Major trends in cattle and sheep husbandry drove the economy of Medieval England

Major dataset adjusts the timeline of shifting animal production practices

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

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A pile of animal bones.

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Credit: Matilda Holmes, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

As populations expanded in Medieval England, key changes occurred in the uses of cattle and sheep to produce food and materials, according to a study published September 2, 2026 in the open access journal PLOS One by Matilda Holmes of the University of Leicester, UK, David Orton of the University of York, UK, and colleagues.

Medieval England experienced major changes in population sizes and trade networks, requiring changes in the ways that animals were used for meat, milk and arable production. Historically, the timing of these changes has been poorly understood. In this study, Holmes and colleagues investigate the changing animal economy using a large dataset provided by the Feeding Anglo-Saxon England project, including information from 460 sites across England from CE 400-1400.

Early on during this time range, cattle were far more abundant than sheep, but sheep began to increase during the 7th Century, originating with monastic farms with an emphasis on wool production. By the end of the time range, the importance of wool in the economy was firmly established. Between the 10th and 12th Centuries, older male cattle were progressively more important to the economy and, when combined with increasing deformations to their lower limb bones, is consistent with use as draught animals; this practice wanes afterward, likely due to the increased demand for meat as evidenced by earlier culling of cattle, and to the growing role of draught horses.

These data confirm previously reported trends and clarify the timing of certain events, such as the earlier rise of sheep farming and the fluctuating use of draught cattle. The authors note that many areas of uncertainty remain to be examined by future study, including assessments of the significant variation between archaeological sites and standardizing of methods for determining the sex of ancient domesticated animals.

The authors add: “The use of an aoristic method allowed us to look at the changing use of cattle and sheep over a continuous chronology, rather than relying on artificial periods such as ‘Saxon’ or ‘high medieval’. This way we could see more clearly the shift in emphasis towards sheep husbandry in the seventh century and the peak in draught cattle use for arable production in the tenth to twelfth centuries, followed by a change in market forces requiring more meat and milk as the population grew in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.”

“This was a great project to work on; it followed on from the groundbreaking research produced of the Feeding Medieval England project by using the data from that project to develop a new method of analysis with David Orton. This method will allow a better understanding of changes in the animal economy over time, and there is no reason why the method cannot be expanded to include other types of archaeological data.”

“The increase in older cattle in the tenth to twelfth centuries was unexpected and implies a real change in the working practices of farmers in that period. It would have relied upon closer working relationships between people and cattle, and it is likely that they were valued members of the workforce. As far as sheep are concerned, the new monastic communities of the late seventh century appear to have instigated the increase in wool production that underpinned the English economy well into the sixteenth century.”

The freely available article in PLOS One: https://plos.io/4yiSowj

Author interview: https://plos.io/4gvrwSm

Citation: Holmes M, Orton D, Hamerow H, Thomas R (2026) Meat, milk, wool and grain: The animal economy of medieval England (CE 400 to 1400). PLoS One 21(9): e0355965. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0355965

Hidden DNA in medieval gospels reveal history of deadly livestock virus

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University College Dublin

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Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.10.5, fol. 62v, the Epistles of St Paul, Ireland/Northumbria, 700–800 CE. Reproduced with kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge

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Credit: Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.10.5, fol. 62v, the Epistles of St Paul, Ireland/Northumbria, 700–800 CE. Reproduced with kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge

Some of Europe’s most well-known historic manuscripts, including the York Gospels, have proven to be biological time capsules for uncovering the 3,500-year history of the sheeppox virus (SPPV).

By extracting DNA from the animal skins used to make the documents’ centuries-old parchment, an international team of geneticists, historians, virologists, protein chemists and conservators, led by University College Dublin have provided the first genetic evidence of how this devastating disease plagued European farmers’ herds long before the modern era.

A highly contagious disease, sheeppox spreads rapidly and can affect large portions of a flock in a short time.

The disease is particularly dangerous because it can cause very high mortality rates, especially in young animals, and dramatically reduces productivity by damaging wool, meat and milk yields.

