The honeybee is an iconic species and the world’s most important food crop pollinator. Bee hive products, including beeswax, honey and pollen, used for both food and medicinal purposes, support livelihoods and provide livelihoods for local communities throughout much of Africa, both through beekeeping and harvesting. wild animals.
Today honey is harvested from the nests of wild bees in many African countries. In the rainforests of West Africa, hunting for wild honey, which can be found in natural hollows in tree trunks and on the underside of thick branches, is a common subsistence activity.
It is not known how long people have been using bee products. Honey would definitely have been a rare source of sweetener for ancient people and was probably in high demand. However, there is very little evidence of ancient human exploitation of bees, with the exception of Paleolithic rock carvings, which depict bees and combs dating from 40,000 to 8,000 years ago, most of which are in Africa.
Historical and ethnographic literature from across Africa also suggests that bee products, honey and larvae, were important both as a food source and in the production of honey-based beverages such as beer and wine.
A team from Bristol chemically analyzed more than 450 prehistoric shards from the Nok culture of Central Nigeria to find out what foods they cooked in their pots. The Nok people are known for their remarkable large-scale terracotta figurines and early iron production in West Africa around the first millennium BC. The acidic soils at the Nook archaeological site meant that organic remains such as animal and plant bones did not survive very well, so what the Nock people ate was somewhat of a mystery.
Much to the team’s surprise, their results, published today in the journal Nature Communications, showed that about one-third of the ceramic vessels used by the ancient Nok people were used to process or store beeswax. The presence of beeswax in ancient ceramics is determined by a complex complex of lipids, fats, oils and waxes from the natural world. Beeswax is likely to be present either as a result of processing (melting) the honeycomb with gentle heating, which causes it to be absorbed into the walls of the container, or, alternatively, it is suggested that beeswax acts as a substitute for making or storing honey.
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Honey is often an important food source for hunter-gatherers, and there are several groups in Africa, such as the Efe gatherers from Ituri Forest, East Zaire, who have historically relied on honey as their main food source, collecting all parts of the forest. a hive, including honey, pollen and bee larvae, from the hollow of trees, which may be up to 30 m from the ground, using smoke to distract stinging bees.
Honey could also be used as a preservative for storing other foods. Among the Kenyan people, the Okieki, who rely on fishing and hunting a wide variety of game species, canned smoked meat with honey and stored for up to three years. A number of Nock pots contained chemical evidence of both beeswax and meat products.
Aside from using honey as a food source, it may have been used to make beverages based on honey, wine, beer, and soft drinks that are widespread in Africa today, although it should be noted that chemical identification of ancient fermentation is notoriously difficult. The letters of ancient researchers give an idea of the antiquity of these practices. For example, Ibn Battuta, a Muslim Berber scholar and explorer, visiting Mauritania in 1352, talks about a sour drink made from ground millet mixed with honey and sour milk. Another story about making wine from honey can be found in the record of the visit of the Portuguese to the west coast of Africa (1506-1510).
Honey and beeswax could also be used for medicinal, cosmetic and technological purposes. Beeswax has also been used in various ways since prehistoric times as a sealant or waterproofing agent on collared flasks in the early Neolithic in Northern Europe, as a light source for lamps in Minoan Crete, and mixed with fat, possibly for candle making, in the medieval vessels in West Cotton, Northamptonshire. Lead author, Dr. Julie Dunn of the University of Bristol School of Chemistry, said: “This is a wonderful example of how biomolecular information extracted from prehistoric pottery, combined with ethnographic data, allowed for the first time to understand the ancient honey hunt in West Africa. , 3500 years ago. “
Professor Richard Evershed FRS, head of the Bristol Division of Organic Geochemistry and co-author of the study, added: “The association of prehistoric humans with the honeybee is a recurring theme in the ancient world, but the discovery of chemical constituents The use of beeswax in Nok pottery provides a unique window into this relationship. although all other sources of evidence are lacking. “
Professor Peter Breunig of Goethe University, who is the director of archeology for the Nock project and co-author of the study, said: “Initially, we began studying chemical residues in pottery shards due to the lack of animal bones in Nock sites, hoping to find evidence of potted meat processing. The fact that the Nock people used honey 3,500 years ago was completely unexpected and unique in prehistoric times in West Africa. “
Professor Katharina Neumann of Goethe University in Frankfurt, director of archaeobotany for the Nok project and co-author of the study, added: “Plant and animal remains from archaeological sites usually show only a fraction of what prehistoric people ate. The chemical residues of beeswax in the clay shards open up entirely new perspectives on the history of resource use and ancient diet. ”