Philistines had a taste for distant food, a fossil toothpick appears

Researchers have long agreed that the New Testament story of the Three Wise Men reveals a successful trade at a distance that brought oil and resins from the Arabian Sea and marked further east into an area. of the Mediterranean Sea in Roman times. But an astonishing new discovery reveals that the ancient inhabitants of what is now Israel enjoyed fruit and spices from South Asia as early as 3,500 years ago.

A recent study of a fossil dental record from more than a dozen skeletons dating from the Middle Bronze to the early Iron Age (ca. 1500-1100 BC) revealed evidence for bananas, turmeric, and soybeans – all crops grown in the south. Asia at the time.

Finds, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, add artistic and archaeological evidence showing that ancient Mediterranean civilizations imported everything from chickens to black pepper and vanilla from as far away as India and Indonesia.

“We once thought that people got their food locally and imported precious stones from far away places,” says co-author Philipp Stockhammer, an archaeologist at Ludwig Maximilian University. in Munich. “But even in the Bronze Age they are very similar to us, taking in the food from all over. ”

Tooth calculus is the hard plaque that accumulates on teeth. Until recently, it was thought to be rubbish scraped from ancient symbols and thrown away. But recent discoveries have shown it to be a rich source of information that captures everything from old DNA to bacteria and proteins.

“If you stopped brushing your teeth, in 2,000 years I could tell what you were eating,” Stockhammer says.

To find out what people in the Levant ate in ancient times, an international team analyzed a record from the mouth of 16 skeletons. Some of the remains have been excavated in Megiddo, an ancient city better known by its Biblical name, Armageddon. Megiddo prospered in the Bronze Age, a fact that was revealed in the great burials sampled for the research, but lacked the great wealth and imperial reach of his great neighbors. “He was rich and well-connected,” Stockhammer says, “but not a major player – nothing compares to Egypt, or Mesopotamia.”

Although dental calculus from high-class graves in Megiddo showed that people there ate a lot of grains, including wheat and oats, and fruits as dates, they also ate food from far away places. further away. Samples from several people found evidence of eating soybeans and the spicy orange turmeric – both a crop native to South and East Asia that archaeologists did not consider to be familiar with human tables in the ancient region of Mediterranean.

“Even from these small number of samples, we can see something that you might not have expected at that time,” said Matthew Collins, a protein expert from the University of Copenhagen, who was not involved in the study.

The researchers also extracted calculus from the teeth of people buried around 1100 BC at a nearby settlement site called Tell Erani, which archaeologists have linked to the so-called Philistines in the Bible. Tell Erani’s simplest offerings feature a place with less richness, and the authors wondered if there would be less exotic imports as well. Their results turned off traces of sesame, which were also present in samples from Megiddo.

While sesame oil, paste, and seeds are all common items in Levantine food today, the plant is native to South Asia. Archaeologists had found sesame seeds in the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, who was buried around 1400 BC, but many researchers doubted that sesame was common in the local diet long after that.

The most remarkable dental discovery, however, came from a man in his 50s who was buried at Tell Erani: a protein that stimulates ripening in bananas. “[The Tell Erani burials] they are very humble funerals, with no evidence of an elite group, ”Stockhammer says. “It doesn’t look like the king is his first banana. ”

Dental calculus is a valuable tool for identifying foods that are frequently or very rarely preserved in most antiquarian settings, such as spices and oils. Although recognized as a mainstream of ancient trade routes, “these two types of food are virtually invisible in the archeological record,” says co-author Christina Warinner, a paleogeneticist at Harvard University and the Max Institute. Planck for the Study of Human History in Jena, Germany. . “This will allow us to see high economic value foods that leave no trace,” such as rare sesame and soybean oil and exotic fruits such as bananas.

In the case of bananas, archaeological evidence is particularly difficult to come through: The domestic fruit is seedless, and its soft flesh rots quickly. That is why it is unlikely that lumps of bananas were sent to Megiddo. Instead, people there might have been indulging in and eating dried banana chips, which would have easily survived a long voyage.

Evidence that researchers can now escape from a fossil tooth block, plant proteins – unlike animal DNA, milk proteins, or the strongest microscopic crystals found in the tight shells and grain stalls – will include they break down easily. As a result, they are rarely preserved on dental calculus, leaving the misconception that milk, meat, and porridge have taken control of the old table. The researchers used a new method to extract more protein from the calculus, and spent more time than previous studies comparing what they found to libraries of plant proteins looking for matches.

The researchers believe that it is very likely that more Mediterranean residents enjoyed plant foods such as sesame and bananas, but the proteins were not locked in their block or did not survive. they live in the ages past. “We only get the top of the iceberg,” Stockhammer says. “This does not mean that only one person ate bananas, but that there is only one where sufficient evidence is preserved. ”

Since it is difficult to tell when a dental calculus was formed, it is also possible that the Tell Erani banana eater was a merchant or sailor who ate the fruit while traveling in Asia before he died off the shores of the Mediterranean – an equally remarkable testament to prehistoric long-distance travel.

This new evidence contributes to a growing understanding that the Bronze Age was remarkably global, with long-distance trade links stretching from China to the Mediterranean. “It’s no longer a surprise,” said Haifa University archaeologist Ayelet Gilboa, director of the Zinman Institute of Archeology at Haifa University, who was not involved in the study. “Over the last decade there has been a transformation of our views on long-distance trading in prehistory.”

Five years ago, for example, when Gilboa published research showing that cinnamon was found in jars found at a site near Megiddo, “people said it was impossible,” Gilboa says. “But as we’ve dug deeper, the evidence seems to have been there – but nobody bothered to pay attention.”

“We now have so much evidence, starting in the second millennium BC, at least, that goods moved over long distances,” she said. “This shows that small societies operated as part of a large network. ”