“The recording of ancient DNA of pathogens has completely changed our understanding of infectious disease in the past, and here we show that parchment can also preserve animal pathogen DNA. It is possible that archives and libraries around the world also contain the genetic traces of disease outbreaks in animals in the past,” said Louis L’Hôte, PhD candidate at UCD and lead author of the study. 

“These genomes help us understand how these pathogens evolved and how they impacted past societies - such as sheeppox virus, which we show has been affecting Eurasian sheep herds for at least three and a half millennia.”

In a new study, published in Science Advances, reconstructing over 3,500 years of sheeppox virus evolution, researchers identified traces of the disease in medieval manuscripts, including several of significant historical importance.

Among the works analysed was the 1,000-year-old York Gospels, one of the finest illuminated manuscripts surviving from the early Anglo-Saxon period, and earlier manuscripts such as the Corpus Glossary of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, one of the earliest English dictionaries, and other medieval codices from across Britain and continental Europe.

In several cases, multiple pages from the same manuscript were found to contain sheeppox virus DNA, indicating that infected animals were used in their production.

Because the parchment used in the making of these documents was made from the hides of livestock like sheep, goats, and cattle it serves as a unique bio-archive, preserving the health of the animal at the time of its death centuries ago.

One of the most unexpected findings from the new study was the detection of sheeppox virus on parchment made from calfskin and goatskin, suggesting either rare examples of cross-species infections or that there was contamination during the parchment-making process.

“Parchment making has been considered a vanishing craft, but we are beginning to understand just how much of the past it has retained. This project shows that parchments not only preserve our cultural history for hundreds of years, but also the landscape of disease in our livestock  in the medieval period,” said Dr Kevin G. Daly, Associate Professor at UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science and the study’s supervising author.

“This kind of exciting, surprising discovery is only possible when researchers from a range of disciplines come together to share their expertise and data - a generosity and trust that collaborative science depends on.”

By combining the study of manuscripts with even older samples from Bronze Age sheep teeth, the study reveals that Sheeppox has threatened livestock for over 3,700 years.

Unlike other skeletal material, teeth can preserve genetic evidence of infection over thousands of years, providing a valuable record of past outbreaks.

The research team identified the earliest known detections of sheeppox virus from dental remains recovered from ancient pastoralist settlements in the Eurasian steppe.

By comparing these ancient sequences with modern ones, they  estimate that the major lineages of capripoxviruses (sheeppox virus, goatpox virus, and lumpy skin disease virus) diverged between 11,500 and 3,700 years ago. 

This timeline aligns with the rise of animal domestication and the major translocation of sheep from the steppe into Europe.

“People around the world are still fighting against this pathogen - there is currently an outbreak of sheeppox in Greece, causing much economic damage,” said Louis L’Hôte.

“Ancient genomes can help us understand how these pathogens affecting us today evolved. We find that unlike the smallpox virus, the sheeppox virus genome was very stable over the last few millennia.”

Adding: “This might mean that genetic changes before this point were very important to how the sheeppox virus evolved to infect its host, which may help us fight the pathogen in the future.”

This study was funded by Taighde Éireann-Research Ireland and the European Research Council, and led by researchers at UCD in collaboration with over 30 Irish and international institutions including Trinity College Dublin, the Helmholtz Institute for One Health, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, the University of Leicester, Cambridge University, and the University of Copenhagen.

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.64898/2026.02.23.707469 

Wrapping grains in leaves: from tomb to table

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Science China Press

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The East I chamber of the Wuwangdun Tomb (A) and the plant bundle (B), note the floating plant bundles in the water surface. Phytoliths (C 1-9 and 11, 12) and pollen (C 12) from the plant bundles indicating Poaceae plant remains dominated the plant bundle. Plant seeds (D) remains illustrated the full husk condition. Specific details of phytoliths, pollen and seeds can be found in the supplementary of the article.

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Credit: Yong Ge

The research team, led by Dr. Yong Ge from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Dr. Fan Yang from the National Center for Archaeology, conducted systematic archaeobotanical analyses of the plant bundles unearthed from the Wuwangdun Tomb. Their findings suggest that these plant bundles may represent a possible precursor of zongzi, the well-known traditional Chinese food.

