Dirty 16,000-year-old dishes have revealed that Siberian hunters cooked hot meals of fish and bone marrow to help them survive the harshest seasons of the ice age.
Researchers analysed ancient fats and lipids that had been preserved on 28 pottery sherds from ice age archaeological sites along the Amur River, in eastern Russia.
They found that — along the Lower Amur — these particular pieces of the world’s oldest pottery was used for fish, most likely salmon and freshwater fish.
These findings match the pattern of usage seen in pots of the same age from Japan — suggesting that fish was becoming a key food in this period of climatic chaos.
In contrast, the team found that fragments from the middle Amur bore lipids from ruminant animals — likely from the boiling of bone marrow.
This marrow would have provided an important source of sustenance in such scarce times brought about by the colder climate.
The researchers also found that these variations in pottery usage was also reflected in the different manufacturing techniques used to create them.
Together, the findings suggest that groups of hunter-gatherers in East Asia independently developed pottery making during this challenging time.
Dirty 16,000-year-old dishes have revealed that Siberian hunters cooked hot meals of fish and bone marrow to help them survive the harshest seasons of the ice age. Pictured, some of the pottery sherds the researchers analysed from site along the Amur River in eastern Russia
‘This study illustrates the exciting potential of new methods in archaeological science: we can extract and interpret the remains of meals that were cooked in pots over 16,000 years ago,’ said archaeologist Oliver Craig of the University of York.
‘It is interesting that pottery emerges during these very cold periods and not during the comparatively warmer [periods] when forest resources, such as game and nuts, were more available.’
‘We are very pleased with these latest results,’ said paper author Shinya Shoda of the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties in Japan.
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