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Neanderthals with gnawed bones, Sicicillian Wine and the Human Diet - Ep 123
550 Plays3 years ago
This week on The Archaeology show, we discuss 3 recently published Archaeology Articles and stories in the news. First, Neanderthals are back in the news, again! It seems like there is something new about Neanderthals, and this time it is the discovery of 9 individuals with gnawed bones found in an Italian cave. Second, new research uses chemistry to identify beer and wine residue in ancient Sicilian jars. And finally, new research looking at the diet composition of ancient humans, as compared with modern humans.
Links
- Gnawed bones of 9 Neanderthals found in Italian cave
- How Scientists and Archeologists Trace Beer and Wine through Antiquity
- Chemical evidence for the persistence of wine production and trade in Early Medieval Islamic Sicily
- A global carbon and nitrogen isotope perspective on modern and ancient human diet
Contact
- Chris Webster [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
We're excited to announce that our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor to the show. Check out the podcast discount link in our show notes and stay tuned for why we love using Zen for the podcast.
Introduction to The Archaeology Show
00:00:11
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to the Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast.
Neanderthals and Ancient Diets Overview
00:00:27
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Archaeology Show, episode 123. On today's show, we talk about Nod Neanderthal bones, ancient Sicilian wine, and modern versus ancient human diets. Let's dig a little deeper.
00:00:44
Speaker
All right, welcome to the show, everybody. How's it going? Hello, good. So, man, I don't even know what day it is. We've been just a little dive into our personal lives. We've been driving every single day for the last eight, nine days now. Eight days, yeah. Yeah, Sunday, so. Eight days. For the last eight days now, yeah.
Travel Challenges and Archaeology Work
00:01:04
Speaker
And we're going from Massachusetts to Nevada to do some archaeology.
00:01:09
Speaker
Yeah. So eight days ago we left Massachusetts. We are now in Wyoming and I think the constant travel is starting to wear on us a little bit. Yeah, because we work full time. We do long days on the weekends, but during the week we're only doing a couple hours, maybe two, three hours a day before basically my meeting schedule. And it's a lot. So anyway, neither here nor there. So,
00:01:35
Speaker
Well, it was there and now it's here. I thought I was supposed to make the dad jokes. Usually it is you, but I couldn't let that one go. So what is the Neanderthal story of the week?
00:01:49
Speaker
I feel like we should just bookmark one segment for Neanderthals every week. There's just like a resurgence and research into them. We're just paying attention. I don't know. I feel like people are just more interested in them now. Scientists don't do research because people are interested in them.
Discovery of Neanderthal Bones in Italy
00:02:08
Speaker
Anyway, the major news sources are picking up a lot of Neanderthal stuff lately because we first saw this article on CNN and they titled it, Nod Bones of Nine Neanderthals Found in Italian Cave, which is like, usually they're over the top with their headlines and this one is not that bad. There's nobody surprised or astounded, which is great.
00:02:30
Speaker
Yeah, so what's going on here? So basically there's a cave in Italy called the Guattari cave and this cave was originally found in the 1930s and a couple remains were found in there but there's a lot of blockage and they just weren't able to like
00:02:48
Speaker
do full excavation back in the day. And recently people have gone back in to get these blockages out of the way and do like a more thorough excavation. And they have found nine new remains plus there are two from the previous excavations. So that makes a total of 11 Neanderthals found in one cave, which is like kind of a lot of Neanderthals to be found in one cave. So that's sort of why this is so interesting and different and exciting. And these bones,
00:03:17
Speaker
these Neanderthal bones have what look like cut marks in them. Well, not cut marks, but marks that don't look like they were born that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's clear signs of nine, hence the title of the article. They think it's probably by hyenas or a hyena type
00:03:34
Speaker
animal and the big question is is they don't know if the Neanderthals were dead when the gnawing happened or if they were killed by the animal. So kind of a horrific thought to consider there that they were
00:03:50
Speaker
They were mauled by hyenas and then killed yeah, and then their bones were not on but who knows but yeah, so the The Neanderthals that they found they did they were able to date them and one of them does date back to like 90,000 to 100,000 years ago and then the other eight date back to 50,000 to 60,000 years ago a huge span of time isn't it yeah, so and
00:04:14
Speaker
It's a little unclear if all of the bones show gnawing from hyenas and like why there would be such a big time span between the older one and then the newer ones, but that it is interesting though because it does show that this cave was preferred by those people at that time. So they definitely were going back to it often over the years. So that's one interesting thing. So yeah.
