In case you're bored or something

An excerpt from my article review homework. In case you're wondering why I hardly blog these days. So busy with work and skool!!!

The main idea of this article is that radiocarbon-dating shows that the period of overlap between early Neolithic and late Mesolithic was a brief one and not drawn out (in England and Wales) as previously thought.
The latest Mesolithic sites date to 5400-5500 Before Present. The Neolithic appears in southern Britain between 5400-5200 BP. The Neolithic brings new innovations in material culture such as pottery and monument building, but the biggest difference between Mesolithic and Neolithic sites is, of course, the domestication of plants/edible grains and animal husbandry. It was previously believed that this process was a timely one, and that domesticated plants and animals were gradually introduced into the diet. Red deer and hazelnuts are examples of wild foods characteristically found at Mesolithic sites, whereas Neolithic sites feature refuse from domesticated fauna and cattle. Furthermore, coastal shell middens, which were essentially Mesolithic garbage dumps, show evidence of a great amount of marine remains. These appear to have been abandoned by the Neolithic revolution, implying that diet had shifted from marine to farmed food. On top of this evidence, we have stable isotope analysis of human bones. This provides direct evidence of diet over a person’s lifetime. The carbon from the food we eat makes its way into our bones and is stored in bone collagen. This will reflect the protein of a diet in the last 5-15 years of a person’s life. Richards and Hedges analyze the data from the stable isotope analysis to determine whether their diets were composed mainly of marine or terrestrial protein. They found that from the early Neolithic sites there was a lack of marine food, even though the sites were coastal ones. The Mesolithic sites, however, had people who ate primarily marine diets. The fact that the Neolithic sites do not have people with significant marine protein in their diet proves that this adjustment occurred rapidly and not over a longer period of time.