Stone Age Britons traded with European farmers 8,000 years ago

Archaeologists have concluded that pre-agricultural Stone Age hunter-gatherers on the Isle of Wight 8,000 years ago obtained domesticated wheat from farmers on the continent of Europe. That is 2,000 years earlier than people were farming in England.

English archaeologists said in a paper published in February 2015 in the journal Science that they’ve found evidence of wheat at a Middle Stone Age site at Bouldnor Cliff now underwater off the northern coast of the Isle of Wight, which is located off the south coast of England.

One of the researchers, Robin Allaby said the finding of einkorn wheat shows there was contact between pre-agricultural Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic) people from the Isle of Wight and New Stone Age (Neolithic) European farmers, possibly via a land bridge in southern England. The finding may require scholars to reassess the origins of agriculture in the British Isles.

The DNA of the wheat, which was found in submerged soil or sediment at Bouldnor, matches wheat first domesticated in what is now Turkey.