Ancient World Review

Neanderthal Cannibalism

Report from 2016.

Notes: "Grisly evidence has been uncovered by researchers that Neanderthals butchered their own kind some 40,000 years ago, opening up many possibilities regarding the way late Neanderthals dealt with their dead in this last period before they died out." Source: Science Daily (2016).

Archaeologists have been uncovering evidence of Neanderthal cannibalism for years. Back in 2006, for instance, Live Science reported that "Neanderthals suffered periods of starvation and may have supplemented their diet through cannibalism, according to a study of remains from northwest Spain." At the time, further evidence had also been discovered at other sites in Europe, according to paleobiologists who said that cannibalism "was general among Neanderthal populations,"

In 2013, the Independent reported the discovery of "the remains of a group of Neanderthals in northern Spain who were butchered and eaten by a group of local cannibals." According to this report, which may have been a follow-up to the earlier discovery in Spain, the Neanderthals "butchered their rivals, breaking open their skulls and bones to extract the marrow," apparently eating them raw. The bones were found back in 1994.

The extinction of the Neanderthals is still a mystery, but one theory says that they were hunted, killed and eaten by the humans who eventually replaced them. This idea is based on the discovery of a Neanderthal jawbone which was "apparently butchered by modern humans," according to the Guardian (2009). The researcher responsible for the theory argued that the bone "provides crucial evidence that humans attacked Neanderthals, and sometimes killed them, bringing back their bodies to caves to eat or to use their skulls or teeth as trophies."

This theory has been widely dismissed, however. According to Live Science (2013), "no clear evidence suggests modern humans ate Neanderthals, much less that they did so enough to drive Neanderthals to extinction, despite recent claims from scientists in Spain."  From what I can tell, most researchers currently believe that the Neanderthals vanished due to natural causes rather than some kind of prehistoric genocide. The evidence for Neanderthal cannibalism seems to be pretty clear, though, and I find it hard to believe that early humans didn't occasionally practice it themselves.

2200-Year-Old Winery Discovered In Egypt's Nile Delta

Video from 2012.

"Archaeologists recently uncovered ancient storage rooms in a 2,000-year-old winery, at a site in Egypt's Nile Delta to the north of Cairo." Source: Live Science (Jan. 2019).

"Inside these rooms — which appeared to be climate-controlled for keeping wine — archaeologists also found coins, pots used in winemaking and other pottery objects, said officials with the Ministry of Antiquities for the Arab Republic of Egypt ..."

Note: "Wine played an important role in ancient Egyptian ceremonial life. A thriving royal winemaking industry was established in the Nile Delta following the introduction of grape cultivation from the Levant to Egypt c. 3000 BC. The industry was most likely the result of trade between Egypt and Canaan during the early Bronze Age, commencing from at least the 27th-century BC Third Dynasty, the beginning of the Old Kingdom period. Winemaking scenes on tomb walls, and the offering lists that accompanied them, included wine that was definitely produced in the delta vineyards. By the end of the Old Kingdom, five distinct wines, probably all produced in the Delta, constituted a canonical set of provisions for the afterlife." (Wikipedia)

The Hallucinogenic Honey That Poisoned A Greek Army

"When bees feed on the pollen of rhododendron flowers, the resulting honey can pack a hallucinogenic punch." Source: Atlas Obscura.

"It’s called mad honey, and it has a slightly bitter taste and a reddish color. More notably, a few types of rhododendrons ... contain grayanotoxin, which can cause dramatic physiological reactions in humans and animals. Depending on how much a person consumes, reactions can range from hallucinations and a slower heartbeat to temporary paralysis and unconsciousness."

