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Domesticated pigs were present in northern Germany around 4600 B.C., some 500 years earlier than previously thought, new fossil and DNA evidence reveals. The finding, detailed in this week's issue of the journal Nature Communications, is significant because the people living in that part of Europe at the time were Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who primarily lived off of wild game. These people, known as the Ertebølle culture, kept domesticated dogs as hunting companions, but it would be several hundreds of years before they began raising animals and crops for food. One hypothesis for how the Ertebølle came to acquire the pigs...

Chemical analyses of teeth from 41 human skeletons excavated on Easter Island revealed the inhabitants ate rats rather than seafood; Here, Moai statues at Ahu Tongariki on the south-eastern part of the island, where 26 of the skeletons were found. The inhabitants of Easter Island consumed a diet that was lacking in seafood and was, literally, quite ratty. The island, also called Rapa Nui, first settled around A.D. 1200, is famous for its more than 1,000 "walking" Moai statues, most of which originally faced inland. Located in the South Pacific, Rapa Nui is the most isolated inhabited landmass on Earth;...

...The results published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) also suggest tooth decay was more prevalent in earlier societies than previously estimated. The results also suggest that the hunter-gatherer society studied may have developed a more sedentary lifestyle than previously thought, relying on nut harvesting. Dental disease was thought to have originated with the introduction of farming and changes in food processing around 10,000 years ago. A greater reliance on cultivated plant foods, rich in fermentable carbohydrates, resulted in rotting teeth.High level of decayNow, the analysis of 52 adult dentitions from hunter-gatherer skeletons found in a cave...

WASHINGTON - Dairy farming became widespread in Britain as early as the new stone age — around 4,000 B.C. — a team of researchers at England's University of Bristol reports.Mark Copley, an archaeological chemist, said evidence of milk fats was found on broken pieces of pottery at several ancient sites in southern England.Using new methods of analysis, scientists have learned to differentiate between ancient residue from milk fat and other fats and oils in recent years, Copley and his team report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.Their findings provide evidence of "the earliest farming communities in Britain, though...

Monday, 27 January, 2003, 22:36 GMTPrehistoric Britons' taste for milk The oldest direct evidence for the existence of dairy farming has been discovered in the UK. It is based on a chemical analysis of milk fat deposits left on pottery fragments found to be 6,500 years old. It is clear that by the time farming reached Britain, milk was already an important commodity Although the practice of milking animals for food was undoubtedly developed elsewhere and then introduced into Britain, this is the earliest time for which researchers have been able to show definitively that it was going on. According...

University of Cincinnati archaeologists are turning up discoveries in the famed Roman city of Pompeii that are wiping out the historic perceptions of how the Romans dined, with the rich enjoying delicacies such as flamingos and the poor scrounging for soup or gruel. Steven Ellis, a University of Cincinnati associate professor of classics, will present these discoveries on Jan. 4, at the joint annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and American Philological Association (APA) in Chicago. UC teams of archaeologists have spent more than a decade at two city blocks within a non-elite district in the Roman...

Shelburne Farms' clothbound cheddar has a bright yellow color because it's made from the milk of cows that graze on grasses high in beta-carotene. The news from Kraft last week that the company is ditching two artificial dyes in some versions of its macaroni and cheese products left me with a question.Why did we start coloring cheeses orange to begin with? Turns out there's a curious history here.In theory, cheese should be whitish — similar to the color of milk, right?Well, not really. Centuries ago in England, lots of cheeses had a natural yellowish-orange pigment. The cheese came from the...

A university academic says she believes she has uncovered the first English recipes for iced chocolate desserts. Dr Kate Loveman, from the University of Leicester, said she found the recipes in manuscripts which belonged to the Earl of Sandwich in 1668. At the time, the chocolate treats came with a health warning for damaging the stomach, heart and lungs. The research also shows some of the regular themes in chocolate advertising across the centuries. Dr Loveman, a senior lecturer in 17th and 18th Century English literature, said she was looking through a Samuel Pepys journal when she came across a...

Sunken treasure with a distinctly fishy flavor has been recovered from a huge Roman shipwreck in the Mediterranean. The 2,000-year-old vessel, discovered off the Spanish coast, was described by marine archaeologists last week as "a jewel of the Old World." Jars found in Roman shipwreck photo However, it wasn't gold or silver that the ship was carrying but hundreds of jars of a foul-smelling fish sauce. The ancient delicacy, known as garum, was usually made from fermented fish guts and blood. Wealthy Romans, experts say, couldn't get enough of the stuff. The sailing ship, dating from the first century A.D....

Remains of Roman rabbit uncovered The remains of a 2,000-year-old rabbit - found at an early Roman settlement at Lynford, Norfolk - may be the earliest example of rabbit remains in Britain. The bones - which show evidence the animal had been butchered and buried - are similar to those of a small Spanish rabbit, common in Roman times. It is thought rabbits were introduced to Britain following the Roman invasion in AD43.The remains will be officially dated at the Natural History Museum in London. The bones themselves had been butchered, possibly the rabbit was to be eaten by a...

