Publications by authors named "Christian Jeunesse"
Direct, accurate, and precise dating of archaeological pottery vessels is now achievable using a recently developed approach based on the radiocarbon dating of purified molecular components of food residues preserved in the walls of pottery vessels. The method targets fatty acids from animal fat residues, making it uniquely suited for directly dating the inception of new food commodities in prehistoric populations. Here, we report a large-scale application of the method by directly dating the introduction of dairying into Central Europe by the (LBK) cultural group based on dairy fat residues.
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- Lactase persistence (LP) evolved as a significant genetic trait in European, African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian populations over the last 10,000 years, largely influenced by milk consumption patterns.
- Despite evidence of widespread milk use in Europe since the Neolithic period, the relationship between prehistoric milk consumption and LP allele frequency is complex and suggests that other factors, such as environmental stressors, may have played a role in driving LP selection.
- The findings indicate that LP's rise in frequency may be better understood in the context of population dynamics and challenges faced by societies, rather than solely through the lens of milk exploitation.
This work demonstrates the importance of integrating sexual division of labour into the research of the transition to the Neolithic and its social implications. During the spread of the Neolithic in Europe, when migration led to the dispersal of domesticated plants and animals, novel tasks and tools, appear in the archaeological record. By examining the use-wear traces from over 400 stone tools from funerary contexts of the earliest Neolithic in central Europe we provide insights into what tasks could have been carried out by women and men.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPottery is one of the most commonly recovered artefacts from archaeological sites. Despite more than a century of relative dating based on typology and seriation, accurate dating of pottery using the radiocarbon dating method has proven extremely challenging owing to the limited survival of organic temper and unreliability of visible residues. Here we report a method to directly date archaeological pottery based on accelerator mass spectrometry analysis of C in absorbed food residues using palmitic (C) and stearic (C) fatty acids purified by preparative gas chromatography.
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