Significance of the Guattari Cave
00:04:38
Speaker
And they never went back and we're like, man, those bones there. Oh well. Yeah. And like, because this isn't an article in like an archeology journal, it doesn't say like, as far as depth that the bones were found out, like was one deeper, they're for older. Yeah. It's a cave.
00:04:56
Speaker
Caves by nature are made typically either because of some geologic instability, more likely because of water and stuff flowing through them over millions and millions and millions of years. They rowed out and make these caves. Because of that, they often have water brings in sediment with it, and ceilings collapse, all kinds of stuff happen. Although the reconstruction, there's a drawing and it looks like more of a rock shelter on the front of it. There must be some caves going back in there. Again, we don't have the original article.
00:05:25
Speaker
Yeah and they definitely said that there was like blockage and oh it says an ancient earthquake and then a more recent landslide had made parts of the cave inaccessible. So that's part of the reason why some of the stuff was buried and some wasn't and blah blah blah. So yeah. So do you remember how you can tell that these were more likely
00:05:46
Speaker
nod marks and not cut marks, like it wasn't some sort of form of cannibalism or something like that. Like cut by a tool. Right. Cause it would be like a straight cut if it were cut by a tool and then gnawing would be a different type of
00:05:59
Speaker
Well, there's a very clear way to tell. Gnawing is usually done by your canines, your tiny teeth, and those leave a U-shaped groove. Whereas a cut mark with some kind of a tool or a knife, and by knife I mean like stone knife, has a V-shaped groove. So it's a pretty clear indication when something has been cut with some sort of tool and something has just been gnawed on. Because even if a human is going to gnaw on bones, typically it's going to have a U-shaped groove because our teeth are shaped that way.
00:06:27
Speaker
Right. Well, and that is an interesting point to bring up because one of the things they said is that there were ventilation holes in the ceiling of the cave and then some of the bones were also burned. So that led to speculation that perhaps there was cannibalism going on, which I think is a bit of a reach.
00:06:49
Speaker
I mean, maybe it's just that this was a great kid to be in and somebody came by and there were just like bodies in there from the recent hyena activity and, you know, bodies stink and are gross. So burn them and get rid of them. Oh, that's, that's possible. Yeah. Like some sort of funerary situation, whether
00:07:07
Speaker
Either that or just cleaning up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's definitely possible. I don't know. That definitely seemed like the writers of the news article were kind of reaching because, you know, the word cannibalism is always something that sparks interest in people reading. So yeah.
00:07:24
Speaker
Yeah, caves are also cool too because they just get layered with sediment year after year. And one of the other things the authors were doing with this cave study, this current cave study, and probably looking at some past excavations as well, but they're looking at the sediment to take a look at climate change because
00:07:41
Speaker
it represents, you know, 60 to 120,000 years of animal species in pollen. So if you just look, you might not be able to tell the layers year after year, like you're looking at the rings of a tree, but in some cases you can, especially if it fills with water, then you get those laminar sediments like you do at the bottom of a lake. But if it doesn't, I mean, simply just looking at the
00:08:06
Speaker
the pollen, you can tell species of plants from 80,000 years ago versus 60 versus 40 versus 20. Yeah. And same thing with the animal species. Were there any that are extinct now that you're seeing in lower layers? Right. Stuff like that. So it's pretty cool. A lot of stuff we can tell from just this one cave. Caves are like literal treasures. Yeah. They're like archeology gold. Yeah.
00:08:27
Speaker
Yeah, totally. Yeah. And the other interesting thing too that they're saying is that they hope to do more excavation to find tools, which I took that to mean that they did not find any tools in the excavations that have happened so far. So that'll be interesting because if they don't find any tools or any other evidence of, you know, domestic use of the cave, then that I feel like would give more credence to the thought that the hyenas killed them and dragged them back there to eat them rather than humans were like,
00:08:58
Speaker
occupying this cave, or not humans, excuse me, Neanderthals. And that if there was fire, then maybe they did ritualistically burn them. Yeah. You know, if they're not going to hang out there for a while, they like to leave their stuff around. Yeah, for sure. All right, so that's pretty cool.
Ancient Sicilian Wine and Trade
00:09:12
Speaker
So let's go from there and celebrate with a glass of wine.
00:09:16
Speaker
in a minute. Chris Webster here for the Archaeology Podcast Network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archaeology from around the world. One way we do that is by recording interviews with our hosts and guests located in many parts of the world all at once. We do that through the use of Zencaster. That's z-e-n-c-a-s-t-r. Zencaster allows us to record high quality audio with no stress on the guest. Just send them a link to click on and that's it. Zencaster does the rest. They even do automatic transcriptions.
00:09:45
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00:09:56
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00:10:21
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So don't miss out on this exciting opportunity for professional and personal development. For more information on pricing and core structure, visit paleoimaging.com. That's P-A-L-E-O, imaging.com. And look for the link in the show notes to this episode. Welcome back to episode 123 of The Archaeology Show. I'm going to start saying it like Ohio State and say The Archaeology Show. It's not Archaeology Show, it's The Archaeology Show. I don't know why they do that. There's got to be a reason for it.
00:10:51
Speaker
been the Ohio State, please don't come and murder us in our sleep, Ohio people. He does not know what he says. I know I'm not a sports ball guy, so I don't really know, but I have heard that kind of stuff before. So anyway, welcome back to the archaeology show. And now we're going to talk about
00:11:07
Speaker
wine and as we're making our journey across the country we are using a service called harvest hosts which basically gives you I'm putting in scare quotes here like free camping at wineries distilleries places like that but we end up spending more on wine because they say patronize the people that you're at right like we're currently at a bowling alley in Evanston Wyoming and we are gonna go have some of their wings and maybe bull around and
00:11:31
Speaker
Oh, for sure. I'm pretty excited about that. Let's get this segment going here. It's our duty as Harvest Host members to go do that. Exactly. It brings money and stuff to local communities, things like that, so we like to support that. But anyway, wine is definitely on our minds. Maybe when I found this article, that is why I clicked on it.
00:11:51
Speaker
The article is entitled, How Scientists and Archaeologists Trace Beer and Wine Through Antiquity. Now, this is from wine enthusiasts, but to their credit, they actually link to the PNAS article, which is the original article entitled, Chemical Evidence for the Persistence of Wine Production and Trade in Early Medieval Islamic Assicily.
00:12:10
Speaker
And that is an open source journal, right? Yeah, totally. And one of the cool things I liked about this was, I mean, first off, their study area, pre-Islamic Sicily. Let's just put that together for a second right now, because what that really means is, and I wrote this down.
00:12:29
Speaker
Sicily, the area of Sicily, which is the island off the boot in Italy, that's actually not that far from the Middle East and North Africa. It's just a hop, skip, and a jump across the Mediterranean. I say that having done that in the USS Enterprise and standing there seeing 18-foot swells on the Mediterranean on a clear day. So not exactly easy. Attacking that kind of a sail back in the day would have been pretty difficult. Of course, you get a walk there, too. You should just go around the long way.
00:12:58
Speaker
Oh my God, that would take forever. Well, you know, people did it. So anyway, it was under Islamic control, which I'm not exactly sure what that means, like which Islamic countries or areas actually had that area under control. But it was for a lot longer and much more recent than I ever would have expected. And it says fifth to the 11th centuries. Oh, no way.
00:13:19
Speaker
Oh, so okay, so Sicily would have been under the control of the Romans at the height of Roman Empire, right? And then when they started to sort of dissolve, then I'm guessing whatever Islamic group came in and took control of the island until they finally lost it in the middle ages.
00:13:36
Speaker
I guess so, and it would be real interesting to see, because you think, when I think of Sicily, I mean, I've never been to, I've been to Italy a few times, but when I think of Sicily, I think of, you know, pizza and, you know, Sicilians and, you know, all that, like, Sicilian mobs. Sicilian mobs. I mean, all the typical Italian stuff I think of when I think of Sicily, but it makes me wonder, like, how much
00:14:02
Speaker
Islamic architecture and influence is actually in Sicily. I would imagine a lot because I don't know a whole lot about Sicilian culture necessarily, but I do know that like the food and some of the traditions there can be very different from mainland Italy. So I'm sure there's a lot of different stuff there and it must be because of this influence from the Islamic culture that ruled for, gosh, how long?
