Philistines loved widespread food, fossilized plaque reveals

Researchers have long agreed that the New Testament tale of the three wise men reflects a thriving long-distance trade that brought exotic oils and resins from the Arabian Sea and points further east to the Mediterranean in Roman times. But a startling new discovery reveals that ancient residents of what is now Israel enjoyed South Asian fruits and spices as far back as 3,500 years ago.

A recent analysis of fossilized plaque from more than a dozen skeletons from the Middle Bronze to the Early Iron Age (c. 1500-1100 BCE) provided evidence for bananas, turmeric and soybeans – all crops that grew in the Far South. Asia at the time.

The finds, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, adding to artistic and archaeological evidence showing that ancient Mediterranean civilizations imported everything from chickens to black pepper and vanilla from even India and Indonesia.

“We once thought that people were sourcing their food locally and importing gems from afar,” said study co-author Philipp Stockhammer, an archaeologist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. “But even in the Bronze Age they look a lot like us and import their food from all over.”

Tartar is the hardened plaque that accumulates on teeth. Until recently, it was considered junk to be scraped off archaeological samples and thrown away. But recent discoveries have shown that it is actually a rich source of information that holds everything from ancient DNA to bacteria and proteins.

“If you stopped brushing your teeth, I could see what you were eating within 2,000 years,” Stockhammer says.

To find out what people in the ancient Levant ate, an international team analyzed plaque from the mouths of 16 skeletons. Some remains were excavated in Megiddo, an ancient city-state better known by its Biblical name Armageddon. Megiddo thrived in the Bronze Age, a fact reflected in the elite funerals sampled for the study, but it lacked the sheer wealth and imperial reach of its larger neighbors. “It was rich and well-connected,” said Stockhammer, “but not a big player – nothing compared to Egypt or Mesopotamia.”

While tartar from upper-class tombs in Megiddo showed that the people there ate many grains, including wheat and millet, and fruits such as dates, they also ate delicacies from much further afield. Samples from several people provided evidence that they were eating soybeans and the bright orange turmeric – both crops native to South and East Asia that archaeologists believed were unknown to people’s tables in the ancient Mediterranean.

“Even from this small number of samples, we see something emerging that you wouldn’t expect at that point at the time,” said Matthew Collins, an ancient protein expert at the University of Copenhagen who was not involved in the study.

The researchers also scraped calculus from the teeth of people buried around 1100 BC in a nearby settlement called Tell Erani, which archaeologists have linked to the people known in the Bible as Philistines. The simpler burials at Tell Erani reflect a place of less wealth, and the authors wondered if there would be fewer exotic imports as well. Their results yielded traces of sesame, which were also present in samples from Megiddo.

Although sesame oil, pasta, and seeds are all common ingredients in Levantine cuisine today, the plant is native to South Asia. Archaeologists had found sesame seeds in the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, buried around 1400 BC, but many researchers doubted whether sesame was included in the local diet much later.

The most surprising dental discovery, however, came from a man in his 50s buried in Tell Erani – a protein that triggers the ripening of bananas. “[The Tell Erani burials] are very modest funerals, with no evidence of an elite group, ”said Stockhammer. “It doesn’t look like the king has his first banana.”

Tartar has proven to be an invaluable tool for identifying foods that are otherwise infrequently or rarely preserved in most archaeological settings, such as spices and oils. While well-known pillars of ancient trade routes, “these two foods are nearly invisible in the archaeological record,” said study co-author Christina Warinner, a paleogeneticist at Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Human History in Jena, Germany. . “This allows us to see foods of high economic value that would otherwise leave no trace,” such as rare sesame and soybean oils and exotic fruits such as bananas.

In the case of bananas, archaeological evidence is particularly difficult to obtain: the domesticated fruit is seedless and the soft flesh quickly decays. Therefore, it is unlikely that bunches of bananas were shipped to Megiddo. Instead, people there might have imported and eaten dried banana chips, which would have easily survived a long sea voyage.

Among the evidence that researchers can now plague fossilized plaque, plant proteins – unlike animal DNA, milk proteins or the sturdier microscopic crystals in the hard hulls and stems of grain – easily fall off. As a result, they are rarely kept on tartar, giving the misleading impression that milk, meat and porridge dominated the old table. The researchers used a new method to extract more protein from the calculus, and spent more time than previous studies comparing what they found with libraries of plant protein looking for matches.

The researchers think it is very likely that more Mediterranean residents enjoyed plant foods such as sesame and bananas, but the proteins were not trapped in their plaque or survived in the intervening centuries. “We’re just getting the tip of the iceberg,” Stockhammer says. “This does not mean that only one person ate bananas, but that there is only one with sufficient evidence.”

Since it is difficult to tell when tartar formed, it is also possible that the long-dead Tell Erani banana eater was a merchant or seafarer who ate the fruit while traveling through Asia before dying on the shores of the Mediterranean – some would be equally remarkable evidence of distant prehistoric travel.

This new evidence adds to a growing realization that the Bronze Age was surprisingly global, with long-distance trade links stretching from China to the Mediterranean. “It’s no longer surprising,” said archaeologist Ayelet Gilboa of the University of Haifa, director of the Zinman Institute of Archeology at the University of Haifa, who was not involved in the study. “There has really been a transformation in our perception of long-distance trade in prehistoric times over the past decade.”

For example, when Gilboa published a study five years ago showing that pots found in a location not far from Megiddo contained cinnamon, “people said it was impossible,” Gilboa says. “But as we dug deeper, it turns out that the evidence was always there – but no one bothered to pay attention.”

“We now have so much evidence that goods were at least moved over great distances from the second millennium BC,” she adds. “This shows that small-scale societies operated as part of an extensive network.”