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A German pensioner who had kept a tub of lard in his cupboard for 64 years, took it to authorities who pronounced it very much fit for consumption -- if a little tasteless. Retired chemist Hans Feldmeier, 87, told AFP he had received the pig fat as a student in 1948 near the northern city of Rostock as part of the post-war US aid programme.

A prehistoric 10 kilo lump of bog butter thought to have been a gift to the gods has been found by turf cutters. The creamy white dairy product, which smells like a strong cheese and is believed to be about 2,000 years old, was unearthed by Jack Conway, from Maghera, Co Cavan, while he worked on Emlagh bog in Co Meath last week. The find, while not unusual, has been given to the National Museum where it will be preserved. Andy Halpin, assistant keeper in the museum's Irish Antiquities Division, said the discovery was significant because it was found in...

Peat cutter said the ancient food still smells of dairy Over 100 pounds of "bog butter" have been discovered in Tullamore, County Offaly. This ancient food substance, thought to been buried as a form of refrigeration, is thought to be 5,000 years old, dating from the Iron Age. Brian Clancy and his uncle Joe were cutting turf in Ballard Bog when they made the discovery. Joe explained "We were cutting turf and I found what looked like a huge piece of timber...We took it out with a spade and it turned out to be bog butter." Speaking to the Irish...

Two workers have discovered an oak barrel, full of butter, estimated to be roughly 3,000 years old, in Gilltown bog, between Timahoe and Staplestown, in Ireland. According to a report in Leinster Leader, the amazing discovery of the barrel, which is being described by archaeology experts in the National Museum as a "really fine example" was found by two Bord na Mona workers... What they found was an oak barrel, cut out of a trunk, full of butter. It was largely intact, except for a gash towards the bottom of it caused by the harrow. It was head down, and...

Mysteries of bog butter uncoveredWax found in Celtic bogs is the remains of ancient meat and milk. 17 March 2004 PHILIP BALL Peat cutters often stumble on chunks of butter in the bogs. © Stockbyte Chemical detectives have traced deposits of fat in Scottish peat bogs to foodstuffs buried by people hundreds of years ago. The 'bog butter' is the remains of both dairy products and meat encased in the peat, say Richard Evershed of the University of Bristol and colleagues. Those who live in the countryside of Ireland and Scotland and dig up chunks of peat for fuel have...

Professor VD Mishra said that new researches have revealed that agricultural practices in India started in Mesolithic period (6-7,000 BC), much before the Neolithic period (4000 BC) as is generally believed. This discovery has proved that agriculture in India started simultaneously with other parts of the world. He said that Sativa rice, discovered from excavations at Chopni in Belan valley, has proved that India did not lag behind in agriculture... Joshi said that encroachments around historical monuments should be stopped because it harms our heritage. Citing an example, he said that Gwalior Fort could not be declared World Heritage due...

What an eggsperiment! A group of high school students in Japan have made an incredible discovery - they've figured out how to hatch a perfectly healthy chick from an egg without the shell. The discovery is so significant, the students' findings have been published in a scientific journal. The experiment - which was filmed and then shared on YouTube - consists of a few very simple steps and takes less than one month. By day three - the little chick's heart had formed, and by day five, the outline of its body could be seen. In just three weeks, a...

Scientists conducted tests on ancient pottery jars and funnels found at the Mijiaya archaeological site in China’s Shaanxi province. The analyses revealed traces of oxalate — a beer-making byproduct that forms a scale called “beerstone” in brewing equipment — as well as residues from a variety of ancient grains and plants. These grains included broomcorn millets, an Asian wild grain known as “Job’s tears,” tubers from plant roots, and barley. Barley is used to make beer because it has high levels of amylase enzymes that promote the conversion of starches into sugars during the fermenting process. It was first cultivated...

Researchers Have Finally Solved The Mystery Of The Irish Potato Famine Denise Chow, LiveScience May 24, 2013, 12:03 PM The Irish potato famine that caused mass starvation and approximately 1 million deaths in the mid-19th century was triggered by a newly identified strain of potato blight that has been christened "HERB-1," according to a new study. An international team of molecular biologists studied the historical spread of Phytophthora infestans, a funguslike organism that devastated potato crops and led to the famine in Ireland. The precise strain of the pathogen that caused the devastating outbreak, which lasted from 1845 to 1852,...

"The Spaniards were much impressed with the productivity of manioc in Arawak agriculture in the Greater Antilles," historian Jonathan Sauer recounts in his history of crop plants. "[A Spanish historian] calculated that 20 persons working 6 hours a day for a month could plant enough yuca to provide cassava bread for a village of 300 persons for 2 years." By all accounts, the Taíno were prosperous -- "a well-nourished population of over a million people," according to Sauer. And yet... lacked the monumental architecture of the Maya or the mathematical knowledge of the Aztec. And most importantly, they were not organized in...