The study revealed that the plant bundles were wrapped in oak (Quercus dentata) leaves, stuffed with rice (Oryza sativa), millets (Panicum miliaceum and Setaria italica), and other cereals (species not yet determined), and bound with cordage made from grass leaves (subfamilies Panicoideae and Arundinoideae). Structurally, they are identical to modern zongzi, which are typically wrapped in bamboo (Indocalamus tessellatus) leaves, filled with glutinous rice, and tied with cordage made from Chinese iris (Iris lactea) leaves. Notably, however, the grains found in the archaeological bundles were unhulled and the bundles still contained inflorescence remains, suggesting that these bundles were not intended for consumption but rather served as funerary offerings—a key distinction from their modern counterparts.

Dated to approximately 2,200 years ago, these plant bundles fall within both the historical period of the Chu State and the same geographic region associated with the legend of Qu Yuan. According to the legend, people threw zongzi into the Miluo River—where Qu Yuan drowned himself—to prevent fish from consuming his body. This legend not only reflects the use of zongzi in commemorating the dead but also aligns remarkably well with the funerary context of the archaeological discovery.

Prior to this study, the only unequivocal archaeological evidence of typical zongzi came from a tomb dating back about 1,000 years to the Song Dynasty, with specimens nearly the same to modern ones. The Wuwangdun finds, could potentially extend the known history of zongzi by another millennium. Over this 1,000-year timespan, the structure and function of zongzi appear to have undergone a significant transformation—from ritual offerings to everyday food. In modern times, zongzi has diversified greatly: wrapping materials vary according to local resources, ranging from banana leaves to bamboo tubes, and fillings have expanded to include everything from sago to seafood. While cultural innovation has never ceased, the deep-rooted origin of this tradition may now be finally elucidated.

This discovery not only enhances our understanding of ancient funerary rituals but also bridges historical records with archaeological evidence, offering tangible proof of China's long and splendid cultural traditions.

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Journal

National Science Review

DOI

10.1093/nsr/nwag504 

 

Human-driven fires have shaped the Amazonian forest for over 10,000 years

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Pensoft Publishers

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a. Map of Amazonian sites with 1329 14C AMS dated charcoal fragments or burned archaeological material used in the summed probability analyses. Sites are color coded by geographic region: central (CA), eastern (EA), northwestern (WAN), southwestern (WAS), southern (SA) Amazonia, and Guiana Shield (GS). Symbols denote new 14C dates from this study (squares inside dashed boxes), and previously published 14C dates from soil charcoal surveys (circles) and archaeological surveys (triangles). Symbol size indicates the number of 14C dates at each site. Tree cover is shown as the fractional tree cover in proportions ranging from 0 to 1 for the year 2020 (Liu et al. 2024); b. Frequencies of 14C dates over the last 12,000 years for this study (left), previously published dated soil charcoal fragments from paleoecological surveys (center), or previously published dated material from archaeological sites (right).

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Credit: McMichael et al., 2026

New research is dismantling the long-standing myth of the "pristine" Amazon. A reconstruction of 10,000 years of Amazonian pyrogeography, based on 1,361 radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dates across 303 sites - including soil charcoal and burned archaeological material - shows that fire in the rainforest is almost exclusively a human-driven phenomenon, not a natural one. Over the last two millennia, human-ignited fire has driven vegetation change on a scale comparable to major climatic shifts, such as deglaciation or the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna. The research has been published in the open-access, peer-reviewed Frontiers of Biogeography journal.

The human spark

Amazonian fires rarely, if ever, ignite without human input. In the pre-human evolutionary history of these wet forests, fire was an exceptional rarity.

Glacial-aged paleoecological reconstructions from sites like the Hill of Six Lakes in Brazil and the Serra Sul dos Carajás reveal that charcoal was either entirely absent or present in only minuscule amounts before human arrival. Even more striking, the Campo Libre sediment core on the Andean slopes of Ecuador showed a total absence of fire for 30,000 years, ending only when humans appeared on the landscape around 4,500 years ago.

