The plastelina casts for one of the chewing gums from Huseby Klev. The cast captures the teeth imprints from each side.
Photo: Verner Alexandersen.
How could the Bible's authors possibly have known what people were doing in Scandinavia when they didn’t even know where Scandinavia was because they thought Earth was a small flat place with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, centred on the Middle East?
The answer is that they couldn't of course. Had they done so, they would have concocted much less parochial tales about the things they didn't understand and would have known that Earth was much older than the few thousand years they imagined.
But now we know much better than they did. For example, modern science is able to take the resin people were chewing on (probably to make glue from it) and analyse the DNA in it to see what they had been eating and what organisms they had living in their mouths. It turns out that just about the time when the Bible's authors were setting their creation tale, people in Scandinavia were eating trout, deer and hazelnuts, and suffering from pathogenic bacteria, oblivious of the creation allegedly going on far away in the Canaanite Hills.
Although creationists now tell us that pathogens and other parasites didn't exist before the supposed 'Fall' and must have been made since by a thing called 'Sin', there is no biblical support for this modern invention which has been hurriedly cobbled together to defend the alleged creator god from the charge of malevolence in the design of pathogens which do nothing other than make more copies of themselves and add to the suffering in the world.
Embarrassingly for those creationist apologists, the same study presents compelling evidence of commensal and pathogenic organisms in the mouths of these Scandinavians, just as there are today in modern humans, including bacteria that cause teeth to fall out.
How scientists discovered this is the subject of an open access paper in Scientific Reports and a news release from Stockholm University:
What did people eat on the west coast of Scandinavia 10 000 years ago? A new study of the DNA in a chewing gum shows that deer, trout and hazelnuts were on the diet. It also shows that one of the individuals had severe problems with her teeth.More detail is given in the published paper:
Some 9 700 years ago, a group of people were camping on the west coast of Scandinavia, north of what is today Göteborg. They had been fishing, hunting and collecting resources for food. And some teenagers, both boys and girls, were chewing resin to produce glue, just after munching on trout and deer, as well as on hazelnuts. Due to a bad case of periodontitis (severe gum infection that can lead to tooth loss and bone loss), one of the teenagers had problems eating the chewy deer-meat, as well as preparing the resin by chewing it.
We know this because an international research team has been working with the chewed resin from Huseby Klev for some time. “There is a richness of DNA sequences in the chewed mastic from Huseby-Klev, and in it we find both the bacteria that we know are related to periodontitis, and DNA from plants and animals that they had chewed before”, says Dr. Emrah Kırdök, from Mersin University Department of Biotechnology, who coordinated the metagenomic work on the Mesolithic chewing gum. Emrah Kırdök started to analyse the material when he was a postdoc at the Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies at Stockholm University, but the study has grown much since then.
The site Huseby Klev on the island Orust was excavated 30 years ago. Chewed resin was found together with remains of stone tools in a context dated to c. 9700 years ago. The stone material also indicated a Mesolithic chronology. The chewed material from Huseby Klev has already generated a study on the human genetic data from three individuals, and the DNA in the material that was not of human origin has also been analysed and published.
Snapshot of the life of a small group of hunter-gatherers
Professor Anders Götherström, at the Centre for Palaeogenetics, a collaboration between Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History, is the head of the project where this study was conducted. “This provides a snapshot of the life of a small group of hunter-gatherers on the Scandinavian west coast. I think it is amazing, there are other well established methods to work out what nutrition and diet relates to the Stone Age, but here we know that these teenagers were eating deer, trout, and hazelnuts 9 700 years ago on the west coast of Scandinavia, while at least one of them had severe problems with his teeth.”
The study is published in Scientific Reports. Read article: Metagenomic analysis of Mesolithic chewed pitch reveals poor oral health among stone age individuals.
AbstractJust another casual refutation of creationism by a team of scientists who did nothing more than reveal some facts that are entirely inconsistent with basic creationists beliefs and the tales related in the Bible.