00:14:28
Speaker
800 years or something like you said? Six, 700 years at least. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's cool. So yeah. So anyway, one of the things that was really cool, there was a researcher, she's a postdoctoral fellow, I think it is, Leah Drew. Drew, I'm not sure, D-R-I-E-U. We're going to link to the original PNAS article as well, but she's from the University of York. She's a chemist and she studies the eating and drinking habits of the past. So she's like an archaeochemist.
00:14:53
Speaker
That's very neat. Which is actually cool because a co-founder of this network, Tristan Boyle, studied archaeochemistry in his program. Anyway, she uses organic residue analysis to confirm the chemical fingerprint of wine on ancient pottery. It gets really deep into the weeds here when you look at the article, but specifically, again, she was looking at the wine that was traded in pots from Sicily while under that Islamic control.
00:15:21
Speaker
Tartaric acid is basically crystals that grow in wine as it ages. And in fact, apparently tartaric acid and those crystals, those kind of crystalline forms are looked for by wine enthusiasts in really old wines. Oh, really? Yeah. I liken it to like a really sharp cheddar. It's got to be a similar process. Oh, sure. Yeah. Because a really sharp cheddar, when you get up into like the five, six, seven, eight year range. It's crystalline. They have those crystals in them. And I don't know if it's as a result of tartaric acid. I'm not really sure.
00:15:51
Speaker
And I wonder too, like in wine, I know what it's like in cheese, but in wine, is it visible crystals or is it like, are they microscopic? I wonder how that works. Right. Well, the thing is other things can also create tartaric acid, other fruits, stuff like that. Okay. When it's just kind of left. Anything that can ferment, I would assume. I mean, kind of. Yeah, pretty much. So then she looked at malic acid, which is also found in sour fruits. She looked at unripe grapes, tamarind, wine itself, grape juice, and vinegar.
00:16:20
Speaker
She ended up coming up with a, the fingerprint is basically the ratio between tartaric acid and malic acid is different in grape products as compared to most other fruits. Oh, okay. Okay. Sure. That makes sense. Yeah. And then you can take this study a little bit farther and, which I think is kind of like the nail in the coffin for this whole thing. Like, why wouldn't you just kind of do this first? But I mean,
00:16:42
Speaker
If you don't have DNA analysis, that's one thing, but a lot of times when you have these wine production areas, you will find seeds, you will find the skins of grapes around, and that's a good clue that they weren't just eating these grapes, like table grapes. They were squishing them. They were peeling them for processing. They were squishing them for some reason, because they made vinegar out of grapes, they made just grape juice out of grapes, and then they let it ferment into wine as well. So they did actually quite a few things.
00:17:07
Speaker
But anyway, using the ratio between tartaric and malic acid and then looking at the DNA analysis from grapes, basically you could say not only are these typically wine grapes that we found, but also judging by what's in these pots here, this was definitely some kind of wine.
Continuity in Wine Production
00:17:22
Speaker
So that is pretty cool. They also, using that DNA analysis,
00:17:27
Speaker
were able to find an exact match to modern, and I'm going to pronounce this right, seven onion grams, grape, grams, grapes, S-A-V-A-G-N-I-N grapes. And not just like a descendant, but an exact match, which means that the branch clippings from a grapevine
00:17:50
Speaker
900 years ago has propagated 900 years all the way up until when they sampled it down. That is so cool. Yeah. So that is so neat. Vineyards have been like that for a long time, right? Yeah. And also horticulturalists will take something. It didn't take them very long to figure out a long, long time ago, thousands of years ago, that if you take a piece off of one plant, throw it in the ground, you're going to have another plant. Yeah. The same exact plant, basically. But they may not have known it was the same exact plant back in the day.
00:18:16
Speaker
But it's the same exact plan, right, genetically. That's really cool. That's so neat. So anyway, lots of cool stuff that they're doing there. There's one thing I thought was interesting.
Insights from Residue Analysis
00:18:26
Speaker
The article in Wine Enthusiast made it sound like she invented organic residue analysis, but I'm pretty sure she didn't. She's just using that as a tool. Yeah, yeah.
