Bee products were exploited continuously at least from the seventh millennium BC, according to a multinational team of scientists led by University of Bristol scientist Dr Mélanie Roffet-Salque.
Part of the name of pharaoh Thutmose II. Image credit: Przemyslaw ‘Blueshade’ Idzkiewicz.
The team analyzed chemical components on more than 6,000 samples of prehistoric pottery from more than 150 Old World archaeological sites.
The distinctive chemical signature of beeswax was detected at multiple Neolithic sites across Europe.
For example, beeswax was detected in cooking pots from an archaeological site in Turkey, dating to around 6,500 BC – the oldest evidence yet for the use of bee products by Neolithic farming communities.
Previous evidence from prehistoric rock art is inferred to show honey hunters and Pharaonic Egyptian murals show early scenes of beekeeping. However, the close association between early farmers and the honeybee remained uncertain.
“The association of humans with the honeybee predates post-industrial-revolution agriculture, as evidenced by the widespread presence of ancient Egyptian bee iconography dating to the Old Kingdom (approximately 2,400 BC),” Dr Roffet-Salque and co-authors said.
“There are also indications of Stone Age people harvesting bee products; for example, honey hunting is interpreted from rock art and a beeswax find in a pre-agriculturalist site.”
Alabaster vase inscribed with the name of Semerkhet, pharaoh of the first dynasty of Egypt, c. 2920 BC. Image credit: Iry-Hor / CC BY-SA 3.0.
“The most obvious reason for exploiting the honeybee would be for honey, as this would have been a rare sweetener for prehistoric people,” Dr Roffet-Salque explained.
“However, beeswax could have been used in its own right for various technological, ritual, cosmetic and medicinal purposes, for example, to waterproof porous ceramic vessels.”
The lack of evidence for beeswax use at Neolithic sites above the 57th parallel North points to an ecological limit to the natural occurrence of honeybees at that time.
“Our study is the first to provide unequivocal evidence, based solely on a chemical fingerprint, for the paleoecological distribution of an economically and culturally important animal,” said Prof. Richard Evershed, also form the University of Bristol, UK.
“It shows widespread exploitation of the honeybee by early farmers and pushes back the chronology of human-honeybee association to substantially earlier dates.”
The scientists describe their findings in the November 12 issue of the journal Nature.
_____
Mélanie Roffet-Salque et al. 2015. Widespread exploitation of the honeybee by early Neolithic farmers. Nature 527, 226-230; doi: 10.1038/nature15757
