New research suggests humans and bees have had a relationship since the Stone Age.
In the past, scientists have discovered prehistoric rock art depicting honey hunting and Pharaonic Egyptian murals depicting ancient beekeeping, but the association between honeybees and early farmer has remained a mystery, the University of Bristol reported. Now, scientists have discovered chemical evidence of beeswax in the pottery vessels of the first farmers of Europe.
"The lack of a fossil record of the honeybee means it's ecologically invisible for most of the past 10,000 years. Although evidence from ancient Egyptian murals and prehistoric rock art suggests mankind's association with the honeybee dates back over thousands of years, when and where this association emerged has been unknown - until now," said study leader professor Richard Evershed.
The findings were made at multiple Neolithic sites across Europe, suggesting beekeeping was fairly widespread. Beeswax was found in one cooking pot from an archaeological site in Turkey, dating to the seventh millennium B.C., making it the oldest evidence of beekeeping known to science.
"The most obvious reason for exploiting the honeybee would be for honey, as this would have been a rare sweetener for prehistoric people. 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," said Mélanie Roffet-Salque, lead author of the paper.
The researchers noted evidence of ancient beekeeping was not found north of Scotland and Fennoscandia, which provides insight into ancient honeybee distribution.
"Our study is the first to provide unequivocal evidence, based solely on a chemical 'fingerprint', for the palaeoecological distribution of an economically and culturally important animal. It shows widespread exploitation of the honeybee by early farmers and pushes back the chronology of human-honeybee association to substantially earlier dates," Roffet-Salque concluded.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Nature.
