16 ms·

People in present-day Austria drank beer and ate blue cheese 2,700 years ago

168 points by Hooke 5y ago

goldenshale 5y ago
They've also discovered neolithic villages that were along the shores of lakes in the alps in present day Switzerland that have been dated to as far back as 1,000 BC. They were already living in post and beam homes on stilts, herding animals, making pottery, and probably living a pretty nice life.
- riffraff 5y ago
  Did you mean 10000BC? 1000 BC is already Iron Age, we had had entire civilizations with literature, fine metalwork and gigantic monuments all over the place at that point.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    By 1000 BC the pyramids were already as old as the Hagia Sophia is now.
  - eru 5y ago
    Different parts of the world were in eg the neolithic at different times. The iron age didn't arrive simultaneously everywhere. (No clue about this specific place in the Alps, though.)
- liketochill 5y ago
  I feel like the golden age of civilization was pre internet. Text based communication too easily devolves in to flame wars, but the time it took to receive, read, contemplate and respond to a letter seems to moderate tempers.
  - meowface 5y ago
    I believe written letters actually weren't much of a thing back in 1000 BC. However, there was still real-time in-person communication, which can certainly lead to heated arguments no matter what year you live in. It seemed to have no problem generating persecution, pogroms, and genocide back then. Maybe I'm a naive futurist, but I think the best time for a person to be alive is right now, if you're fortunate enough to be born in a developed country. And also maybe even if you weren't, as long as you weren't born somewhere awful like North Korea.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > I believe written letters actually weren't much of a thing back in 1000 BC. That very much depends where you were. We have lots of surviving letters from that time period.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    >"I feel like the golden age of civilization was pre internet." https://youtu.be/nS5_EQgbuLc https://youtu.be/nS5_EQgbuLc
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    More like instead of Internet flame wars villages simply waged wars against each other over petty bullshit. The world has less war than ever.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      That's not entirely true - pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer societies don't seem to have had any kind of wars at all for all we've been able to find out (obviously they would have had murder and such human-to-human conflict). This actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it - Only with the advent of agriculture did war make any sense, as before it would always be advantageous to just move to a different area rather than risk the few members of your family/tribe in a fight with another family/tribe, especially in the endless forests that populated much of the environment where humans lived.
      - _0ffh 5y ago
        Don't know. It's true that an all-out battle is too risky a proposition. But Chimps e.g. are known to patrol the border areas of their territory in order to catch and kill stray members of neighbouring troupes. You can call that a murder, but I'd go with low-intensity warfare.
      - ekianjo 5y ago
        > pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer societies don't seem to have had any kind of wars at all for all we've been able to find out Its not because it did not leave any trace that it did not exist
      - Mikeb85 5y ago
        Ummm, we've discovered tribes that were/are still at that level of technology. They definitely engage(d) in warfare.
      - eru 5y ago
        Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization
- FpUser 5y ago
  >"and probably living a pretty nice life" Working round the clock, fighting with other tribes, being eaten by parasites, having all kinds of diseases, I could go on and on. Sounds like "pretty nice life".
  - carabiner 5y ago
    Also, ritualized gang rape and subsequent death during childbirth.
    - pedrosorio 5y ago
      > ritualized gang rape ?
      - iso1631 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence#Antiquity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence#Antiqu...
  - zwirbl 5y ago
    fighting, parasites, diseases, sure. but working round the clock is more common in industrialized societies than it was befor https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
- keewee7 5y ago
  >and probably living a pretty nice life. Human remains from other parts of Europe show many people in this Era died violently. 17 percent of skulls in Denmark from this Era had signs of serious violence. Women and children were not given any mercy.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    Yeah people seem to be completely oblivious about the fact that the past was way more violent than the present.
- iso1631 5y ago
  Skara Brae dates back about 5000 years and there are even older buildings in the area (Knap of Howar)
- nothis 5y ago
  Ancient life is all romantic until you think of what you're going to do when you need a dentist.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    I'm in my 40's. My grandfather told me stories about going to the dentist when he was young: Foot-powered pneumatic drills drills were still in use (electric drills were available and up to about 50% higher rpm by the time he was a little boy) Foot powered drills reached 2,000 rpm and only dates to the mid 1800's. Early electric dental drills reached about 3000 rpm in 1914. Modern dental drills are 40,000 rpm - 800,000 rpm depending on type and use (with the highest rpm being mostly for precision work). I shudder to think what the 2k-3k rpm ones would be like to be subjected to - I find the low rpm current drills used for high torque, low precision work bad enough. But the hand drills that went before them were typically in the region of 15 rpm... So as someone who has been through enough dental work that new dentists tends to marvel at all the exciting work they can see examples of when examining me, I absolutely share the terror when thinking of ancient dentistry. (On the other hand, I'd probably have died of complications in my 20's if I'd had the same dental damage back then)
    - OldHand2018 5y ago
      One might argue that modern dentistry is just barely keeping up with the ability of modern society to destroy teeth.
      - vidarh 5y ago