"The intoxicating effects of mad honey have been known for thousands of years. Not surprisingly, there have been many famous episodes of human inebriation caused by its consumption. Xenophon, Aristotle, Strabo, Pliny the Elder and Columella all document the results of eating this 'maddening' honey, believed to be from the pollen and nectar of Rhododendron luteum and Rhododendron ponticum. According to Xenophon, an invading Greek army was accidentally poisoned by harvesting and eating the local Asia Minor honey, but they all made a quick recovery with no fatalities. Having heard of this incident, and realizing that foreign invaders would be ignorant of the dangers of the local honey, King Mithridates later used the honey as a deliberate poison when Pompey's army attacked the Heptakometes [1] in Asia Minor in 69 BCE. The Roman soldiers became delirious and nauseated after being tricked into eating the toxic honey, at which point Mithridates's army attacked." Source: Wikipedia.

[1] "In about 65 BCE, Pompey's army was approaching Colchis.  Mithridates' allies there, the Heptakometes, were described by Strabo as 'utterly savage' mountain barbarians, dwelling in tree forts and living on 'the flesh of wild animals and nuts.'  The tribe was feared for attacking wayfarers - suddenly leaping down on them like leopards from their tree houses.  The Heptakometes may have received specific orders from Mithridates on how to ambush the Roman army.  What we do know for a fact is that they gathered up great numbers of wild honeycombs dripping with toxic honey and placed them all along Pompey's route.  The Roman soldiers stopped to enjoy the sweets and immediately lost their senses.  Reeling and babbling, the men collapsed with vomiting and diarrhea and lay on the ground unable to move.  The Heptakometes easily wiped out about one thousand of Pompey's men." - Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor. (Source: Roman Times)

Taking mad honey sounds like a dangerous way to get loaded. According to the Drug Classroom, "[t]he core symptoms of mad honey poisoning include nausea, vomiting, salivation, headache, blurred vision, sweating, weakness, circumoral paresthesia, tongue numbing, fainting, drowsiness, drunkenness, tingling, and seizures." The toxins in the honey can also cause "1st to 3rd degree heart block, asystole, and myocardial infarction."

Ancient Beekeeping & Bee Divination

People have been collecting honey from bees since the Stone Age. According to Wikipedia, "[c]ollecting honey from wild bee colonies is one of the most ancient human activities and is still practiced by aboriginal societies in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. In Africa, honeyguide birds have evolved a mutualist relationship with humans, leading them to hives and participating in the feast. This suggests honey harvesting by humans may be of great antiquity. Some of the earliest evidence of gathering honey from wild colonies is from rock paintings, dating to around Upper Paleolithic (13,000 BCE). Gathering honey from wild bee colonies is usually done by subduing the bees with smoke and breaking open the tree or rocks where the colony is located, often resulting in the physical destruction of the nest."

Honey was an important commodity in the ancient world. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised), "bee-keeping had the same importance for antiquity that sugar production has now. Honey-gathering preceded the culture of bees which began perhaps in the mesolithic period. The evidence for bee-keeping in classical antiquity is mainly literary, ranging in time from Hesiod onwards and in content from incidental allusions to codifications of the practical experience of Greek, Roman, and Carthaginian bee-masters."

Then, as now, honey was used both as a food and a medicine. Note: Honey is currently used as an antibiotic and a treatment for coughs, wounds and burns. (Wikipedia) The Egyptians and other people in the Middle East also used honey to embalm the dead in some cases.

Bees, along with other insects, were also used for divination, a form of augury known as entomomancy. Pliny the Elder describes the practice in a section on bees and beekeeping in Book XI of his monumental Natural History:

"Bees provide signs of future events both private and public, when a cluster of them hangs down in houses and temples -- portents that have often been presaged by momentous events. They settled on the mouth of Plato when he was a young child and foretold the charm of his very pleasing eloquence. They settled in Drusus' camp at the time of our great victory at Arbalo; indeed augurs, who always think the presence of bees is a bad omen, are not invariably correct." -- from Book XI, Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, Penguin Classics.

Note: "The oldest known honey remains were found in the country of Georgia. Archaeologists found honey remains on the inner surface of clay vessels unearthed in an ancient tomb, dating back some 4,700–5,500 years. In ancient Georgia, several types of honey were buried with a person for their journey into the afterlife, including linden, berry, and meadow-flower varieties." (Wikipedia)

Report from 2012.

