Tartu University archaeologists have studied the transition from hunter-gatherer to farming society in the northeast Baltic region. The study reveals that there was no transition from foraging to farming in the 3rd millennium BC in Estonia and Latvia. Instead, there were two parallel worlds, with the local population retaining forager lifestyles and the newcomer farmer population (Corded Ware peoples from eastern steppes) adapting to northern latitudes by developing mixed economies, both foraging and farming. This coexistence of two socioeconomically distinct societies lasted for about one to two thousand years until the emergence of widespread animal husbandry in the first millennium BC.
The transition from hunting, fishing, and gathering to farming and domestication of animals is one of the biggest paradigm shifts in human history. The roots of European agriculture go back to the Levant around 11,000 years ago, where it slowly emerged with local populations adopting native plants and animals. The adoption of farming in the east Baltic, with its dense woodland and aquatic landscapes, abundant wild resources, and missing indigenous species suitable for domestication, has not been well understood so far.
The research focused exclusively on the nature and extent of early farming in the northeast Baltic, the territory of what is now covered by Estonia and Latvia. The researchers found that agriculture arrived in Estonia and Latvia with the Corded Ware people, who were migrants from the eastern steppes. New radiocarbon dating of bone artifacts and processing residues found in the tombs of the Corded Ware culture suggests that the first domestic animals – cattle, goats, sheep, and probably pigs – arrived here between 2730-2490 BC.
The Corded Ware populations coexisted as a culturally distinct group for an extensive period of time in parallel with local hunter-fisher-gatherers, who showed no indication of the adoption of domesticates. The study concludes that farming and/or mixed economy-based groups resided together with the foragers for nearly a full millennium.
Hunter-gatherers in the 3rd millennium BC had a traditional lifestyle, including hunting animals, fishing, and consuming wild plants. Archaeological evidence from Latvia’s Abora I settlement supports this, while Estonian material confirms the complexity of the transition from hunter-gatherer to subsistence and livestock farming. An adult man found in Estonia’s Ardu burial site had a classical farmer-animal-herder diet in his youth, but later changed to more Baltic Sea fish and mammals, possibly a reversal from farming to hunting. The transition was more complicated than imagined and not a one-way development. The term „transition” is even misplaced in the northeast Baltic, where local hunter-gatherers maintained their forager lifestyles alongside farming pioneering societies. The two distinct societies coexisted without unequivocally adopting each other’s ways of life for over a millennium. Researchers hope to examine the contacts between these two parallel worlds, the dialogues between these societies, and their prolonged adaptation to each other, resulting in several success-failure episodes over millennia.