Simply being alive between the stone and iron ages would mean every single day would be about survival. In a time when there’s no such thing as refrigerators or effective medicine, keeping yourself and your family fed and trying not to die from the cold or an unknown illness would be a constant struggle. Its nice to know that no matter how hard things were in the past, there were always people who made it through and left us a few clues as to what life was like back then. Here’s a few of the most interesting archaeological finds from a time before humans discovered steel.
The Bog People
During the 1950’s in northern Denmark a series of bodies were found within an area completely covered by a thick marsh. These bodies were in such good condition that you can actually make out the facial features of many of them. There’s also a large amount of clothing and a few accessories like small pouches and leather straps.
There have been over 150 bodies pulled out the area and they have been dated to be between 5,000 and 8,000 years old, making them the largest and best preserved collection of human remains in the world from this long ago.
22 pounds of 2,500 year old butter
In 2016 a man named Jack Conway was doing some gardening at his home in county Meath, Ireland, when he came across what appeared to be a large lump of fat sitting just below the surface in a boggy area. Since he knew it was very out of place he reported it to the Cavan museum who declared it was originally butter, and dated it to be well over 2000 years old.
The butter had taken on a cheese like appearance and started to smell quite bad after it was exposed to the air, but since it was kept in an environment with no additional water or oxygen it didn’t decompose. The 22 lb lump of iron age butter is now on display at the Cavan Museum in Ireland.
The first use of iron
The earliest evidence of iron smelting comes from central Anatolia located in Turkey, with a very limited amount of small iron works dating from around 1800 BC. Iron didn’t really become popular until between 1,000 BC and 800 BC since the know-how to actually melt it out of its ore wasn’t widely shared.
The very first documented use of iron by humans goes back to 3,200 BC in ancient Egypt were a number of small iron beads were found in a burial tomb in Gerzeh. As advanced as they were, the Egyptians made these beads from hammering iron found in a meteor instead of being the first ones to know how to smelt it.
The worlds oldest brewery
In 2018 a team of researchers headed to Israel to begin a dig on a site believed to contain ancient remains, but upon excavating the site what they found was a little surprising. Sitting within the baked mud and clay at the back of the cave were a series of pots and tools that appeared to have been used to make beer.
Some of the insides of the containers were tested and the residue of a fermented grain liquid was found, proving the site was used to make beer. The pots and tools have been dated to be from around 11,000 BC which would mean that people started to make beer the moment they got out of the ice age.
The oldest bread ever found
In the Black desert located within the country of Jordan lays a dig site that has uncovered the oldest evidence of humans making bread. Pieces of flat-bread have been found within the clay and preserved by being starved of oxygen and water. Wild Barley and wheat would have been gathered and ground into a flour before adding the water to make something close to what we know as wholegrain.
The bread also contains plant roots which presumably would have been ground up and mixed with the flour. This find predates the next closest one by almost 5,000 years, making the bread found in the Black desert the first piece of evidence of humans baking bread, at 12,000 BC.