Palaeo what?

Having worked as an archaeologist for over a decade now, I sometimes forget that a lot of people are not aware of what it is archaeologists actually do. There is sometimes confusion between archaeology (studying humans in the past) and palaeontology (studying the stuff that came before humans). There can be a bit of overlap between the two. Some palaeontologists study fossils of the hominids that came before modern humans. Neanderthals for example are one of the earlier hominids, and the ones that most people have heard of. There was a period when modern humans and other hominids overlapped, so you can get palaeontologists and archaeologists working on similar things.

It's a bit of a running joke in archaeology, that the first thing you get asked about is dinosaurs, when in fact the dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago (66,000,000). Archaeology begins 3.3 million years ago, when the first tool using hominids appeared. Modern humans did not appear until roughly 200,000 years ago, in the middle Palaeolithic. So studying dinosaurs very firmly falls under palaeontology, not archaeology! When it comes to palaeodiet in the fitness community, I've come across several blogs which make jokes about cavemen having to run away from dinosaurs. Maybe it's the fault of the Flintstones. Humans and dinosaurs have never co-existed I'm afraid.

Palaeontology and palaeodiet sound similar because 'palaeo' comes from the Greek word 'palaios' meaning old or ancient. So the Palaeolithic means old Stone Age. When you look at a timescale showing the history of life on Earth, by far the biggest span of time falls under palaeontology. We humans have been around for a relatively short time. The popular use of palaeodiet refers to a supposed 'palaeolithic diet', but this period of human history actually covers a very long time span (about 2.5 million years) and a lot of dietary changes.

The Palaeolithic period (lasted for such a long time it is divided up into 3 parts, the early, middle and late Palaeolithic) becomes the Mesolithic (middle Stone Age). This is the transition between the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers and the Neolithic (new Stone Age), when people became sedentary. So if you talk about the early Palaeolithic, you are actually saying the 'early early Stone Age'.

To confuse things further, archaeologists studying ancient diets in any archaeological period, from the Palaeolithic to the Romans are said to study palaeodiet! By the time we get to the medieval period, the use of 'palaeodiet' shifts to just 'diet'. It's just not that ancient by this point. This is of course a generalisation - the shift from being mobile hunter-gatherers to settled farmers didn't happen everywhere in the world, and certainly not all at the same time. And in some cases archaeologists have found evidence of Palaeolithic hunter gatherer cultures building houses. Even when people became settled and started farming, they often still hunted as well. This is why studying palaeodiet is so fascinating - humans are a diverse lot. How and why have we changed our dietary habits?  How this linked in with other cultural changes? How does this vary in different parts of the world and why?

5 archaeological sites where ancient dietary evidence comes from fossil faeces

Last week I talked briefly about one of the more unusual ways that archaeologists study ancient diets, through looking at the contents of fossilized human faeces! Today for your reading pleasure, are 5 examples where fossil faeces (aka coprolite analysis) have given us insights into prehistoric diets around the world.

Desert Flowers and Grasshoppers: Pecos River, Rio Grande canyon Texas, dated 2800 - 1500 BP (AD 500).

The southwest USA has seen a huge amount of coprolite analysis. The dry environment and the fact that peoples occupied caves and rockshelters has meant that fossil faeces have preservation really well. One study found that human coprolites contained large amounts of zoophilous pollen - that is, pollen from plants which are pollinated by animals. This is interesting as pollen that is transported by animals doesn't get very far, and also the plants only produce small quantities of it. It is usually pollen that is transported by wind that we see more of, as it gets blown all over the place and it is produced in huge volumes. If you suffer from hayfever, it is very likely that it is wind transported pollen! So, human coprolites containing large quantities of animal transported pollen means that people were ingesting the flowers of these plants. The most common plant pollen was yucca, agave, sotol and anther, along with prickly pear cactus fruits, wild onion bulbs, goosefoot seeds and...grasshopper!

Mostly Maize, Some Small Mammals: Anasazi diet, Antelope House Arizona,  1500 - 500 BP (AD 500 - 1500).

