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Scientists from the University of Bristol have uncovered, for the first time, definitive evidence that determines what types of food medieval peasants ate and how they managed their animals. Using chemical analysis of pottery fragments and animal bones found at one of England's earliest medieval villages, combined with detailed examination of a range of historical documents and accounts, the research has revealed the daily diet of peasants in the Middle Ages. The researchers were also able to look at butchery techniques, methods of food preparation and rubbish disposal at the settlement... The OGU team used the technique of organic residue...

* China is grappling with a widespread African swine flu (ASF) epidemic, a disease fatal to pigs but harmless to humans. * ASF's effects on pigs are gruesome. Symptoms include diarrhea, depression, and miscarriages. * The government is urging farmers to cull infected pigs to prevent the spread of the disease, which is in turn dramatically decreasing the country's pork production. * Dutch bank Rabobank estimates that the country will kill 150 million to 200 million pigs — or one third of the country's supply — this year. * China is the world's largest pork producer and consumer. The steep...

The genes which protect around four million people in the UK from obesity have been discovered following a major research project. Scientists at Cambridge University say drugs to keep people slim are now a possibility after they identified the handful of genetic factors that prevent overeating. Medics have known for several years that genes can influence a person’s weight. However, the new study is significant because it reveals in granular detail which variants suppress or encourage appetite. The research team analysed the genetic profiles of more than half a million volunteers from the UK Biobank. They found that around six...

It's an age often described as one of social unrest, leading to an "apocalyptic nightmare of violence, warfare, and cannibalism." A Neolithic mass grave in Germany shows the idea may not be far wrong... Christian Meyer and his fellow researchers now believe they have enough evidence to explain "conclusively" what happened at the site of a mass grave in Schöneck-Kilianstädten, near Frankfurt, around 5207-4849 BC. If they are right, their findings may help our understanding of early social unrest among the first Central European farmers of the Neolithic era... The site at Schöneck-Kilianstädten reveals a "new violence-related pattern: the intentional...

The Italian peninsula seems to shimmer and shine with history and art, from graceful, full bodied nymphs set against make-believe cypresses and oaks, to crumbling mounds of marble on which lie the almost breathable, almost visible words of lives, songs, and politics past. But before all the art, before the reawakening, before the soldiers cloaked in scarlet and gold, and the senators in their Senate hall...before the reign of emperors and tyrants was a race of peoples whose culture lived on in the greatest empire the world has ever known. They were the Etruscans, a mysterious tribe that scattered throughout...

The reason that humans shifted away from hunting and gathering, and to agriculture -- a much more labor-intensive process -- has always been a riddle. It is only more confusing because the shift happened independently in about a dozen areas across the globe... One theory posits that in times of plenty there may have been more time to start dabbling in the domestication of plants like squash and sunflowers, the latter of which were domesticated by the native peoples of Tennessee around 4,500 years ago. The other theory argues that domestication may have happened out of need to supplement diets...

The age of the grains was ascertained using radiocarbon dating. Based on the results, the grains originated in the period of the Pitted Ware culture, thus being approximately 4,300-5,300 years old. In addition to the cereal grains, the plant remnants found in the sites included hazelnut shells, apple seeds, tuberous roots of lesser celandine and rose hips. The study suggests that small-scale farming was adopted by the Pitted Ware Culture by learning the trade from farmers of the Funnel Beaker Culture, the latter having expanded from continental Europe to Scandinavia. Other archaeological artefacts are also evidence of close contact between...

Farming was developed approximately 11,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, a region that includes present-day Iraq, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan as well as the fringes of southern Anatolia and western Iran. By about 8,300 BCE it had spread to central Anatolia, in present-day Turkey. These early Anatolian farmers subsequently migrated throughout Europe, bringing this new subsistence strategy and their genes. Today, the single largest component of the ancestry of modern-day Europeans comes from these Anatolian farmers. It has long been debated, however, whether farming was brought to Anatolia similarly by a group of migrating farmers from the...

Diet-induced changes in the human bite resulted in new sounds such as "f" in languages all over the world, a study by an international team led by researchers at the University of Zurich has shown. The findings contradict the theory that the range of human sounds has remained fixed throughout human history. Human speech is incredibly diverse, ranging from ubiquitous sounds like "m" and "a" to the rare click consonants in some languages of Southern Africa. This range of sounds is generally thought to have been established with the emergence of the Homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago. A study...

eil deGrIf you had told this editor she would spend two days in a row writing about cows at Twitchy, she’d have laughed and asked you to stop eating paint chips … and yet here we are. Day two covering cows, all because PETA decided it was SEXIST to eat cheese. Oh you didn’t see that one? Promise we’re not making that up, see for yourself. And now THIS: Neil deGrasse Tyson ✔@neiltyson A cow is a biological machine invented by humans to turn grass into steak. 6:38 PM - Aug 7, 2017 2,914 Replies 19,215 Retweets 62,451 likes (snip)...

