Britain’s oldest recipe sounds as awful as more recent fare.
Roman antibiotics
Also from Tangled Bank comes news of a study looking at the evidence for various infectious diseases from the skeletons of people killed at Herculaneum by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. ((That’s the one that also destroyed Pompeii, though in a somewhat different way.)) Among the diseases was brucellosis, evidence for which was also gleaned from the carbonized cheeses found at the site. Herculaneum was apparently famous for its goat cheeses, which seem, however, to have been badly infected. Which is all amazing enough. But one of the commenters on the article points to another paper which adds a twist to the story.
It seems the inhabitants of Herculaneum, despite their brucellosis and tuberculosis, were relatively free of non-specific bone inflammations. And that may be because:
Pomegranates and figs, consumed by the population, were mainly dried and invariably contaminated by Streptomyces, a bacterium that produces natural tetracycline, an antibiotic.
Is there similar evidence from contemporary populations of the protection conferred by natural antibiotics?
Bees older than agriculture?
A press release from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem says that scientists have uncovered the world’s oldest known bee hives, which date back around 11,500 years, at Tel Rehov in the Beath Shean valley.
The beehives there were found in the center of a built-up area there that has been excavated since 1997 by Dr. Nava Panitz-Cohen of the Hebrew University. Three rows of beehives were found in the apiary, containing more than 30 hives. It is estimated, however, based on excavations to date, that in all the total area would have contained some 100 beehives.
Beehives of very similar construction are apparently still in use in Arab villages in Israel and elsewhere around the Mediterranean.
Pigs didn’t fly, walked to Europe
We know that agriculture began in the Fertile Crescent about 12,000 years ago and then spread across Europe between 9,000 and 6,000 years ago. But what exactly was it that spread? Was it the idea of agriculture or agriculturalists themselves? Just-published work on the DNA of modern and ancient pigs says it was probably a bit of both. It seems that Middle Eastern farmers migrated into Europe carrying their agrobiodiversity with them — crops and domesticated animals. But, as far as the pig was concerned anyway, they soon adopted a locally domesticated version in preference to the Middle Eastern type they had brought along.
Mayan manioc
Signs of a cassava field have been found under the several metres of ash that buried a Mayan village when a nearby volcano erupted in about 590 AD. Archaeologists excavating Ceren in San Salvador — dubbed the American Pompeii — found tubular hollows in the solidified ash, formed when the tubers decomposed. This is apparently the earliest evidence of cassava cultivation.