This site is also located in a cave at the bottom of a canyon. Coprolites were examined for pollen, and also contained large amount of 'visible' particles. Pollen types included cattail and horsetail. Cattail pollen is highly nutritious, and still eaten today - you can forage for it yourself, or buy it online either as raw pollen or prepared into a protein rich flour. Maize, or corn, was found in 74% of the samples, either as whole kernels or milled. Even more interesting was the fact that the whole kernels and milled maize were never found together, which suggests that these made up two different types of 'cuisine' that were eaten on different occasions, or at different times of the year (milled maize could be stored, for example, and so could be eaten out of season). Other types of seeds found included amaranth, cactus, pine nuts, squash and physalis (you may have seen these in the supermarket - the weird little orange fruits with a papery case). Coprolites with bone fragments were found together with the maize kernels, maybe a maize and small mammal stew! These coprolites were also analysed for protein residues, which found a small number of samples tested positive for animal protein, including pronghorn, rabbit, deer, guinea pig/squirrel, cat and dog.

Lots of Rabbits: Dust Devil Cave, Utah, 8800 BC - 6800 BP

Another site where prickly pear was incredibly popular, along with chenopod seeds, other desert succulents, pinyon pine nuts, sunflower seeds, fragments of wild onion bulbs. A huge amount of rabbit bones were also found at this site, along with smaller quantities of rodents and unidentified small birds, and it is thought that these people focused their hunting efforts almost exclusively on the cottontail rabbit.

Bone Marrow: Catalhoyuk, a Neolithic 'town' in Turkey, 9400  - 8200 BP

Of course I had to mention Catalhoyuk, as it's the site I have worked on for over a decade, working on fossil faeces and rubbish heaps! It is one of the earliest large settlements in the world. Compared to the other sites above, we have a much wider range of dietary evidence from Catalhoyuk, because we have human skeletons, houses with food storage bins etc, so we can look at diet in lots of different ways. My own work has shown that some of the human coprolites have large angular fragments of bone in them. This is normally something that is associated with dog coprolites, as dogs chew on bone and ingest splintered fragments. Finding these splinters in human poop shows that people in the past had less qualms than many people do today about chewing on bone! It is possible that this was done deliberately to 'suck' or otherwise remove the marrow from the bones.

Lots of Meat, Also Veg: Neanderthals at El Salt, Spain, c.50,000 BP.

Rather than looking at the remains of seeds and bones inside the coprolites, these archaeologists looked at invisible chemical residues. They found that the Neanderthal diet was meat heavy, as has always been suspected, but also that plants were a significant component. So they were very much omnivorous, much like modern humans.


These are just a few examples. Basically, prehistoric diets were incredibly varied, and often based on what was available in the local environment on  a seasonal basis. Where in the world you are obviously dictates the types of plants and animals that were available to you. Some groups hardly ate any meat, others relied heavily on one type of animal. Some ate mostly wild plants, others engaged in cultivation, from small scale horticulture to more intense agriculture, or had a mix of food strategies that included both wild and 'managed' resources. Even in the permanent settlement of Catalhoyuk, people ate a mix of 'domestic' and wild resources.

desert succulents, parched Sporobolus (drop-

seed) caryopses, sunflower achenes, wild onion

bulbs and pin

˜

on pine nuts

Palaeodiet from Palaeofaeces

What?

Yes, you read that right, there is such a word as palaeofaeces. It's a word archaeologists sometimes use to refer to ancient human shit. It's pretty common knowledge that archaeologists work with human skeletons, so it's not that much weirder that they look at poop, right? Another word that is more commonly used is coprolite. Technically it means fossilised poop, and is the word for dinosaur poo that has turned to rock, cause it's like millions of years old. Ancient human poo isn't really old enough to be properly fossilized, but coprolite sounds much more polite than palaeofaeces doesn't it. Anyway, why I am posting about ancient poop? It's something I've talked about a lot over on my archaeology blog, and that's because it is probably one of the most useful things that we can examine in order to understand what people ate in the past. It can also tell us a lot about the gastro-intestinal health of ancient populations. So if we want to learn something about 'real' palaeodiets, it's a fun place to start.