Prehistoric chewed pitch has proven to be a useful source of ancient DNA, both from humans and their microbiomes. Here we present the metagenomic analysis of three pieces of chewed pitch from Huseby Klev, Sweden, that were dated to 9,890–9,540 before present. The metagenomic profile exposes a Mesolithic oral microbiome that includes opportunistic oral pathogens. We compared the data with healthy and dysbiotic microbiome datasets and we identified increased abundance of periodontitis-associated microbes. In addition, trained machine learning models predicted dysbiosis with 70–80% probability. Moreover, we identified DNA sequences from eukaryotic species such as red fox, hazelnut, red deer and apple. Our results indicate a case of poor oral health during the Scandinavian Mesolithic, and show that pitch pieces have the potential to provide information on material use, diet and oral health.
Introduction
The Scandinavian Peninsula (hereafter referred to as Scandinavia) gradually became accessible to humans when the Weichsel ice sheet melted away after the late glacial maximum (LGM) peaked between 27,000 and 21,000 years before present (BP). There is material evidence for sporadic human presence in ice-free areas around 16,000 BP, but from around 12,800 BP there was a proper expansion into Scandinavia1, and from 11,700 BP there was a continuous human presence in the southwestern part of the Peninsula2,3,4. However, the earliest human DNA from the Scandinavian Peninsula is only slightly younger than 10,000 years old5.
The early Mesolithic sites exhibit a rich material culture (lithics, bone and antler) that has been used to infer demography, mobility, social relations, use of technology, and the subsistence strategies6. While this has provided an understanding of the Early Mesolithic people in Scandinavia, we still don’t have enough molecular data to contextualise their oral microbiome profile, pathogen burden, diet related information, and paleoenvironmental utilisation.
Recently, metagenomic analysis of ancient DNA reads sequenced from ancient human samples have enabled researchers to obtain information about the historical human populations with a great depth. Ancient dental calculus has become the predominately used material to investigate oral microbiome, due to its structural integrity7. Lately, chewed pitch materials are also proved to be useful to access historical oral microbiome8.
Ancient dental calculus studies provide information about the oral microbial species in dental biofilm formation and maturation, and its association with dental health9,10,11. Moreover, changes in the oral microbiome through archaeological time periods can also be investigated. For example, the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to farmers brought a significant increase in human oral health pathologies, which are associated with dietary and lifestyle changes12. Several ancient DNA studies had investigated changes in oral microbiome composition from the Mesolithic period to modern day and their relation to dietary changes and population movements13,14,15,16, as well as pre and post Columbian contact17. It is also possible to identify dietary remains and DNA reads related to the paleoenvironment through ancient DNA and microscopic studies18,19,20.
Another promising source of ancient microbiome DNA investigated here are masticates, or pitch pieces that have been chewed by humans and therefore contain materials from the oral cavity. Previous studies had investigated the oral microbiome and dietary components from 5,700 years old chewed pitch from Denmark and successfully proved the potential usage in ancient DNA research domain5,8.
To better understand the Mesolithic community in Huseby Klev, we provide a metagenomic analysis of the pitch mastic pieces that are more than 9,500 years old, and that already have yielded information on Mesolithic demography5. This DNA represents the oldest known genomic and metagenomic material to date from humans and human activities in Scandinavia.
Our analysis shows the oral microbiome profile in three chewed pitch pieces along with high coverage genomes of human commensal oral microbes. By comparing our data with modern oral microbiomes, we demonstrate the increased abundance of oral microbes that could cause pathological conditions such as periodontitis. Moreover, we provide DNA evidence on dietary components and possible paleoenvironmental eukaryotes that represents the Huseby Klev archaeological site21.
Kırdök, E., Kashuba, N., Damlien, H. et al.
Metagenomic analysis of Mesolithic chewed pitch reveals poor oral health among stone age individuals. Sci Rep 13, 22125 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-48762-6
Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
Work like this is the reason creationist cult leaders put so much effort into misleading their dupes about science and trying to undermine their trust in facts which contradict their childish beliefs and why creationism only thrives in scientifically illiterate, superstitious cultures which still believe the world runs on magic.
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