Around 5,000 years ago, the people burying their dead in communal cemeteries along the western shore of Lake Turkana already had cattle. They had sheep and goats too. By the standard narrative of the Neolithic transition, that should have been a turning point: the moment when a population stops depending on what the landscape provides and starts managing its own food supply. The hunting, the fishing, the foraging — these should have become supplemental at first, then marginal, then gone.
They weren’t gone. Not for a very long time.
A new study led by geochemist Kendra Chritz at the University of British Columbia, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,1 draws on isotopic data from 111 individuals spanning roughly 9,500 to 230 years before the present across Kenya and Tanzania. The researchers analyzed stable isotopes preserved in tooth enamel and bone collagen — chemical signatures that accumulate as teeth form and that record, with surprising specificity, what a person was actually eating. They supplemented this skeletal evidence with leaf wax isotopes and lipid residues extracted from ancient ceramic cooking pots.
The picture that emerged doesn’t fit the transition model neatly. Eastern Africa’s earliest pastoralists weren’t eating like pastoralists.