Romans went to war on diet of pizza, dig shows John Innes ROMAN soldiers went to war on egg and pizza according to archaeological analysis of Roman army toilets in Scotland. Scientists also have discovered that the soldiers also appear to have gone to the lavatory in pairs. Further analysis of the 2,000-year old remains of the legionnaires’ breakfasts may produce more clues to the diet and eating habits of the troops led by Gnaeus Agricola. They forced their way to the north of Scotland and victory over Caledonian tribesmen at the battle of Mons Graupius in 84 AD. But...

A genetic study of snails, combined with other factors, suggests a migration of Mesolithic peoples from the Pyrenees to Ireland. A recent study of the mitochondrial DNA of the Cepaea nemoralis land snail, a snail curiously common only between Ireland and the Pyrenees region of Southern France, has led researchers to conclude the possibility that ancient Mesolithic people carried the fauna with them in a migration from the French region to Ireland about 8,000 years ago. This correlates with studies of human genetics and the colonization of Ireland, according to the research* published June 19 in the open access journal...

Researchers had previously theorised that it was an increase in population that drove behavioural innovations which in turn led to the creation of these artefacts and eventually, the expansion out of Africa. However, by examining mollusc shells from Stone Age sites, Richard Klein of Stanford University and Teresa Steele of University of California, Davis, have determined that a significant population increase did not occur until the Later Stone Age (LSA), after the out of Africa migration had already begun... The researchers found that the median size of MSA shells was larger than that of LSA shells. This showed that selection...

The secret of imperial purple has been rediscovered. A British amateur chemist has worked out how the ancient Romans dyed the togas of emperors this deep colour thanks to a bacterium found in cockles from the supermarket Tesco. The hue had special significance as the colour of imperial power. Cleopatra also had the sails on her ship dyed the same colour. The recipe for the dye had been kept a craft secret, even in ancient Egypt and Rome. There are few references to the dying process in the historical literature. Green to purple Modern chemistry can make every shade of...

A 12th-century manuscript contains the oldest known European Medieval food recipes, according to new research. The recipes, which include both food and medical ointment concoctions, were compiled and written in Latin. Someone jotted them down at Durham Cathedral's monastery in the year 1140. It was essentially a health book, so the meals were meant to improve a person's health or to cure certain afflictions. The other earliest known such recipes dated to 1290. Many of the dishes sound like they would work on a modern restaurant menu... Gasper added, "The sauces typically feature parsley, sage, pepper, garlic, mustard and coriander,...

Chinese researchers have identified a bacteria which may cause obesity, according to a new paper suggesting diets that alter the presence of microbes in humans could combat the condition. Researchers in Shanghai found that mice bred to be resistant to obesity even when fed high-fat foods became excessively overweight when injected with a kind of human bacteria and subjected to a rich diet. The bacterium -- known as enterobacter -- had been linked with obesity after being found in high quantities in the gut of a morbidly obese human volunteer, said the report, written by researchers at Shanghai's Jiaotong University....

...So who concocted that first bowl of soup? Most sources state that soup making did not become commonplace until somewhere between 5,000 and 9,000 years ago. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America says, for example, "boiling was not a commonly used cooking technique until the invention of waterproof and heatproof containers about five thousand years ago." That's probably wrong — by at least 15,000 years. It now looks like waterproof and heatproof containers were invented much earlier than previously thought. Harvard University archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef and colleagues reported last year in Science on their finding of 20,000-year-old...

Ancient beer pots point to origins of chocolate 22:00 12 November 2007 NewScientist.com news service Jeff Hecht Earlier long-necked pots would have been used for beer making. Chemical evidence in a pot such as this is seen as proof that beer brewing involved fermenting cacao (Illustration: PNAS/National Academy of Sciences) Chocolate was first produced by the ancients as a by-product of beer, suggests a new archaeological study. And evidence from drinking vessels left by the Mesoamericans who developed chocolate suggests that the source of chocolate, cacao, was first used 500 years earlier than thought. Mesoamericans – who flourished in central...

Analyses of Stone Age settlements reveal that the hunters were healthy and would gladly eat anything they could get their hands on, including carbohydrates – contrary to the modern definition of the Paleolithic, or Stone Age diet. The Stone Age hunter’s food contained large amounts of protein from fish, lean mean, herbs and coarse vegetables and has formed the basis of one of today’s hottest health trends: the paleo diet. The modern version of the Stone Age diet excludes foods rich in carbohydrates. This exclusion of carbs is based on the idea that Stone Age hunters didn’t have access to...

ELAZIG, Turkey — There are easier places to make wine than the spectacular, desolate landscapes of southeast Turkey, but DNA analysis suggests it is here that Stone Age farmers first domesticated the wine grape. ~~~snip~~~ "We wanted to collect samples from wild and cultivated grape vines from the Near East -- that means southeastern Anatolia, Armenia and Georgia -- to see in which place the wild grape was, genetically speaking, linked the closest to the cultivated variety." "It turned out to be southeastern Anatolia," the Asian part of modern Turkey, said Vouillamoz, speaking at the EWBC wine conference in the...