Over 3,500 years ago, two brothers from an upper-class family survived with serious illness, and one underwent the radical procedure of trephination, discovery at Megiddo reveals
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An archaeological excavation of the ancient city of Megiddo in northern Israel. (Credit: The Megiddo Expedition.)
(CN) The Levant was the site of global trade as long ago as 3,700 years, much earlier than previously believed, researchers found in an archaeological excavation of 16 Bronze Age bodies in modern Israel.
Philipp Stockhammer, a prehistoric archaeologist at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, and his colleagues analyzed food residues in the ancient corpses’ tooth tartar, also known as dental calculus. In these human fossils, which dated to the second millennium BCE, the scientists saw evidence of turmeric, bananas and soy.
“Exotic spices, fruits and oils from Asia had thus reached the Mediterranean several centuries, in some cases even millennia, earlier than had been previously thought,” Stockhammer said in a statement. “This is the earliest direct evidence to date of turmeric, banana and soy outside of South and East Asia.”
Date Time
Aroma of Distant Worlds
Exotic Asian spices such as turmeric and fruits like the banana had already reached the Mediterranean more than 3000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought. A team of international researchers in Germany and the US has shown that even in the Bronze Age, long-distance trade in food was already connecting distant societies.
An international team at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and Harvard University found evidence that exotic Asian spices such as turmeric and fruits like the banana reached the Mediterranean more than 3000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought.