Prehistoric Baby Bottle Discovery; Infants Fed Animal Milk 5000 Years Ago
Common Joe writes:
Clay vessels that have been found in Germany could have been used to supplement breast milk and wean children more than 5,000 years ago. They became more common across Bronze and Iron Age Europe and are thought to be some of the first-known baby bottles.
[...]Our results showed that the three vessels contained ruminant animal milk, either from cows, sheep or goat. Their presence in child graves suggests they were used to feed babies animal milk, as a supplementary food during weaning.
This is interesting because animal milk would only have become available as humans changed their lifestyles and settled in farming communities. It's at that time - the dawn of agriculture - that people first domesticated cows, sheep, goats and pigs. This ultimately led to the "Neolithic demographic transition", when the widespread use of animal milk to feed babies or as a supplementary weaning food in some parts of the world improved nutrition, contributing to an increased birth rate. The human population grew significantly as a result, and so did settlement sizes, which eventually became the towns and cities we know today. By holding these ancient baby bottles, we're connected to the first generations of children who grew up in the transition from hunter-gatherer groups to communities based around agriculture.
Apparently, they had been finding these animal-containers at dig sites, but couldn't pin down exactly how they were used. The ones they tested were found in a child grave site. They performed a lipid analysis to figure out the content had been milk.
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