Stone Age Britons imported wheat

[anarchy8]

It seems like more and more we are learning just how smart we were in the deep past

[rowanseymour]

I've read a couple of good books recently (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari being my favourite) which make a convincing case for human evolution having mostly finished sometime around 100,000 - 50,000BCE when we homo sapiens started migrating out of Africa. It's pretty amazing to think that there were human beings walking around back then who were at least as mentally developed, if not more, than we are today.

[protomyth]

Given the surprise a lot of people have learning their were pre-columbian trade routes from the Arctic to South America, I am not sure we really teach much in the way of history.

[venomsnake]

I got that memo the first time I saw the pyramids. The engineers were technologically inferior, but new their craft and were smart.

[markvdb]

Much more recently, from around 1600 BCE, amber from the Baltic coast seems to have found its way into Egypt.

http://books.google.com/books?id=NAwGLzAfyhEC&printsec=front...

[dalke]

Another example, from the article: "there has been other signs of contacts, including bones of domesticated pigs in Germany in Stone Age hunter-gatherer settlements. "There are trade networks that pre-date agriculture,""

Regarding the amber trade, see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Road .

[kiiski]

That link gives a 404 page.

[dalke]

Looks like the original article was published in the most recent Science, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6225/998 , so behind a paywall but available from my local library.

There are more details in the review at The Independent . http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/the-remarkab... .

[shawabawa3]

It seems this is all based on a finding of "traces of wheat DNA"

Does that really suggest farming or trade? Couldn't it have just been wild wheat?

[dalke]

Quoting from the article:

> The scientists also found DNA of oak, poplar and beech and of dogs or wolves, deer, grouse and auroch, a type of cow. There was no trace of wheat pollen in the samples, indicating that it was not grown locally.