00:18:36
Speaker
But that's pretty neat because the fact that you can get it off of pottery, enough of it off of pottery, it probably means to me that it wasn't just like discarded pottery that was empty, like it was just like out of wine so they checked it or something like that. It was probably pots that had been either forgotten about, left in a building, something happened and the wine evaporated through time and you're left with a lot of residue.
00:19:02
Speaker
Yeah. Maybe not even visible to the naked eye, but enough that you can extract it from the pottery. And I wonder if reusing the same pots over and over and over would give the same kind of thing because it just seeps in over time. And yeah, you might not be able to visually see it, but it just is into the fiber of the ceramic, basically. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Anyway, yeah, that's pretty neat. This is a good article in the fact that, and the Wine Enthusiast article actually goes into beer quite a bit, too. I just kind of focused on the wine.
00:19:33
Speaker
And they actually do talk about beer in the PNAS article as well. So definitely head over and check that out. It's got its own idiosyncrasies, but kind of along the same lines of doing the organic residue analysis and the genetic analysis as well. So it's pretty cool. And what were conclusions, or were there not really conclusions drawn? It was just showing how this process can work.
00:19:54
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, really what they were looking for is they were trying to identify it. Okay. Like where was this, where did this come from? So the conclusion was, can you find this residue and date it basically? Can you? Or identify it. Can you identify it? Okay. Yeah. Because I don't think they could necessarily date it. Right. Yeah. But they could definitely identify it and note that it was a certain type. And then if they have, it's like you take anything else like obsidian. Obsidian is a chemical fingerprint from a volcano, right? Mm-hmm.
00:20:21
Speaker
When they studied the Sicilian pots and it was an Islamic society, they can now do this residue analysis on pots maybe found in some Islamic countries where they might have those and say, hey, this wine totally came from Sicily. So just being able to identify that. And then using this process, I mean, there is wine all over the Mediterranean.
00:20:40
Speaker
Right. Just everywhere. So being able to understand the chemical analysis and fingerprint these wines and their points of origin will help better understand Mediterranean trade networks. Yeah. So and maybe even global trade that well at least hemispheric trade networks because I'm seeing what you're saying. Like we could potentially see like this specific wine residue all over Europe and then we can see how it was moved around the continent basically.
00:21:07
Speaker
Yeah, wouldn't it be cool to find some Sicilian wine somewhere up in northern England or something like that in an old pot? The journey that wine would have taken and then people enjoyed it up there. It would have been a thing. Food has always been one of those elite sort of commodities where going back
00:21:31
Speaker
I mean, I don't even know if there's a start. It's just been always, right? Like if you have something that is hard to get and sought after, you're seen as above. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So wine and food. I mean, just to say that you've got wine from Sicily, you know, whatever it was called back then, I didn't know if it was called Sicily, but you've got wine from here. They're like, Ooh, wow. You're, you're rich and famous. You know? So that's literally changed for sure. Yep.
00:21:57
Speaker
The only thing that's kind of changed is now we just try to get the rare stuff that's more expensive to have our status is because, you know, when we were on the East Coast, we were buying wine from Lodi, California in the store, like in the grocery store, right? So whatever stores they have on the East Coast, the crazy wine stores. So it's a little harder to do. So you got to get the ultra rare stuff. So in fact, I was reading this book, just one last little story here.
00:22:21
Speaker
I was reading this book. Well, I've been listening to this book as we've been driving. It's called Flip the Script by Oren Hatch, I think his last name is. Anyway, he was just talking about a story where he was at this exclusive party, basically, talking to the bartender, and he's talking about having your status, establishing an equal status with somebody who you're trying to negotiate with.
00:22:43
Speaker
gave his knowledge to the bartender trying to find out if this was just a weekender bartender or a real bartender and the woman he was talking to he was like he was like what do you have and she's like oh we got these things was like corona Bud Light and he's like really and she's like wasn't my call man he's like man he was like not too long ago I got to have a
00:23:00
Speaker
What do you call it? Like a torpedo tactical nuclear penguin or something like that. And apparently it was like this beer that like a thousand bottles of it were made. And now it is so rare and sought after. It goes for something like a thousand to five thousand dollars a bottle. What? Really? What makes this so special?
