals. Understanding how these agropastoralists adapted subsistence strategies to novel environments offers valuable insight into the ecological flexibility of Neolithic communities. Here, we use sequential stable carbon (δ¹³C) and oxygen (δ¹⁸O) isotope values measured in sheep tooth enamel from Gadachrili Gora (ca. 5900–5400 cal BCE), a Late Neolithic settlement in southern Georgia, to reconstruct herding practices and assess how livestock management was adapted to local conditions. The results support a model of year-round lowland pasturing in a humid, cultivated river valley dominated by C₃ vegetation. Moderate δ¹⁸O amplitudes (mean = 3.5‰) reflect predictable seasonal variation in temperature and precipitation, consistent with grazing in the alluvial plain. Relatively low δ¹³C amplitudes (mean = 1.7‰) suggest continuous access to well-watered forage, with possible seasonal movement between local woodlands in summer and meadows or fallow fields in winter. Patterns of covariation between δ¹³C and δ¹⁸O varied among individuals, but most showed positive or indeterminate trends, supporting year-round lowland grazing rather than seasonal vertical transhumance. Together, these findings add to evidence of Neolithic livestock strategies in the Southern Caucasus and provide insight into how agropastoralists adapted to environmental variability.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".