The evolution of animal husbandry in Neolithic central-west Anatolia: the zooarchaeological record from Ulucak Hoyuk (c. 7040-5660 cal. BC, Izmir, Turkey)

Research into the emergence of animal husbandry west of the Taurus mountains has been primarily confined to central Anatolia, the Lake District and the Marmara region in Anatolia, leaving a c. 85,000km(2) area in western Anatolia largely unexplored. This vast region is crucial to understand the developmental trajectories of early farming practices in Anatolia and to explain the expansion of Neolithic agro-pastoralist lifeways into southeast Europe. The hand-collected faunal assemblage from Ulucak Hoyuk near Izmir provides a first opportunity to examine the beginnings and the evolution of Neolithic animal husbandry practices in this region across an uninterrupted cultural sequence dating between c. 7040-5660 cal. BC. Taxonomic, osteometric and demographic analyses suggest that all four initial food animals (sheep, goat, cattle and pig) appeared simultaneously at the beginning of the seventh millennium BC. The relative proportions of the domestic food animals indicate that beef was as significant a resource as sheep and goat meat. Fusion data for cattle and combined tooth-eruption and wear data for sheep and goat suggest that milk exploitation may have begun towards the end of the seventh millennium BC and intensified during the first quarter of the sixth. Evidence for post-adult caprines and cattle is thought to represent a strategy employed to maximise herd size and buffer risk. No clear evidence for cattle traction was found. Fallow deer seems to have become an increasingly important resource throughout the period. Small amounts of fish remains and substantial amounts of marine molluscs demonstrate that coastal environments were also exploited. These results indicate that central-west Anatolia played an essential role in the expansion of animal husbandry technologies into southeast Europe.