00:23:16
Speaker
I had no idea. That's crazy. I think what made it special is it was served to the right people and there was a limited quantity and they made a demand for it. So now there's bottles floating around that people bought up. And if you have one or you see one, it's like this thing. All right. Well, keeping an eye out for that, I guess. Anyway.
00:23:35
Speaker
With that, we are going to take our final break. We're going to come back and get into the weeds with another PNAS article, nitrogen isotope perspectives and things like that. But it's basically talking about modern and ancient diets and comparing the two. Back in a minute.
00:23:53
Speaker
You may have heard my pitch from membership. It's a great idea and really helps out. However, you can also support us by picking up a fun t-shirt, sticker, or something from a large selection of items from our tea public store. Head over to arcpodnet.com slash shop for a link. That's arcpodnet.com slash shop to pick up some fun swag and support the show. Welcome back to episode 123 of the archeology show. And we are going deep into some science for this one.
00:24:21
Speaker
But more food stuff, right? Oh yeah, more food stuffs. Yeah, we're hungry right now. We haven't had a very good lunch, and we just want food. Oh my God, we're going to start sounding like Alex from Animals. Yes, that's right. All right, so this is also from PNAS, like the last one. And PNAS, for those that don't know, there's a lot of open source stuff on here, but it's the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, to use their full
Ancient vs Modern Human Diets
00:24:46
Speaker
title.
00:24:46
Speaker
This was published on May 11th, 2021, and it's called a global carbon and nitrogen isotope perspective on modern and ancient human diet. Now I will tell you this thing really quickly goes deep into the weeds on chemistry. It does. I read the abstract and I was like, cool, got this. I'm here. I'm with it. And then I started reading the full article and like, I felt myself start like skimming more than reading. Cause I was like, Oh dear God, there's a lot of science here and my brain is not absorbing all of it.
00:25:16
Speaker
Right. I can't even say the symbol that they use here. I can't remember what it's called. What is this, a lowercase omega or something? I'm not really sure. I don't know. But anyway, you don't feel guilty for not reading the article because one thing I actually heard recently from a college professor was the best way to read basically a lot of scholarly articles, because these can get really detailed, is you understand how the article is written. So definitely start with the abstract. Yeah.
00:25:43
Speaker
then go all the way to the conclusion. It's either the conclusion or results. Sometimes they call it different things, but whatever the final word on whatever they did is, because usually those two things are written in somewhat plain, unjargoned English. And you can just, okay, this is really good here. And also go through after that and look at the figures.
00:26:02
Speaker
Because the figures will give you an idea. Now, if you think that, for whatever you're researching or studying, that you need to dive deeper into it and say, yeah, but at locality five, what really did they find here? You just need to dive into it, right? Well, if it's your area of study, then of course you're going to be that interested in it. Maybe not. It depends on what you're trying to figure out.
00:26:22
Speaker
The whole reason, the whole thesis about a scientific paper and how these things are written is replicability. So they have to put in their methods. They have to put in exactly what they had. That's why you'll find massive tables of spreadsheet data in reports. And a lot of times these spreadsheet data are actually in supplemental materials that aren't included in the paper anymore. They're some other PDF or downloadable material that you can actually get.
00:26:47
Speaker
Because they have to include that stuff. You're looking at replicability. Other people are going to say, oh, well, I'm going to try this in my lab, or I'm going to try this on my computer, and I'm going to try to do the same thing. Here's exactly how they did it. Yes, I got the same results. Bam. Now you have correlation.
00:27:02
Speaker
Yeah. Well, as far as reading the article goes, I am definitely going to be the first to admit that I read the abstract. I started the article and then I skipped to the results. I think they called it in this article. I think most people naturally just kind of do that. I'm just saying make it official. Just skip to the results. Just do it. It's great.
00:27:22
Speaker
So anyway, the point of this article, so they looked at 13,666 modern human collagen and keratin samples. So collagen is hair. Yeah. Yeah. Hair and keratin. Isn't that like fingernails or something? Or do you get keratin in hair as well?
00:27:39
Speaker
No, I think it's hair and fingernails. Now, you learn a lot about somebody's diet by looking at their hair and their fingernails. You learn a lot of stuff about that. And these guys didn't do their own study. They looked at other reports that, again, had these tables of data in them. They had already done the sampling, they'd already sent off the results, and they were looking at some of the chemical signatures within these results. It might not even have been the original purpose of the paper that sent off the samples to get analyzed.
