Human-beaver cohabitation in the Early and Mid-Holocene of Northern Europe: Re-visiting Mesolithic material culture and ecology through a multispecies lens

Abstract

The Eurasian beaver ( Castor fiber) was an important member of Early and Mid-Holocene landscapes and animal communities in Northern Europe. Previous zooarchaeological research has established the alimentary roles of beavers for Mesolithic societies and their importance for fur procurement. In this paper, we develop an integrated biocultural approach to human-beaver interactions, examining the position of humans and beavers in Mesolithic and Early Neolithic multispecies systems. We contextualize beaver landscape agency in hydroactive environments with human behaviour, synthesizing currently available data on mammalian assemblages, ichtyofauna and beaver-related material culture across Northern Europe. This cross-cultural, diachronic analysis reveals previously overlooked facilitations of human behaviour by beaver practices and ecological legacies. We show that long-term trajectories of human-beaver cohabitation differed between northern European regions. While in Southern Scandinavia, human-beaver intersections witnessed major re-organizations during the Mid-Holocene, beavers retained a key role for human societies across Northeastern Europe throughout much of the Holocene and played an important part at the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in the Dutch wetlands. Divergent pathways are also evidenced by Mesolithic beaver-related material culture, highlighting the cultural keystone status of Castor fiber in higher latitude European landscapes. We argue that this keystone status is grounded in the supply of human hunting, fishing, and gathering affordances by the animals, pointing to the generative commensality between Mesolithic foragers and their beaver neighbours. Taken together, our findings demonstrate the importance of the beaver in the making of Early and Mid-Holocene forager societies in Northern Europe and illustrate the fruitfulness of deploying an integrated multispecies approach.

The human side of biodiversity: coevolution of the human niche, palaeo-synanthropy and ecosystem complexity in the deep human past

“…These practices can provide novel or added incentives to further enable and/or tolerate the respective palaeo-synanthropes, and may so render them central to human landscape presence and livelihood, entrenching the associated coevolutionary dynamics. This dynamic may be complicated by the possible development of hunting restraints, as attuning to these animals may foster care and respect in the face of significant others [188,208,247,248]. Such cases are more difficult to trace as their archaeological signature is often ambivalent.…”

“…Notable also are the implicit curational practices tied to integrated foraging strategies such as 'garden hunting' [179,180], which have a deep history in the Americas; here, animals are ecologically encouraged by human landscape agency, in turn facilitating their hunting or trapping. Multispecies affordances [181] emerging from the dynamics of human niche construction and adaptation can consequently become significant biodiversity catalysts within early human-environment systems. Given that hunting itself represents an important form of niche construction [141,182,183], the manipulation of dietary landscapes through human predation and its aftereffects lends itself to similar analyses, especially when Pleistocene humans acquire apex predator status [184].…”

A Special Relationship—Aspects of Human–Animal Interaction in Birds of Prey, Brown Bears, Beavers, and Elk in Prehistoric Europe

“…Animal remains from Mesolithic and early Neolithic sites in northern Sweden show beaver next to elk as the most hunted mammalian species (Figures 2 and 3; cf. [65,120]), and we can be sure that the animal was hunted for its meat, fur, and maybe its castoreum. Beaver meat is a high-quality protein source due to its well-balanced essential amino acid composition [121], and it is also a valuable fat resource, since a beaver carcass contains 15% fat [122]-a value significantly higher than in all other non-marine species in the region.…”

“…For people with forager lifeways, cohabitation with beavers improved their habitat and their living conditions. In many cases, it was the beavers' agency that created suitable settlement places and pathways in the forested landscape [120]. In North America, this resulted in a widespread aversion to beaver hunting and in a role and standing of beavers in a belief system quite similar to the status of cattle in India today [144].…”

“…The more common and widespread beavers were in a region, the clearer and more natural the importance of the 'landscape gardener' beaver seems to have been to hunter-gatherer-fisher communities. Thus, following Hussain and Brusgaard [120], beavers were an ecological keystone species for humans with a 'Mesolithic' lifestyle, but in the course of the very long joint history of human-beaver co-habitation, the beaver also became a 'cultural keystone species'. The extremely careful handling of tools made from beaver lower jaws by Mesolithic humans [145] could also be an indication of the ideal significance that even tools made from beaver bones had.…”