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 Scientists said on Wednesday they have found evidence of beeswax
in pottery made by Stone Age people from early farming cultures in
Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, including in cooking pots
from a site in eastern Turkey dating to about 8,500 years ago.
"The distinctive chemical fingerprint of beeswax was detected at
multiple Neolithic sites across Europe, indicating just how
widespread the association between humans and honeybees was in
prehistoric times," organic geochemist Mélanie Roffet-Salque of the
University of Bristol in Britain said.
The beeswax was present in the pottery because these people may have
been using honey, which bears traces of beeswax, or coating the
inside of pots with beeswax for waterproofing, Roffet-Salque said.
"It is clear that Stone Age people knew their environment very well
and were exploiting various natural resources such as beeswax, but
also tree resins and tars," Roffet-Salque added.
 The most obvious reason for making use of the honeybee would be for
honey, "a rare sweetener for prehistoric people," Roffet-Salque
said.
"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 or soften brittle birch bark
tar to make glue," Roffet-Salque said.
Honey could not be detected directly because it is mainly composed
of sugars that would not survive thousands of years at
archaeological sites. "Detecting beeswax in pots allows us to say
that early farmers were exploiting hive products: beeswax and
honey," Roffet-Salque said.
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The ancient Egyptian murals, prehistoric rock art and other evidence
had already shown humankind's use of the honeybee dated back many
millennia, but how long and how widespread had been uncertain.
The researchers examined chemical compounds trapped in the clay of
more than 6,000 potsherds from more than 150 Old World sites.
Pottery examined from more northerly sites, specifically above the
57th parallel, for example from Scotland and Scandinavia, were found
to lack beeswax.
This suggests honeybees did not live in those locales at that time
perhaps due to the harsher, high-latitude conditions, University of
Bristol biogeochemist Richard Evershed said.
The research was published in the journal Nature.
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)
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