In Western Europe, agriculture replaced gathering and hunting later than elsewhere.

2024-07-25 19:23:30

Since Asterix, we have known that a particularly resilient people live in the north-west tip of what is now France, in Brittany – at least that’s what René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo drew and wrote in Asterix comics. Now scientists are providing evidence that the comic world is closer to reality than we previously knew. They investigate the question of why modern people in Europe continued to live as hunters and gatherers until the sixth century BC, while Middle Eastern agriculture and animal breeding had already made life easier. Why don’t hunters and gatherers adopt these innovations that are thought to make life easier? But it is clear that it was not because Obelix was unable to leave the wild, as a Franco-French research team has now shown using bone analyses. Accordingly, cultural peculiarities have a specific effect.