Chinese archaeologists said they have found a paddy dating back more than 8,000 years, which could be the earliest wet rice farming site in the world. The field, covering less than 100 square meters, was discovered at the neolithic ruins of Hanjing in Sihong county in East China's Jiangsu province in November 2015, according to a spokesman with the archeology institute of Nanjing Museum. At a seminar held in late April to discuss findings at the Hanjing ruins, more than 70 scholars from universities, archeology institutes and museums across the country concluded that the wet rice field was the oldest...

An impressive array of brainpower —“Fat? Blame your genes, say doctors” —“Overweight? Maybe you really can blame your genes” —“Blame your genes for obesity” Headlines such as these have become a staple of science and health journalism. Are they right? Are obese people really helpless victims of their genes? Let us begin by distinguishing between “monogenic” obesity and what scientists call “common” obesity. Monogenic obesity, as the name implies, is caused by a mutation in a single gene, which is inherited in a Mendelian fashion, just as conditions such as sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis are. In the case of...

In the second half of the 20th century, conventional wisdom in the medical community held that overconsumption of saturated fats — the kind found in milk, cheese, meats and butter — was dangerous. And so, between 1968 and 1973, a well-planned, well-executed study involving more than 9,000 patients was performed to test this widely accepted relationship between diet and heart disease. The results of the Minnesota Coronary Experiment were notable for two reasons. First, the findings contradicted much of what was believed at the time: The study demonstrated that people who ate a diet rich in saturated fats did not...

Dairy fats on Iron Age pottery sherds, evidence of pre-historic origin for dairying. The discovery of dairy fats on ancient pottery may indicate dairying high in the Alps occurred as early as the Iron Age over 3000 years ago, according to a study published April 21, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Francesco Carrer from the University of York, UK, and colleagues. Dairy farming has long been an important economic and cultural tradition in the European high Alps, but little is known about when and how the practice originated. Using organic residue analysis, the authors of the present...

Demet Kara, an archaeologist from the Hatay Archaeology Museum, said the mosaic, which was called the “skeleton mosaic,” belonged to the dining room of a house from the 3rd century B.C., as new findings have been unearthed in the ancient city of Antiocheia. “There are three scenes on glass mosaics made of black tiles. Two things are very important among the elite class in the Roman period in terms of social activities: The first is the bath and the second is dinner. In the first scene, a black person throws fire. That symbolizes the bath. In the middle scene, there...

Back in the day - we're talking WAY back in the day - beer was brewed with malt, and bread, and honey and wine . . . and just about anything that could be fermented. How the ancients brewed - and how you can too! Archaeology and beer seem to go together, and it’s not just because a cold brew helps wash the dust from your teeth after a long day on the digs. I’m an archaeologist by profession and a homebrewer by avocation. Lots of archaeologists brew their own, and those who don’t often have a passion for more...

I don’t buy organic foods. In fact I specifically avoid doing so. It’s not my place to tell anyone else what to do, but I’d like to lay out three, seriously considered factors that have shaped my personal stance on organic: 1. Informed confidence that we are safe buying “conventional” foods 2. Recognizing that some of the best farming practices from an environmental perspective are not always allowed or practical under the organic rules 2.An ethical problem with the tactics that some organic advocates and marketers employ which seriously misrepresents their “conventional” competition...... As for the safety issue. When most...

Scientists from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (HEP) in Tübingen have studied the Neanderthals' diet. Based on the isotope composition in the collagen from the prehistoric humans' bones, they were able to show that, while the Neanderthals' diet consisted primarily of large plant eaters such at mammoths and rhinoceroses, it also included vegetarian food. The associated studies were recently published in the scientific journals Journal of Human Evolution and Quaternary International. The paleo-diet is one of the new trends among nutrition-conscious people -- but what exactly did the meal plan of our extinct ancestors include? "We have...

Like a Big Mac or a Coke, a Budweiser is one of the global economy’s more reliable pleasures, cheaply available almost everywhere. Historically, like the double-pattie burger and the iconic cola, the global dominance of light, fizzy, relatively bland, central European-style lager — from Budweiser to Molson and Corona — relied as much on cleanliness and consistency as it did on taste, as anyone who has tasted a Bud can tell you. In a talk to a gastronomy conference at the University of Toronto Mississauga this weekend, food historian Jeffrey Pilcher will argue that lager conquered the world, after first...

Archaeologists working in the borderlands of northern Mexico have uncovered a camp used by ancient hunters as much as 10,500 years ago, revealing insights into some of the earliest human history in the Greater Southwest. On a ranch near the Santa Maria River in northern Chihuahua, researchers have unearthed more than 18,000 artifacts, including thousands of stone flakes, cores, and hammers, along with 370 projectile points, and a dozen stone ovens. But the most surprising find has been the grave of a teenage girl, who was interred among the rocks, alone and unadorned, some 3,200 years ago.