Early Neolithic farmers arriving on the Baltic coast bucked trends and incorporated fish into their diets

Pioneering early farmers who arrived on the Baltic coast 6,000 years ago may have taken up fishing after observing indigenous hunter-gatherer communities, a major new study has found.

Previous studies of prehistoric cooking pots in areas including Britain, Spain, France and Portugal have indicated that people completely stopped cooking fish once they started farming crops and animals, even in coastal areas.

In stark contrast, the new research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and led by academics at the University of York in collaboration with the British Museum, has found that farmers who arrived on Northern Europe’s Baltic coast adopted a mixed diet that embraced both fish and domesticated animal products.