Researchers examined collagen from the man’s right femur and a rib, according to a study published in 2015 in Radiocarbon. The femur, which stops replacing collagen usually in early adulthood, suggested a diet primarily of fish, typical of Iron Gates foragers. The rib, however, indicated a farmer’s grain and meat-heavy diet. Collagen in a rib is continually replaced, so it suggests a person’s diet in their final years, says Clive Bonsall, lead author and an archaeologist at the University of Edinburgh.

Rather than feasting on, say, a plate of catfish in the years before his death, Burial 7/I might have spooned up calorie-rich porridge, a mix of cereals and goat’s milk. Here was the Neolithic transition embodied in one person.

Despite the dietary turn, the ways of his ancestors didn’t completely escape him: The man was laid to rest on his back, body straight, palms on his belly.

The conclusions in the Radiocarbon study are controversial. Originally excavated in the 1960s, Burial 7/I’s remains have been moved to different storage locations and sometimes mishandled, says Roksandic, who examined the skeleton in the late 1990s and is the paper’s co-author. Contamination is possible, she acknowledges. But Bonsall says bone collagen is relatively resistant to postmortem alteration. He hopes that future analysis of the skeleton’s DNA and teeth will answer questions raised by colleagues.

By the time the man died, about 8,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer culture was in its twilight at Iron Gates. “It takes not more than 300 years, and the whole area is full of farmers,” says Burger. “The hunter-gatherers have been replaced.”

Farmer Boom

Before the foragers were fully absorbed into the farming communities, however, Lepenski Vir appears to have been the region’s first multicultural nexus. “That might have contributed to the creativity we see at the site, and what makes the site so important,” says Bori.

Within hundreds of years of first contact in Iron Gates, complex agricultural societies sprang up in southeastern Europe, along with other advances, such as intricate metalwork.

Meanwhile, agriculture was also spreading outside southeastern Europe. By the middle of the sixth millennium B.C., some 400 years after Burial 7/I, farming was in central Europe and on the Iberian Peninsula, according to a paper published in Nature in February. By the end of that millennium, agriculture had reached Eastern Europe, which included farming settlements in the Ukraine of hundreds of people.

The swiftness of the agricultural revolution makes the interaction at Iron Gates all the more interesting. An ancient subsistence strategy was starting to vanish. A cultural watershed, perhaps the most significant in human history, was underway. Change was happening on an unprecedented level. But from the viewpoint of an individual living through it, the transition was pretty casual — manifesting, on occasion, as foragers and farmers talking shop above the thrum of a river.