Prehistoric human teeth have revealed what the 'paleo diet' actually entailed

New archaeological research may have revealed that the original 'paleo diet' contained wheat and barley, and was not restricted to only meat and vegetables, as the diet typically is today.

Scientists from Cambridge, Cardiff, UCL, and York studied the remains of nine people who lived about 9,000 years ago in the late Mesolithic (6600 BC to 6450 BC) and the Mesolithic-Neolithic phases (6200 BC to 5900 BC) and found plant matter fossilised in their teeth.

Thanks to poor dental hygiene, microfossils were trapped in ancient plaque on their teeth. The researchers say these plaques contain plants - cereals, in fact - that weren't thought to be part of people's diets for another four centuries.

"There has been a long-standing view that for the most of the Palaeolithic times, but also in the Mesolithic, animal protein coming from meat and fish was the main staple food with a very limited role of plant foods," lead researcher Dusan Borić told Business Insider.

People in the Mesolithic period are generally believed to have been hunter-gatherers and lived in vast woodlands.

The Neolithic, or New Stone Age, came afterwards, and it's then that people were believed to have first planted cereal crops and developed agriculture.

The discovery of domestic cereals in Mesolithic people's diets means that social networks between local foragers and the first Neolithic communities probably extended further than archaeologists originally thought, given how deep into the Balkan hinterland they were found.

"At the time of the discovery we had the sense that these groups of complex hunter-gatherers were in contact with other more distant locations," Borić said.

"We found beads made of marine gastropods that come from coastal areas in Greece and the Adriatic, hundreds of kilometres away from the region for instance."

Comments

This strange mineral grows on dead bodies and turns them blue

If you were to get up close and personal with Ötzi the Iceman – the 5,000-year-old mummy of a tattooed , deep-voiced man who died and was frozen in the Alps – you’d notice that his skin is flecked with tiny bits of blue. At first, it would appear that these oddly bluish crystal formations embedded in his skin are from freezing to death or some other sort of trauma, but it’s actually a mineral called vivianite (or blue ironstone) and it happens to form quite often on corpses left in iron-rich environments. For Ötzi, the patches of vivianite are from him resting near rocks with flecks of iron in them, but other cases are way more severe. According to Chris Drudge at Atlas Obscura , a man named John White was buried in a cast iron coffin back in 1861. During those days, coffins often had a window for grieving family members to peer inside even if the lid was closed during the funeral. Sometime after he was buried, that window broke, allowing groundwater to come inside the

It's Official: Time Crystals Are a New State of Matter, and Now We Can Create Them

Peer-review has spoken. Earlier this year , physicists had put together a blueprint for how to make and measure time crystals - a bizarre state of matter with an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, allowing them to maintain constant oscillation without energy. Two separate research teams managed to create what looked an awful lot like time crystals back in January, and now both experiments have successfully passed peer-review for the first time, putting the 'impossible' phenomenon squarely in the realm of reality. "We've taken these theoretical ideas that we've been poking around for the last couple of years and actually built it in the laboratory," says one of the researchers , Andrew Potter from Texas University at Austin. "Hopefully, this is just the first example of these, with many more to come." Time crystals are one of the coolest things physics has dished up in recent months, because they point to a

The Dark Side Of The Love Hormone Oxytocin

New research shows oxytocin isn't the anti-anxiety drug we thought it was. Oxytocin, the feel-good bonding hormone released by physical contact with another person, orgasm and childbirth (potentially encouraging monogamy ), might have a darker side. The love drug also plays an important role in intensifying negative emotional memories and increasing feelings of fear in future stressful situations, according to a new study. Two experiments performed with mice found that the hormone activates a signaling molecule called extracellular-signal-related kinases (ERK), which has been associated with the way the brain forms memories of fear . According to Jelena Radulovic, senior author on the study and a professor at Northwestern University's medical school, ERK stimulates fear pathways in the brain's lateral septum, the region with the highest levels of oxytocin. Mice without oxytocin receptors and mice with even more oxytocin receptors than usual were placed in

Aestus Ajith

Search This Blog