Ancient Human Skulls Shed Light on Dairy Use

              Charles Choi

A Late Bronze Age burial from the site of Ludas-Varjú-dulo, Hungary dated to about 1200 B.C. This individual marks the onset of lactose tolerance in the region.

The DNA from ancient human bones is shedding new light on the prehistory of Europe, such as when changes in skin color and lactose tolerance occurred, researchers say.

      

This research unexpectedly revealed that ancient Europeans started dairying thousands of years before they evolved genes to make the most of milk in adulthood, investigators added.
Scientists examined ancient DNA extracted from 13 individuals in archaeological burial sites unearthed during highway construction in the Great Hungarian Plain in Central Europe. This crossroads for Eastern and Western cultures experienced significant transformations in culture and technology known to have shaped European prehistory. The bones at the site span about 5,000 years, from 5,700 B.C. to 800 B.C., ranging across the Stone, Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages. [Image Gallery: Our Closest Human Ancestor Revealed]

PHOTOS: What Our Ancestors Looked Like

After several years of experimentation with a variety of kinds of bones, the researchers discovered the best place to recover ancient DNA for analysis in humans is the petrous bone, a pyramidal bone at the base of the skull. The name petrous comes from the Latin word "petrosus," meaning "stonelike." The petrous bone is the hardest bone in the human body and very dense, forming a protective case for the inner ear.
"The high-percentage DNA yield from the petrous bones exceeded those from other bones by up to 183-fold,"the study's joint senior author Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist at University College Dublin in Ireland, said in a statement. "This gave us anywhere between 12 percent and almost 90 percent human DNA in our samples, compared to somewhere between 0 percent and 20 percent obtained from teeth, fingers and rib bones."
The DNA the scientists recovered helped them systematically examine the skeletons. "Our findings show progression towards lighter skin pigmentation as hunter-and-gatherers and nonlocal farmers intermarried," Pinhasi said in the statement.
The scientists also found that great changes in prehistoric technology, such as the adoption of farming, and the first use of hard metals such as bronze and then iron, were each associated with the substantial influx of new people.
In the Neolithic or New Stone Age, ancient central Europeans did not look anything like modern central Europeans, "but were closer to Sardinians," or people from the Italian island of Sardinia, Pinhasi told Live Science. "With the Bronze Age, you get a total shift into populations that look more like Western Europeans, and in the Iron Age you get another shift, with people genetically coming from the East, such as the Caucasus or Asia. These shifts were probably associated with major migrations and population turnovers in Central Europe."

     

Surprisingly, Pinhasi and his colleagues found that ancient Central Europeans apparently remained intolerant to lactose, the natural sugar in the milk of mammals, until the Bronze Age, about 4,000 years after these people began dairying. Artifacts that archaeologists previously unearthed suggest ancient Europeans started dairying 7,500 years ago in the Neolithic period. Most of the world is lactose intolerant, unable to digest lactose as adults, and the evolution of the ability to break down this sugar in adulthood helped Europeans take advantage of animal milk, a highly nutritious food.

Paleo Diet May Have Included Sweets, Carbs

"These ancient Europeans would have raised domesticated animals such as cows, sheep and goats without having yet developed the genetic tolerance for drinking milk from mammals without problems," Pinhasi said.
Pinhasi suggested ancient Europeans may have practiced dairying "not to drink milk, but to consume milk products such as cheese and yogurt," he said. "The processes that make cheese and yogurt break down lactose. Nowadays, in the Caucasus region, most people eat cheese and yogurt, but milk drinking is not a big thing."
The scientists are now sequencing even more ancient human genomes dating back 13,000 years from the Caucasus and other parts of Europe "to find out about genetic diversity that existed before and after the Ice Age," Pinhasi said. "We are also analyzing ancient farmers to find out who the first farmers truly were."
The scientists detailed their findings online Oct. 21 in the journal Nature Communications.

Discovery News

Real Paleo Diet: Ancient Humans Ate Snails

By Tia Ghose

Archaeologists recently uncovered evidence of (a)a fireplace and (b) snail shells with evidence of burning in a rock shelter in Spain. The find, which dates to 30,000 years ago, suggests humans ate snails during the Paleolithic period. Credit: Fernández-López de Pablo et al.

Escargot is more than just a modern delicacy: Ancient humans who lived 30,000 years ago ate the mollusks too, a new archaeological excavation has revealed.
Hundreds of burnt snail shells were found near fireplaces along with tools and other animal remains in rock shelters along a cliff in Spain. The finding suggests Paleolithic people on the Iberian Peninsula ate snails more than 10,000 years earlier than those who lived in the neighboring Mediterranean region.
The snails probably didn't make up a calorically significant part of these Paleolithic people's diet, but may have provided key vitamins and nutrients, said study lead author Javier Fernández-López de Pablo, an archaeologist at the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social in Spain

Snail's pace
Neanderthals may have munched on sea slugs, but there isn't much evidence that modern humans ate land-based snails until about 20,000 years ago, Fernández said.
"Even though land snails are very present in paleolithic sites, the interpretation of snails as a food resource is very complicated," Fernández told Live Science.
For one, snails live in the dirt, so it's conceivable they accumulated naturally after dying there. And other predators that eat the mollusks, such as hedgehogs or birds, could also have left snail shells behind after eating the shells' occupants, Fernández said.
Paleo appetizer
Fernández and his colleagues were excavating a site in Benidorm, Spain, about three years ago when they came upon signs of ancient inhabitants. The site, called Cova de la Barriada, contained ancient fireplaces, stone tools, animal bones — and hundreds of snail shells close to the evidence of ancient cooking. The other animal bones found at the site appeared to have been intentionally fractured by people to extract the marrow, Fernández said.
The snail shells were burnt and all came from the same species, Iberus alonensis, which even today is a delicacy often found in Spanish dishes like paella, Fernández said.

Archaeologists recently found evidence of ancient human consumption of snails at a rock shelter in Spain called Cova de Barriada
Credit: Fernández-López de Pablo et al.

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The snail shells were also found along with charcoals of pine and juniper. In addition, the snails were all about the same size, indicating they were harvested when they were fully grown, at about 1 year old.
Together, the findings suggest the ancient inhabitants of the region ate the snails as a regular part of the diet. Snails are rich sources of vitamins A, B3, B6 and B12, and also provide a hearty helping of cholesterol, he said.
By harvesting only adults, the ancient people had developed a "sustainable" farming practice that, based on the size of snail shells found in multiple geologic layers, lasted for 4,000 years, Fernández said.
It's not clear why people were eating snails at this time and not earlier, but human cultures were going through a transition at this point, with the emergence of new artistic expression in cave paintings and living in larger settlements. So it's possible that society was also changing in ways that enabled them to use dietary resources in their environment more effectively, Fernández said.

http://www.livescience.com/47466-paleolithic-humans-ate-snails.html