This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A new study published in Science Advances reveals how Bronze Age communities in Central Europe adapted to changing environmental and social conditions by adopting broomcorn millet, a fast-growing, climate-resilient crop. Using multiple lines of bioarchaeological evidence, researchers found that millet was already being consumed in southeastern Poland around 1590 BCE—more than a century earlier than previously estimated—and was initially adopted gradually by a small number of individuals.
The findings suggest that millet cultivation enabled communities to expand agriculture into previously marginal areas with poorer soils and drier conditions, reshaping how people used the landscape and strengthening food security. A multiproxy approach combining carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and strontium isotope analyses from human remains with radiocarbon dating, paleoproteomic sex determination, archaeological and anthropological records, and previously published genetic data was applied. Researchers established whether the populations that began consuming millet were local, reconstructed the life stages at which this crop became available to individuals, and identified the cultural profiles and biological sex of millet consumers.
Each proxy answers a different question: Carbon and nitrogen isotopes reflect a person's average diet over years, while oxygen and strontium isotopes reflect the geology and hydrology of the area where their food came from during tissue formation. Dietary changes both between communities and within individual lifetimes were identified by analyzing tissues formed at different life stages, showing that several early millet consumers had grown up on diets dominated by traditional crops such as wheat and barley before incorporating millet later in life. This enabled the team to pinpoint the period at which the new crop entered existing foodways and gain the first precise insights into this gradual process across Bronze Age communities of Central Europe.
Millet, however, was eaten by only part of the population. "And the different strontium isotope compositions in the skeletal tissues of millet consumers versus non-consumers likely point to the use of distinct geological zones within the same territory, rather than to different places of birth," explains co-author Snoeck from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). Because millet grows rapidly and tolerates relatively dry conditions and poor soils, its cultivation allowed Bronze Age communities to exploit areas that were less suitable for traditional cereals.
"In response to increasing food demand and potential changes in climatic conditions, Bronze Age societies adopted a new, resilient staple crop to optimize the use of previously marginal parts of their environment and improve food security," explains lead author Margaux Depaermentier from Vilnius University (Lithuania). Both consumers and non-consumers shared broadly similar archaeological and genetic backgrounds, and the earliest consumers exhibited strontium isotope signatures compatible with local origins. The data therefore provide little support for an explanation based on simple population migration.
Instead, this study suggests that the cultivation of this new crop was associated with changes in how communities used the landscape, enabling cultivation to expand into a broader range of environmental settings. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly. The findings also highlight that "millet consumption was not restricted to a particular sex, age group or social status," says co-author Makarowicz from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland).
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