As many as 200,000 fish bones discovered in and around a pit in Sweden suggest that the people living in the area more than 9000 years ago were more settled and cultured than previously thought, scientists say.
The study provides earliest evidence of food fermentation in Scandinavia, from the Early Mesolithic time period, about 9,200 years ago. The findings suggest that people who survived by foraging for food were actually more advanced than assumed.
The Mesolithic period, which spanned around 10,000-5,000 BC, marked the time before people started farming in Europe.
At this time, researchers believed groups of people in Scandinavia caught fish from the sea, lakes and rivers and moved around following the sources of food they could find.
"This is a really exciting and surprising finding that gives us a completely new picture of how the group lived," said Adam Boethius, said PhD student at Lund University in Sweden.
"We'd never seen a site like this with so many well preserved fish bones, so it was amazing to find," Boethius said.
The foraging people stored huge amounts of fish in one place by fermenting them, suggesting the people had more advanced technology and a more sedentary life than we thought.
If the people were more sedentary, they would have been better able to develop culture.
This makes their culture more comparable to the Neolithic people in the Middle East, who were traditionally thought to have settled much earlier than their northern European counterparts, researchers said.
Researchers had been excavating a site at Norje Sunnansund to rescue any artifacts from Mesolithic settlements before a road was built. As they started to dig, they found lots of fish bones, which indicated people had lived there.
They then uncovered an elongated pit or gutter surrounded by small stake holes and completely filled with fish bones.
"It was really strange, and because of all the fish bones
in the area we knew something was going on even before we found the feature," said Boethius.
Researchers analysed the feature and the contents and discovered the fish bones were from freshwater fish. He also showed the fish had been fermented - a skillful way of preserving food without using salt.
The amount of fish they found could have supported a large community of people. Given the amount and type of fish found at the site, researchers believe freshwater sources played a more important role in the development of culture in the area than we thought.
The study was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
