Found: Milk Residue That Proves Ancient Europeans Used Cute-as-Heck Baby Bottles

[Judi Lynn]

The clay vessels are shaped like mythical animals.
BY REINA GATTUSO
OCTOBER 1, 2019



Archaeologists found these Late Bronze Age feeding vessels in Vösendorf, Austria. COURTESY OF ENVER-HIRSCH, WIEN MUSEUM

FOR DECADES, ARCHAEOLOGISTS EXCAVATING ANCIENT children’s graves in Germany and Austria were puzzled by a set of artifacts: small, rounded vessels, some with handles, and some with designs that looked like the ears and feet of unrecognizable creatures. “We think of [them] as mythical animals,” says Julie Dunne, a Senior Research Associate in chemistry at the University of Bristol, whose team recently analyzed several of the vessels, which date from 1200 BC to 450 BC.

While each vessel was unique, they shared a common feature: All of them had some kind of opening that, like a sippy cup, seemed child-friendly. Archaeologists assumed the objects were ancient baby bottles, but they couldn’t rule out that they were used by the elderly or people with illnesses.

Thanks to the work of Dunne’s team, researchers are now nearly certain that the bottles were intended for babies. To determine what the vessels had contained, Dunne’s team used organic-residue analysis, drilling a small amount of dust from the objects to find and analyze particles from ancient food. “Basically, whatever you were cooking in your pot 5,000 years ago, traces of that remain,” says Dunne.



Feeding vessels from the late Bronze and early Iron Ages found in Znojmo (Czech Republic), Harting (Bavaria, Germany), Franzhausen-Kokoron (Austria), Batina (Croatia), and Statzendorf (Austria), c. 1200-600 BC. COURTESY OF KATHARINA REBAY-SALISBURY

In this case, Dunne’s team found traces of lipids from ruminant milk. Ruminants are a category of mammal that includes cows, sheep, and goats, and the presence of their milk indicates a farming society. These results confirmed scientists’ hunch that the fanciful vessels had been used to feed infants, and offered evidence that Europeans were weaning babies with animal milk as far back as 1200 B.C. “It tells us what babies are being fed at that time, and we didn’t know that,” says Dunne. The findings are also an example of one way the shift from hunting to farming enabled the “Neolithic population explosion.” By supplementing breast milk with milk from domesticated animals, ancient mothers were able to bear and feed more children.

More:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/did-ancient-babies-use-bottles

[Judi Lynn]

1. Ancient sippy cup may hold clues about agriculture's spread in Europe

FUTURE ARCHAEOLOGISTS WILL JUDGE YOUR DIRTY DISHES, PART XXVII —
Ancient sippy cup may hold clues about agriculture’s spread in Europe
Earlier weaning thanks to ruminant milk could have increased ancient birth rates.
KIONA N. SMITH - 10/2/2019, 11:46 AM

A recent study found that prehistoric babies drank milk from ceramic sippy cups, including some with cute animal motifs. Lest you be overwhelmed by the cuteness, there's a heartbreaking side to that discovery: Bronze and Iron Age parents buried their dead infants with their clay sippy cups.

A team of archaeologists found microscopic traces of livestock milk in three of the containers: two from Iron Age graves in Germany dating between 800 and 450 BCE, and a broken one from a much earlier Bronze Age grave nearby. The results suggest that feeding babies milk from livestock may have helped early European farming populations grow and expand.

Not kidding around
Archaeologists have reconstructed surprising details of ancient people’s lives, but they still know relatively little about how infants and children in the ancient past lived. “Infants and children were mainly ignored in archaeology until about 20 years ago,” anthropologist Sian Halcrow of the University of Otago, who was not involved in the study, told Ars Technica. “Research projects that are interested in children are starting to re-examine previous assumptions about activities and objects in archaeology—some items that were thought to be ritualistic are in fact child toys.”

That may sound like child’s play—or at least like a really esoteric research interest. But if we want to understand the growth and expansion of ancient populations, we need to understand how (and when) ancient people fed and weaned their babies.

More:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/ancient-sippy-cup-may-hold-clues-about-agricultures-spread-in-europe/

[lillypaddle]

2. This is amazing!

Wow.