02 July 2021

Using honey to preserve meat

An interesting tidbit I heard yesterday in a podcast from Archaeologica:
A team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, with colleagues from Goethe University, Frankfurt, has found the first evidence for ancient honey hunting, locked inside pottery fragments from prehistoric West Africa, dating back some 3,500 years ago...

The Bristol team were carrying out chemical analysis of more than 450 prehistoric potsherds from the Central Nigerian Nok culture to investigate what foods they were cooking in their pots...

To the team's great surprise, their findings, published today in the journal Nature Communications, revealed that around one third of the pottery vessels used by the ancient Nok people were used to process or store beeswax...

Honey may also have been used as a preservative to store other products. Among the Okiek people of Kenya, who rely on the trapping and hunting of a wide variety of game, smoked meat is preserved with honey, being kept for up to three years, A number of the Nok pots contained chemical evidence for the presence of both beeswax and meat products.
Not totally surprising, since the application of honey to an infected deep decubitus ulcer can accelerate healing, presumably because the hyperosmolality of the honey is lethal to microorganisms.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...