00:28:06
Speaker
It was all modern humans or is ancient and modern? When they say modern human, we're talking about Homo sapiens. We're not talking about Homo erectus. We're not talking about Neanderthals. So when we say modern humans, we're going back 200,000 years. So now we're going to get into finer detail on this here.
00:28:24
Speaker
This macro study of these 13,666 samples, I don't know if I read deep enough to see what regions it crosses, but basically it was from a lot of different places, and it was from a lot of different populations, so current modern populations, and by modern in this case, I mean post-industrialization.
00:28:43
Speaker
and then also modern subsistence societies, like hunter-gatherer societies that still exist today, but also prehistoric peoples and pre-industrialized modern peoples. Right. It sounds like they split these samples up to pre and post-industrialization and also to subsistence and
00:29:05
Speaker
urbanized or non-subsistence populations, whatever you would call that. That's how they were splitting them up and then comparing them to prehistoric examples. They needed something to, I guess, measure all these against. They created what they called a reference frame called the modern diet equivalent. It's this metric that they came up with. If you want to know more about that, again, read the details of the paper.
00:29:28
Speaker
But they use this modern diet equivalent concept to compare modern human diets, and again, like I just said, human diets prior to the advent of industrialized agriculture and the natural environment. And by natural environment, it just means people just eating off the natural environment like right now, like hunter-gatherers, basically.
00:29:47
Speaker
And we say industrialized agriculture because agriculture, sure, agriculture invented 10,000, 12,000 years ago definitely changed the way humans eat. And you would probably focus a lot more on certain foods because you're growing them and you have a lot more of them right there. But industrialized agriculture really changed things when you started having these large factory farms just pumping stuff out. So that's really what their metric was for that.
00:30:13
Speaker
What it revealed was what we can probably basically guess, but it's nice to have the paper and research to back it. But it revealed that humans that are pre industrialized agriculture and humans that are subsistence cultures today have a much broader diet than people who are non subsistence food eaters like most of us are, to be honest, right now. Even if you have a garden in your backyard and you go to the farmer's market every weekend, your diet's not as broad as somebody who
00:30:40
Speaker
you know, pre-industrialized agriculture. It's just simply not. Somebody who's just living off the land and what is around them ends up eating a much broader diet.
00:30:48
Speaker
Yeah. One of the ways that they characterize that statement was they say humans have the ability to consume opportunistically as extreme omnivores within complex natural food webs, which basically means we'll eat anything. And when your life depends on it and your family's life depends on it, and you've got 15 screaming children right there going, I am hungry. It's like, you're going to find something to eat. You're going to be like, wow, that tree bark does actually look good now. Oh, turns out it's got maple syrup on it. No, that's not how that works. No, that's not how that works at all.
00:31:18
Speaker
I was gonna say like that's how insects and crickets and things come into play, right? Because they're actually like a really great source of protein. That's right. And a lot of communities do eat them on the regular, so yeah. Yeah, I mean humans, you just think of, even if you've never been to one, and I haven't been to like any authentic ones, but you think of like Asian markets and stuff like that, a lot of the stuff that they eat over there would just be people in the Western world is just repulsed by.
00:31:45
Speaker
It's just what they've eaten, their whole culture. They didn't go into industrialized food production until way later than, say, the rest of the Western world, like the Asian societies did not. So they still have a lot of those cultural things that are just accepted, that they eat. India, Africa, places. Makes for a much broader diet. So as far as overall health goes, I'm guessing that's a good thing.
00:32:10
Speaker
One thing I thought was interesting about this article is because I was like, well, we know what people were eating in the past, right? Like we know from burned remains of hearts and things like that, like we know what they were eating. But what this article pointed out in which
00:32:27
Speaker
And what I thought was kind of the most interesting is that yes, we know what they were eating in the past, but we don't know what proportions they were eating it in. Sure. We know they were eating corn. They're eating wheat. They were eating meats of some sort, but how much of each? We just didn't know. But this study is what's helping like narrow in on what those proportions were and helping, you know, just give a better idea of what like the diet and the life of prehistoric people were. So that was a really cool takeaway for me from this article.
