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5,700-year-old ‘Chewing Gum’ Indicates Danish Woman Had Dark Skin, Blue Eyes and STDs


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Actual woman’s remains haven’t been found, but analysis of a piece of birch tar she chewed shows she was of hunter-gatherer stock, dark with blue eyes and ate duck

 

The entire genome of a female who lived in Denmark 5,700 years ago has been sequenced, from a piece of prehistoric “chewing gum.”

 

It’s impossible to know whether she was a girl or full-grown woman, but like other early Europeans, as we know now, she likely had dark skin, dark hair and blue eyes, Theis Jensen of the University of Copenhagen and a host of co-authors reported Tuesday in Nature Communications.

 

The international team also managed to elucidate from the masticated bit of birch pitch found at Syltholm, on the island of Lolland, that the prehistoric lady seems to have hosted the herpes species known as Epstein-Barr, as well as the bacteria that causes gonorrhea. She may have suffered the ravages of gum disease as well, say the scientists based on analyzing nonhuman DNA in the birch tar, which is indicative of her oral microbiome (the bacteria living in her mouth).

 

The oral microbiome also included – among a riot of germs – Porphyromonas gingivalis, Tannerella forsythia and Treponema denticola, which cause periodontal disease. Another microbe detected in the gum was Pneumococcus, the cause of pneumonia.

 

Furthermore, the genome analysis indicates that the woman was related to Western hunter-gatherers from mainland Europe and doesn’t evince ancestry from hunter-gatherers closer to home in central Scandinavia, or Neolithic farmers, though they seem to have reached that area when she was alive. Possibly she came from afar or originated in peoples who migrated northward to Scandinavia as the Ice Age waned, but hadn’t mixed with other peoples yet.

 

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The piece of 5,700 year old birch bark tar chewing gum 

 

The “birch pitch” she was chewing is the same as the birch bark tar that prehistoric peoples (including Neanderthals) were using tens and hundreds of thousands of years earlier to glue stone axes to handles (a technique known as hafting).

 

There has been quite the debate over how tricky it is to make birch bark glue. Originally, it was thought to require advanced anaerobic firing. More recently, though, science has demonstrated that birch tar can be made by taking the bark, heating on a rock, and scraping off the pitch. That’s it. Scraped off the rock, the tar can be used to glue something – or, we learn, to chew.

 

sauce

 

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