What a 5,700-Year-Old Piece of Gum Reveals About Its Chewer

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What a 5,700-Year-Old Piece of Gum Reveals About Its Chewer
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This isn't the minty delicious gum you're used to. (2019)

ago, in a seaside marshland in what is now southern Denmark, a woman with blue eyes and dark hair and skin popped a piece of chewing gum in her mouth. Not spearmint gum, mind you, but a decidedly less palatable chunk of black-brown pitch, boiled down from the bark of the birch tree. An indispensable tool in her time, birch pitch would solidify as it cooled, so the woman and her comrades would have had to chew it before using it as a sort of superglue for, say, making tools.

But several converging lines of evidence indicate that this gum-chewing woman actually was a hunter-gatherer, thousands of years after the invention of agriculture. For one, previous analyses have allowed scientists to associate certain genes with either agricultural or hunter-gatherer lifestyles. They did this by matching DNA samples with archaeological evidence for those people—farming tools versus hunting tools, for instance.

“There's actually nothing to tell us that on a Thursday she didn't do farming, and was eating duck on the weekend,” says Schroeder. “But what we can go on is that we know, genetically, she looks like a Western hunter-gatherer.” That and where she was chewing pitch was likely a seaside marshland, not the greatest of places to homestead.

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