What can you learn from ancient poo?

Just like a doctor can ask for a stool sample to check the health of your digestive tract, archaeologists can look as these little packages to get an idea of how healthy people were in the past, and what they were eating. Although a lot of the nutrients that you eat are absorbed by the body in the process of digestion, it's not a completely efficient process, and bits of the food and nutrients make their way through the body until they emerge at the other end, in an amorphous brown lump that we are all familiar with. This can include stuff you can see like fragments of bone, parasite eggs, bits of partially digested seeds and plant fibres, and also 'invisible' stuff, like chemical residues of fat and protein. We use pretty much the same tests that a doctor would to determine how much of this stuff is present, and where it came from. Unlike many of the other methods that archaeologists use to study ancient diets, looking at the stuff bundled up in a coprolite is a direct indicator of what someone was eating, over a very short period, probably a few days, along with an indication of their health. If the coprolite is well preserved, you can even slice it up into little bits to look at how the diet varied between each individual meal!

It's a bit like a detective game - not everything makes it's way through the digestive tract. Some stuff survives better than others (corn cobs anyone). So we have to be careful when we interpret the results. Ideally we look at lots of samples to get an idea of variations and whatnot. So finding ancient toilets is way more exciting than finding the next Stonehenge or some boring old precious metal object. If you're interested in palaeodiets anyway.

Next time...what sort of stuff do we know about palaeodiets that we learned from looking at palaeofaeces?

The famous Lloyds Bank turd - Viking coprolite

Palaeo!

As this is the first post of a new blog, I'll begin by explaining a bit about me, and the name of the blog. I am not new to blogging - over at my other blog, Castles and Coprolites, I've been blogging there for 5 years now, mostly work related. I am an archaeologist, I work at Newcastle University, and I blog about my research, field work and topics related to academia. Archaeology is a very diverse subject, and my own work comes under the heading of environmental archaeology, which means I look at how people interacted with the environment in the past, how they selected and used different resources, and the impact this had on the environment. One of the ways I do this is by looking at ancient diets. What types of food were people consuming, how did it relate to what was available in the environment, and how does it link in with other things that rely on environmental resources, such as cooking and fuel use. And also, how did all of this vary in different parts of the world, and how did it change over time?

So this is where 'palaeo' comes from. In archaeology the word 'palaeo' means old or ancient. So when I look at what the environment was like in the past, it's the palaeoenvironment, when I look at what people were eating in the past, it's palaeodiet. But the reason I started this new blog is because of my non-work interests. At the beginning of 2016 I decided to take up bodybuilding. I'll be posting more in future how and why I made that decision! I've learnt that a huge part of weight and strength training is diet, more than I ever realized. There is a lot of talk in the fitness world about Palaeo Diet, based on the types of foods that are presumed to have been eaten by early humans, but largely separate from archaeological research as far as I can tell. This seems to be based largely on meant and fish, with certain vegetables and fruits, and excluding cereals, dairy and processed food. I've been fascinated how popular the Palaeo Diet is, and how it relates to my academic research. There has been a lot of criticism from archaeologists about the justification for Palaeo Diet not being wrong, but that is not the point of this blog. I am more interested in why people are into Palaeo and the mechanisms behind why it really works (or possibly not, for everyone?). So a lot of what I'll be talking about in this blog is related to the modern idea of Palaeo Diet, in what ways it relates to the 'real' paleodiets that we know about through archaeological research, and also how it differs. Importantly I'll be thinking about geographic variability. We have a tendency to talk about the past as if everything was the same everywhere, which is obviously not true today and wasn't true in the past either!

As I learn more about fitness and nutrition, I'll be incorporating this into the blog as well. So basically this is a place for me to discuss my thoughts informally about diet, fitness and nutrition, with less of the serious stuff about academia!