A team of archaeologists have made a surprise discovery that links modern consumption of cereals grains to the Bronze Age. A Bronze Age-era wooden container found 2650 meters above sea level in an ice patch in the Swiss Alps may provide valuable tools for archeologiests trying to understand early farming and grain consumption across Eurasia.
The archaeologists were expecting to find milk residue (because who doesn’t love a bit of porridge on a hike through the Swiss alps?), but instead, they something more surprising – lipid-based biomarkers for whole wheat or rye grain, also known as alkylresorcinols. If you think that’s a mouthful, wait till you see what these biomarkers could tell us about the development of early farming.
“We didn’t find any evidence of milk, but we found these phenolic lipids, which have never been reported before in an archaeological artefact, but are abundant in the bran of wheat and rye cereals and considered biomarkers of wholegrain intake in nutritional studies, ” says Dr André Colonese, from BioArCh, , University of York.
These hard-to-come-by biomarkers are early evidence of grains being ‘processed’ to create cereals, which is a huge step towards tracing how humans came to depend on grains as a primary food source. While thousands of artefacts from Europe have been examined for their molecular content over the last 30 years, hardly any evidence of cereals has been found. Were the Swiss the real Special K pioneers?
“One of the greatest challenges of lipid analysis in archaeology has been finding biomarkers for plants. There are only a few and they do not preserve well in ancient artefacts. You can imagine the relevance of this study as we now have a new tool for tracking early culinary use of cereal grains – it really is very exciting,” he says. “The next step is to look for them in ceramic artefacts.”
The team, which included other scientists from the University of York, Newcastle University in the UK, the Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern and the IPNA, both in Switzerland, and Target Discovery Institute, University of Oxford, this week.
Researcher Dr Jessica Hendy, from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, said: “The evidence of cereals came from the detection of lipids, but also from preserved proteins. This analysis was able to tell us that this vessel contained not just one, but two types of cereal grains – wheat and barley or rye grains."
Dr Francesco Carrer, from Newcastle University, says the discover sheds new light on life in prehistoric communities. "People travelling across the alpine passes were carrying food for their journey, like current hikers do. This new research contributed to understanding which food they considered the most suitable for their trips across the Alps.”
As research into Bronze Age alpine communities and the early transportation of farmed grains continues, spare a thought for the ancient Swiss hiker who lost a wooden container full of cereal. Hope he or she didn't have too far to go for their next meal.
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