Ancient DNA Reveals Lack Of Continuity Between Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers And Contemporary Scandinavians September 24, 2009. Summary The driving force behind the transition from a foraging to a farming lifestyle in prehistoric Europe (Neolithization) has been debated for more than a century [1] , [2] and [3] . Of particular interest is whether population replacement or cultural exchange was responsible [3] , [4] and [5] . Scandinavia holds a unique place in this debate, for it maintained one of the last major hunter-gatherer complexes in Neolithic Europe, the Pitted Ware culture [6]. Intriguingly, these late hunter-gatherers existed in parallel to early...

The Neolithic is a key period in the history of the European settlement. Although archaeological and present-day genetic data suggest several hypotheses regarding the human migration patterns at this period, validation of these hypotheses with the use of ancient genetic data has been limited. In this context, we studied DNA extracted from 53 individuals buried in a necropolis used by a French local community 5,000 y ago. The relatively good DNA preservation of the samples allowed us to obtain autosomal, Y-chromosomal, and/or mtDNA data for 29 of the 53 samples studied. From these datasets, we established close parental relationships within...

New research has revealed that agriculture came to Europe amid a wave of immigration from the Middle East during the Neolithic period. The newcomers won out over the locals because of their sophisticated culture, mastery of agriculture -- and their miracle food, milk. Wedged in between dump trucks and excavators, archeologist Birgit Srock is drawing the outline of a 7,200-year-old posthole. A concrete mixing plant is visible on the horizon. She is here because, during the construction of a high-speed rail line between the German cities of Nuremberg and Berlin, workers happened upon a large Neolithic settlement in the Upper...

The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. Beer required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture, about 9,000 years ago. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early humans were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That's how villages were formed. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer and vice versa. These two were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of...

Our love affair with chocolate is much older than we thought, and newly discovered traces of cocoa on ancient pots suggest it started in the rainforests of what is now Ecuador some 5300 years ago. That’s nearly 1500 years older than earlier evidence, and it shifts the nexus of cocoa production from Central America to the upper Amazon. “This is an incredibly strong demonstration,” says Rosemary Joyce, an archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new study. “It puts to rest any lingering claims that the use of [cocoa] pods … was an invention...

Traces of cocoa dating back 5300 years have been found in ancient pots in the Ecuadorian Amazon. This is the oldest proof of cocoa use ever found. It predates the domestication of cocoa by the Olmec and the Maya in Central America by some 1500 years. This evidence was collected in the southern Ecuadorian Amazon, at the Santa Ana La Florida (SALF) archaeological site near Palanda, discovered 16 years ago by the archaeologist Francisco Valdez and his Franco-Ecuadorian team (IRD/INPC) (2). The Mayo Chinchipe, the oldest known Amerindian civilization in the upper Amazon, had consumed cocoa almost continuously from at...

Using ancient proteins and DNA recovered from tiny pieces of animal bone, archaeologists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography (IAET) at the Russian Academy of Sciences-Siberia have discovered evidence that domestic animals -cattle, sheep, and goat - made their way into the high mountain corridors of southern Kyrgyzstan more than four millennia ago... in many of the most important channels of the Silk Road itself, including Kyrgyzstan's Alay Valley (a large mountain corridor linking northwest China with the oases cities of Bukhara and Samarkand), very little is...

Those pale button mushrooms in your supermarket hardly do justice to the diversity of fungi. The world hosts an incredible array of these important organisms—and mycologists are discovering more than 2000 new species a year, including ones that live on driftwood, bat guano, and even an oil painting. That’s according to a new report, titled State of the World’s Fungi, from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, a botanical research institution in Richmond, U.K. The lavishly illustrated overview covers the usefulness of fungi (think beer, bread, and penicillin, for starters) as well as the serious threats that some fungi pose to...

Feb. 2, 2005 — You wouldn't know it by current world events, but humans actually evolved to be peaceful, cooperative and social animals. In a new book, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis goes against the prevailing view and argues that primates, including early humans, evolved not as hunters but as prey of many predators, including wild dogs and cats, hyenas, eagles and crocodiles. Despite popular theories posed in research papers and popular literature, early man was not an aggressive killer, argues Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences. Sussman's book, "Man the Hunted:...

Some 3,500 years ago, there was already a brisk trade in fish on the shores of the southeastern Mediterranean Sea. This conclusion follows from the analysis of 100 fish teeth that were found at various archeological sites in what is now Israel. The saltwater fish from which these teeth originated is the gilthead sea bream, which is also known as the dorade. It was caught in the Bardawil lagoon on the northern Sinai coast and then transported from Egypt to sites in the southern Levant. This fish transport persisted for about 2,000 years, beginning in the Late Bronze Age and...