Giant Prehistoric Bird Ate Neanderthal Child's Bones

"One Neanderthal child had a very bad day about 115,000 years ago. The child died — that much is certain — and the bones were gulped down and digested by a giant, prehistoric bird, according to archaeologists in Poland." Source: Live Science.

"However, it's unclear whether the giant bird killed the child before the gruesome feast or whether the child died from another cause before the bird scavenged the remains, the archaeologists said."

Note: The bones, discovered in Ciemna Cave, one of several caves in Ojcow National Park in Poland, are "the oldest known human remains ever to be found in Poland." The bird that ate the child's bones isn't identified, which is too bad. I've got this picture of a Neanderthal kid wandering off from its cave and getting gobbled up by a huge terror bird, but the terror birds, unfortunately, lived in South America during a different time period.

Related: 10 Dangerous Prehistoric Birds.

Medieval Germans Riddled With Tapeworms

Video from 2014. Do not view while eating.

"Sifting through preserved poop from a medieval port city in Germany, scientists discovered that the town's inhabitants were riddled with tapeworms." Source: Live Science.

"The discovery also revealed a fascinating hidden record of dietary changes during that period, according to a new study."

Note: "Intestinal parasites such as tapeworms and roundworms were common in Europe before the advent of modern sanitation," according to Nature. "Adrian Smith at the University of Oxford, UK, and his colleagues extracted DNA from parasite eggs in soil samples from graveyards and former latrines. The samples, collected from archaeological sites in what are now the United Kingdom, Germany, the Czech Republic and Switzerland, ranged from 350 to 5,600 years old."

Cannibalism At Gough's Cave In England

Video from 2014.

"Engravings on a human bone from a prehistoric archaeological site in a cave in southern England shows that human cannibals ate their prey and then performed ritualistic burials with the remains, scientists said on Wednesday (Aug. 9, 2017)." Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation (2017).

"The forearm bone appears to have been disarticulated, filleted, chewed, and then engraved with a zig-zag design before being broken to extract bone marrow, said scientists from Britain's Natural History Museum who conducted the analysis."

Note: The bones were found in "Gough's Cave [Somerset, England], thought to be from Britain's Palaeolithic period ..." The fact that some kind of cannibalism, possibly ritualistic, was practiced in the cave has been known for some time.

Video from 2009.

Wine And The Barbarian's Beverage

Notes: "The alcoholic beverage of choice for both the ancient Greeks and Romans was wine, customarily distilled with water, except perhaps in the case of the Macedonians who were reputed to drink their wine akratos, or unmixed. Distilled spirits, such as brandy and whisky, had not yet been invented, and beer was looked upon as a swinish potation better left to barbarians." Source: Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised).

Both the Greeks and Romans were aware of the destructive effects of excessive drinking and chronic intoxication, according to the OCD. "In the Odyssey, Homer makes a speaker note that wine is a bane to those who drink it excessively and identifies overindulgence as the cause of the Centaur Eurytion's vile behavior. In Hades, Homer's Elpenor admits that heavy drinking was a key factor in his fatal plunge from Circe's roof."

There were actually two centaurs named Eurytion and they were both lushes who came to bad ends after making violent threats and lusting after human females. As for Elpenor, he was one of Odysseus's companions on the island of Circe. He got plastered and decided to spend the night on Circe's roof, only to fall off in a drunken stupor and break his neck.

The Romans were familiar with alcoholism as well. "In On the Nature of Things, Lucretius writes that wine's fury disturbs the soul, debilitates the body and provokes quarrels. The younger Seneca warns that habitual drunkenness so weakens the mind that its consequences are felt long after the drinking has stopped. He notes that some men become so tolerant of wine that even though they are inebriated they appear to be sober." (OCD)

According to the OCD, several famous Romans were accused of being drunks. They include Sulla, Cato, Mark Antony (no surprise there), Cicero's son, Augustus' daughter, Julia, "and the emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Vitellius and Commodus."

