In 2500 BC (before chicken?), humans ate rodents
The European palate may not always have been so sophisticated.
This week, researchers report the first evidence of ancient Europeans snacking on rodents at least 5,000 years ago.
The discovery suggests that rodents such as mice and voles have not always been mere pests hell bent on annoying humanity throughout its history: They may have been a food source as well.
“Rodents are frequently excavated from older archaeological sites in Europe, but people haven’t examined why they are there,” said Jeremy Herman, a biologist at the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh. “Maybe because they are not currently a food source in Europe, no one ever thought to ask if they had been in the past.”
The new finding, reported in the journal Royal Society Open Science, was made after researchers sifted through nearly 60,000 small mammal bones collected at the Skara Brae settlement on the largest island of the Orknay archipelago in Scotland.
Skara Brae consists of the remnants of eight stone houses and was occupied in the latter half of the Stone Age from roughly 3180 BC to 2500 BC, according to radiocarbon dating.
Archeologists pulled more than two kilograms of micro mammal bones out of four different trenches dug at and near the site in the 1970s.
Previous studies have shown that there were just two types of rodents living among the people of Skara Brae — the wood mouse and the Orkney vole, a form of the common European vole. However, until now, nobody had studied how these rodent populations interacted with humans. The research team found burn marks on several of the bones, suggesting the animals had been roasted.
“The way they are burnt it’s pretty clear that they were pretty much whole when they were stuck on the embers of a fire,” Herman said. “I haven’t tried it myself, but I imagine they got pretty crisp on the outside.”
Herman said the number of vole bones the team discovered suggests that the rodents were not a primary source of food for the inhabitants of Skara Brae. Still, it seems pretty clear that people were eating them, at least occasionally.
“It could be that people ate them as a snack, or it was something they fell back on or harder times,” he said.