DNA from 10,000-year-old “chewing gum” sheds light on teens’ Stone Age menu and oral health: “It must have hurt”

DNA from a sort of “chewing gum” utilized by youngsters in Sweden 10,000 years in the past is shedding new mild on the Stone Age food plan and oral well being, researchers stated Tuesday.

The wads of gum are made from items of birch bark pitch, a tar-like black resin, and are mixed with saliva, with tooth marks clearly seen.

They had been discovered 30 years in the past subsequent to bones on the 9,700-year-old Huseby Klev archaeological website north of Sweden’s western metropolis of Gothenburg, one of many nation’s oldest websites for human fossils.

The hunter-gatherers almost certainly chewed the resin “for use as glue” to assemble instruments and weapons, stated Anders Gotherstrom, co-author of a study published within the journal Scientific Experiences.

“This can be a almost certainly speculation — they may in fact have been chewed simply because they preferred them or as a result of they thought that that they had some medicinal function,” he informed AFP.

The gum was sometimes chewed by each female and male adolescents.

“There have been a number of chewing gum (samples) and each men and women chewed them. Most of them appear to have been chewed by youngsters,” Gotherstrom stated. “There was some sort of age to it.”

A earlier 2019 study of the wads of gum mapped the genetic profile of the people who had chewed it.

This time, Gotherstrom and his group of paleontologists at Stockholm College had been capable of decide, once more from the DNA discovered within the gum, that the youngsters’ Stone Age food plan included deer, trout and hazelnuts.

Traces of apple, duck and fox had been additionally detected.

“If we do a human bone then we’ll get human DNA. We are able to do tooth after which we’ll get just a little bit extra. However right here we’ll get DNA from what that they had been chewing beforehand,” Gotherstrom stated. “You can’t get that in every other manner.”  

Figuring out the completely different species combined within the DNA was difficult, based on Dr. Andrés Aravena, a scientist at Istanbul College who spent quite a lot of time on the pc analyzing the info.

“We needed to apply a number of computational heavy analytical instruments to single out the completely different species and organisms. All of the instruments we would have liked weren’t able to be utilized to historic DNA; however a lot of our time was spent on adjusting them in order that we may apply them”, Aravena stated in a statement.

The scientists additionally discovered not less than one of many teenagers had severe oral well being points. In a single piece chewed by a teenage lady, researchers discovered “numerous micro organism indicating a extreme case of periodontitis,” a extreme gum an infection.

“She would in all probability begin to lose her tooth shortly after chewing this chewing gum. It should have damage as effectively,” stated Gotherstrom.

“You will have the imprint from {the teenager}’s mouth who chewed it hundreds of years in the past. If you wish to put some sort of a philosophical layer into it, for us it connects artefacts, the DNA and people,” he stated.

In 2019, scientists constructed a picture of a lady based mostly on the DNA extracted from 5,700-year-old chewing gum. She seemingly had darkish pores and skin, brown hair and blue eyes, and hailed from Syltholm on Lolland, a Danish island within the Baltic Sea. Researchers nicknamed the lady “Lola.”

Researchers on the time stated it was the primary time a complete historic human genome had been obtained from something apart from human bone.  

Sophie Lewis contributed to this report.