00:32:57
Speaker
We all hear the phrase, you are what you eat. I mean, that's quite literally true with some things. The stuff that's in the food that you eat leaves a fingerprint literally inside of your body. And you can really tell, like we've known for a long time how to tell some of the macro things, like where they, you know, subsisting on fish products and marine products more so than say land-based products, you know, that that's pretty easy to tell in somebody's diet by looking at their
00:33:25
Speaker
their hair, their fingernails, stuff like that.
Understanding Ancient Dietary Habits
00:33:28
Speaker
It also helps that they lived in huts by the water. You can probably guess that, too. But it's nice to have this correlation. And the more we refine this science, the more we might be able to refine even more things about somebody's diet. There's Otzi the Iceman, who was found up, was it the French Alps?
00:33:44
Speaker
Are those Spanish Alps up in that area? Yeah, something like that. Anyway, he was found, and they were able to actually, not just from his actual stomach contents, but they were able to retrace the areas he was likely to have been based on the levels of certain chemicals within his body, because he was essentially preserved in the ice, right? So there's a lot of stuff about him that they could still sample and test.
00:34:07
Speaker
And that's pretty cool. One of the things, again, that came out of this study was some actual numbers here is they said that the dietary breadth across modern non subsistence populations, which is pretty much everyone listening to this podcast, has compressed by as much as two thirds as a result of the rise of industrialized agriculture and animal husbandry practices. Which means when they say animal husbandry practices, I mean, we're eating a lot less variety of like small and large game. We're eating a lot of chicken and beef.
00:34:36
Speaker
Yeah. In pork. In pork. Chicken, beef, and pork. Chicken, beef, and pork. Yeah. And that's pretty much it. We're not putting a lot of other game on our menus. Now, we just drive across Wyoming. They may beg to differ. There's a lot of like, I think in, you see the Nebraska or Wyoming in the last couple of days, I saw a place that was just like the big game cafe or something like that. I don't know what they serve. Probably.
00:34:59
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. Actually, a buffalo maybe? Yeah. That is super interesting. It makes you wonder if maybe the paleo diet, maybe there's something to that. Maybe it's not just a fad diet. Maybe go research that.
00:35:15
Speaker
at least take the broadening of your diet aspect from it, because I'm sure that's part of it. I don't really know anything about paleo diet. Okay, well let's get into the paleo diet for a second, because a lot of people do bring that up, right? They think, well let's not eat any processed foods, because obviously they didn't have processed foods back in paleo times. Whatever, it's like olden times for prehistoric people, right? It's just paleo times.
00:35:38
Speaker
But they didn't have any processed foods prior to our ability to process foods. Along those lines, neither did Victorian England. They didn't have processed foods either. Not today's processed foods. Yeah, that's for sure. Not processed in the way that we think of processed foods.
00:35:54
Speaker
Then again, what is food processing? Is wine a processed food? Is cheese a processed food? I guess they are technically. Where I'm going with this with the paleo diet is basically, I've heard some people say it's just eat more meat and take out your grains and stuff like that. But given what we know from the actual archeological record and these samples that were taken and then analyzed in this way,
00:36:17
Speaker
It wasn't just eat more meat. It was eat more of a lot of different things. Yeah. It's the variety that seems to count here. Not just not processed foods, but a variety of not processed foods. So good luck with that.
00:36:34
Speaker
That gets hard. I don't think I'm going to take a punty anytime soon, but I mean for most of us that just means we're going to have avocado toast in the morning instead of like, you know, I don't even know what else. Cereal. Yeah. Yay. Paleo diet. Avocado toast is like so five years ago. Come on. There's got to be something better than that now. I literally don't know what else to say.
00:36:55
Speaker
Well, it's delicious. I know. All right. Well, with that, I think we're going to end this. Those are three very different but interesting news stories. So I think we covered a lot of ground there. Yeah, definitely. It was interesting. All right. Well, we'll be back next week with, I'm sure, something equally interesting. Yep. Probably not. But for right now, we're going to go broaden our diets with chicken wings. So. Chicken wings. Nice. See you next week.
00:37:28
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet.com. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at arcpodnet. You can also find us on the Lyceum app, a podcast app just for educational podcasts. Music for this show is called I Wish You Would Look from the Band's Sea Hero. Again, thanks for listening and have an awesome day.
00:37:53
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:38:16
Speaker
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