As noted above, beer was known as the "Barbarian's Beverage" in the ancient world, but the stuff the barbarians swilled didn't have much in common with the distilled beers we have today:

"We know of ancient European beverages combining various fruits, or fruits and honey, fruits and cereals, honey and cereals, or even fruits, honey, and cereals. Furthermore, numerous types of plants, spices and other substances (such as narcotic drugs) could be added to the beverage before or after fermentation." Source: The Barbarian's Beverage: A History of Beer in Ancient Europe, by Max Nelson (PDF). This book is also available on Amazon.

The history of guzzling and overindulging in various fermented drinks probably goes all the way back to the Stone Age. It appears to be a natural human impulse. Even Conan the Barbarian couldn't resist the urge to get hammered after a long day fighting wizards and smashing heads.

The Roman Grain Trade

Note: This entire lecture series should play automatically, but if it doesn't, the rest of the series can be found here.

"For all of the glory and grandeur of Ancient Rome, the Roman economy never developed into anything terribly complex compared to modern economies. Ancient Rome was an agrarian and slave based economy whose main concern was feeding the vast number of citizens and legionaries who populated the Mediterranean region. Agriculture and trade dominated Roman economic fortunes, only supplemented by small scale industrial production." Source: "Ancient Roman Economy," United Nations of Roma Victrix.

According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised), "The growth of Rome to a city of perhaps 250,000 in the time of the Gracchi and of up to one million under Augustus, far outstripping the productive capacity of her hinterlands, created an unprecedented demand for imported foodstuffs." The regular distribution of "a set monthly ration of grain at a set price for adult male citizen residents" was established by the populari Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, later assassinated for his reforms, and the ration was made free by P. Clodius Pulcher in 58 BC.

The Gracchi brothers were representatives of the lower class who attempted to make reforms benefiting the common people. Both were murdered by the ruling aristocracy for (among other things) their land reforms which would have had a big impact on the patrician's power and incomes. This conflict between the commoners and the rapacious nobility still continues to this day.

The emperor Augustus stabilized the number of residents entitled to the grain dole "at or below 200,000" in 2 BC. "[The] public supply, drawing on the grain paid to the state as rent or tax in Sicily, Africa and (from 30 BC) Egypt, helped the privileged minority who held tickets of entitlement, which could be inherited or sold. But the monthly ration did not meet a family's need for grain, and the tickets did not necessarily go to the poor." (OCD)

Sounds a lot like our modern welfare system. In later years, this public dole, combined with the construction of the new Colosseum, led to the development of the "bread and circuses" system for controlling (or trying to control) the population of Rome and made the grain supply of Egypt critical to the survival of the city.

Even the state couldn't meet the huge demand for grain in a city the size of Rome, however, and this created all sorts of problems. "State grain met no more than a portion of the city's annual grain needs," according to the OCD ('Trade, Roman,' p. 1537).  "The rest had to be supplied by the free market. Furthermore, the importation of the state grain depended upon private traders, who in times of crisis had to be offered considerable incentives to involve themselves in the trade."

World's "Oldest Brewery" Found In Israel

"Archaeologists have found what they believe is the world's oldest site for alcohol production, a study said Thursday, adding the beer-like beverage may have been served in ceremonies some 13,000 years ago." Source: AFP.

"The site is located in the Raqefet cave south of Haifa in today's northern Israel that also served as a burial site for the Natufian people."

Note: Flowers and plants were used to decorate the cave burials. According to Science Daily (2013), "[t]he earliest evidence of using flower beds for burial, dating back to 13,700 years ago, was discovered in Raqefet Cave in Mt. Carmel in northern Israel. In four different graves from the Natufian period, dating back to 13,700-11,700 years ago, dozens of impressions of Salvia plants and other species of sedges and mints (the Lamiaceae family), were found under human skeletons. 

Video from 2013.