In their paper, the researchers, describes the arrival of humans as the introduction of fire to a "naïve landscape." Because Amazonian plants are evolutionarily fire-sensitive, the introduction of regular burning by a fire-using species fundamentally altered a system that had been stable since the late Pleistocene.

The ignition timeline

By compiling and analysing 1,361 (¹⁴C) radiocarbon-dated charcoal fragments and archaeological materials, researchers mapped a history of human-driven fire across Amazonia that unfolded over three phases of the Holocene. 

Between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago, fires were highly restricted, occurring primarily within the basin's peripheral areas and along the main channel of the Amazon River. This localised footprint shifted dramatically between 6,000 and 4,000 years ago, as the geographic spread of fire and occupation sites accelerated sharply across most regions - a development that coincided with the onset of early maize cultivation in northwestern and southwestern Amazonia. 

Finally, between 3,000 and 2,000 years ago, fire reached the deep interior of the basin: though central Amazonia had remained a relatively fire-free refuge for thousands of years while the periphery burned, it was ultimately transformed as expanding human influence and fire-use reached the very heart of the forest. 

The dying fire

This human-driven fire history is marked by a dramatic, two-phase decline over the last 700 years. 

First, an initial decrease in fire frequency 600 to 700 years ago which supports the "early abandonment" of lands several centuries before European arrival. Physical evidence from lake sediments shows a significant "pollen surge" during this window, signaling massive reforestation and a major pre-Columbian shift in land use or site abandonment.

The second and larger decline followed the "Great Dying" after A.D. 1541, when disease, warfare, and enslavement killed an estimated 90-95% of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. As ignitions vanished with the population, the forest entered a second, more extensive phase of recovery. 

The ecological legacy of 10 000 years of fire

These changing fire patterns - particularly over the last two millennia - led to an increase in human-caused fires, which spread across all regions and accelerated changes in vegetation. Ultimately, this left a profound ecological imprint that has strongly shaped today’s plant communities by selectively favoring fire-tolerant species, such as palms, over fire-sensitive vegetation.

The restructuring of Amazonian pyrogeography over the last 2,000 years has likely played a large role in shaping modern forests. The intensification of fire during this period induced rates and magnitudes of vegetation change that are comparable to major climatic shifts. The impact was subtle,  favoring species that were already there but showed the most fire tolerance, such as some palms, but this pressure has undoubtedly changed the configuration of Amazonian plant communities.

- the team explained in their research article

Citation:

McMichael CNH, Heijink BM, Witteveen NH, Zwarts A, Bush MB (2026) The pyrogeography of Amazonia: a Holocene perspective. Frontiers of Biogeography 19: e169863. https://doi.org/10.21425/fob.19.169863

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Cacao may have been consumed at feasts in the 12th century by Mississippian people in the city of Etowah

 The discovery that people living at the great Ancestral Pueblo site of Chaco Canyon consumed cacao changed our understanding of the history of chocolate by demonstrating that networks moving cacao reached beyond Central and South America north at least into the American Southwest. Until now, clear evidence that people of the equally impressive Mississippian civilization east of the Mississippi River consumed chocolate has been lacking. 

This study presents the first evidence that cacao consumption was part of the Mississippian world at roughly the same time as it appeared at Chaco. We present evidence that samples from two Etowah Complicated Stamped pottery sherds recovered from 11th to 12th century contexts at the Etowah site in the modern state of Georgia contained highly fragmented ancient Theobroma cacao DNA. 

Etowah is an Indigenous city located in the modern US state of Georgia that, at its peak in the 14th century, was one of the most important centers in the Mississippian world. Two centuries before that peak, Etowah’s inhabitants began construction of the site’s first earthen platform mound, excavating earth and filling the borrow pits with feasting remains. 

The evidence for cacao consumption comes from these early feasting contexts. This discovery at Etowah asks us to broaden our understanding of the networks that distributed cacao throughout the Americas before European colonization.

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