New evidence for early cattle herding in N Europe 🐄Our research is out in @AntiquityJ.A 🧵on what we discovered about hunter-gatherers, farmers and cows. Spoiler: we found 2 different herds of cattle! 1/.@FacultyofArtsUG @UniLeidenNews @NWONieuws .

RT @Sofie_Helleroe: First week as a 27 y/o and first time ever submitting an application for a PhD position 🎓. It’s been hectic, people!….

RT @FlintDibble: I have no way to get in touch with Keanu Reeves. I invite him to have a frank conversation with me about archaeology. I be….

It was so lovely to visit this wonderful excavation last week 🤩.

RT @AntiquityJ: It was great to meet Antiquity author Nathalie Brusgaard in person at #EAA2024! .Check out her article on early animal mana….

#EAA2024 was a blast. I was also very happy to leave with a copy of the June Antiquity issue our article was published in thanks to @AntiquityJ! Always nice to see your article in print 😁

It was a lot of fun presenting our elk project at #EAA2024 at the Bronze Age animal session organised by @ANSOC_ERC. Such a great session too, I left feeling very inspired! @JoycevanDijk5, Jordy Aal and I will be back with more results soon I hope!

Lovely @EAAPaM social at #EAA2024 last night. I love the yearly moment of catching up with my fellow Stone Age archaeologists. And I'm glad I'm welcome even though I mostly do Neolithic 🤫 (not my fault, we don't have many Mesolithic bones in Holland!).

#EAA2024 off to a great start yesterday with a visit to the amazing Roman forum with @Cetoarchaeology followed by the welcome reception there. Though I think the organisers underestimated how many archaeologists would want to have a drink in this spectacular location 😂

Haven't been very active on here (Twitter isn't what it used to be. ) but I'm getting connected again for @archaeologyEAA conference Rome! Looking forward to hopefully seeing many of you this week?! 🤩

RT @OmroepFlevoland: Swifterbant - Is Swifterbant de bakermat van de veeteelt en de landbouw?

RT @CSLyons: The moment I’ve dreamed of for years is here: my first-ever book is out with @BloomsburyBooks today. What does the return of….

RT @AntiquityJ: NEW Archaeologists discover evidence for the earliest cattle herds in northern Europe in the Netherlands, pushing dates for….

Zie mijn post voor een draadje over ons onderzoek (in het Engels) en het wetenschappelijk artikel voor meer details (open access!).

De eerste runderkuddes in noord Europa 🐄 Ons onderzoek over vroege veeteelt in Nederland is uit. Het laat zien hoe complex veeteelt was al 6000 jaar geleden en dat er in Nederland een ander pad naar het boerenbestaan werd bewandeld. @nrc @nrcwetenschap.

Check out our article for all the details! And stay tuned because we've got more work on the cattle coming out (strontium!). And make sure also to take a look at all the cool research that's been done by the rest of the EDAN project @merimurica @ErvenJolijn @ZooArchGIA. 13/13.

No if we're talking about wild animals. But yes if we're talking about cattle! From this point on cattle play a very specific role in Dutch (pre)history - they are managed carefully, exchanged, and become more and more important. So. hunter-gatherer-farmer-cattle herders?😁 12/

So. hunter-gatherer-farmers? It's a term that's been used for the Swifterbant culture before and it's pretty fitting. What's most interesting about our results I think is the new insights into human-animal relationships. Had these relationships changed? 11/.

While these people kept cattle, pigs, and sheep - and managed them intensively - and they had crops, their subsistence consisted for a large part of hunted and gathered wild resources, like beavers🦫, wild boar 🐗, and hazelnuts. They made full use of the wetland landscape 10/

The cattle were domestic and smaller than the cattle from Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik sites. We also found small domestic pigs that had probably lived on the settlements, foraging on human refuse 🐖 9/

So as early as 4240 BC, people of the Swifterbant culture were keeping cattle and sheep and managing them in different ways. Perhaps they brought some of the animals from elsewhere or pastured them in different places. Talk about complex livestock husbandry! 8/