        As an unintentional connoisseur of modern dentistry techniques (my teeth are unusually soft, as every dentist I've ever had since my first filling at age 4 have told me as they've poked them and marvelled at it), I think it's more than keeping up with our ability to destroy teeth in terms of improving the quality of repairs. E.g. I have no metal fillings left any more - I had many when I was younger - as whenever the old metal fillings came loose the were replaced by composite fillings or porcelain. And I hardly have any plastic composite fillings left either, as they got replaced by porcelain as porcelain have gotten cheaper and faster to do. My teeth overall look better today at 46 than they did in my teens despite far more damage. Today porcelain fillings are about as good as gold fillings used to be, but cheaper and better looking (no, I'm not the type to find gold teeth aesthetically pleasing). Getting work done has gotten more comfortable too (so much so that during my last round of dental work my dentist had to use a bite block as I kept falling asleep in the chair and he got tired of waking me up; though admittedly that is probably at least partly because I'm so used to it) But I fully agree that we absolutely badly need a revolution in preventing decay and/or fully restoring teeth rather than repairing or replacing them, though.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  Pretty nice life with high infant mortality and 30 years life expectancy with back breaking work and the risk of starvation ever present. Lets not romanticize our ancesters.
  - rajin444 5y ago
    To be fair the life expectancy and infant mortality affect one another. If you survived through infancy you would end up living a decent amount of time. I’m sure our lives are more comfortable now but I’m not sure everyone is happier.
    - ekianjo 5y ago
      > I’m sure our lives are more comfortable now but I’m not sure everyone is happier. Happiness is a combination of too many different factors - you can't really optimize for it.
m0zg 5y ago
Ironically people in today's Australia are forbidden by their government from buying beer: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/covid-19-coronavirus-australia-nsw-health-limits-alcohol-for-residents-of-locked-down-tower-block/QEOAVR3IWOHP3MKAYMCJZU3O5A/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/covid-19-coronavirus-austra...
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  Not even the right country
- yesenadam 5y ago
  Uh the actual story seems to be that people in apartment blocks "in NSW Health's Special Health Accommodation, where Covid-positive patients and close contacts are sent for isolation", are being limited to 6 beers a day each. "Residents can consult with a clinician if they think they need more than the allowed limit."
  - m0zg 5y ago
    Sounds like a concentration camp to me. And a profound lack of freedom as well. In the US I don't (yet) have to ask anyone whether drinking seven beers is OK, nor am I forcibly sent anywhere if I get the sniffles.
    - gambiting 5y ago
      >>Sounds like a concentration camp to me Just piss off with these comparisons. As someone who lives next to an actual concentration camp museum, you have absolutely not a slightest hint of a clue what comparison you just made. >>In the US I don't (yet) have to ask anyone whether drinking seven beers is OK So patients in institutions can just drink however many beers they want? Fascinating. >>nor am I forcibly sent anywhere if I get the sniffles. You wouldn't be sent anywhere for sniffles here either so you can sleep well at night.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
theonemind 5y ago
That's crazy. They almost discovered hot wings and beer.
MrYellowP 5y ago
I know this isn't a good comment, but the title entices me to write that, as a present-day Austrian I did not drink beer 2700 years ago.
- corobo 5y ago
  I was wondering if they'd buried the lede in that time travel had been invented
- goto11 5y ago
  The title is perfectly fine. "Present-day Austria" means the geographical area which today is Austria.
  - jnsie 5y ago
    The title is perfectly correct. It is not perfectly clear, therefore not perfectly fine.
    - danparsonson 5y ago
      It should be perfectly clear to a native English speaker as it's a well-used construction ("Present day X" means "The (thing) that is today called X") - but I could understand if it's confusing to a non-native speaker.
      - dahart 5y ago
        I’m a native speaker, and I think the wording could be improved. Furthermore, I don’t agree that this common phrase is normally used this way. The phrase “present day” is most often used to refer to now, not to refer to a time in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_day I agree with the meaning of your example, but I don’t think your example illustrates the issue with the title. The title has “People in present day Austria” which implies these people are alive now, then goes on to say the same people ate something 2700 years ago. Context does clarify the title, despite the confusing wording. Rewordings that would help: “Ancestors of modern day Austrians consumed blue cheese and beer 2700 years ago”, or “People who lived in what is now present-day Austria drank beer and ate blue cheese 2700 years ago.”
nxpnsv 5y ago
I live in Austria, and i had no idea people were that old.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
I always find things like this pretty fascinating. Some salt miner from 3 millennia ago kindly took a poop in his mine so that present day scientists could discern he liked a good Roquefort. Just so cool to be able to figure this stuff out from so long ago.
- tomcam 5y ago
  A lot of people are doing us the exact same favor in places like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles right now!
- nickysielicki 5y ago
  I come at it from the other direction, I’m constantly in awe of the fact that I don’t even know the names of my great great grandparents. I know generally where they lived and I can assume what they did for a living, but I know nothing more. How do we know so little about things that were a mere 5-10 generations ago? We don’t even know the kinds of foods and drinks that existed 40 generations ago? We are the first generation ever to have a permanent digital paper trail and it scares the hell out of me. We’re meant to be forgotten.
  - jhugo 5y ago
    What permanent digital paper trail? I've been on this internet since the mid 90s and most of what I remember from those years has vanished without a trace. Seems to me that information in the digital world is at least as ephemeral as what came before.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    It's okay, the future humans in their mud huts won't be able to read the data.
  - iso1631 5y ago
    > We are the first generation ever to have a permanent digital paper trail and it scares the hell out of me. We’re meant to be forgotten. What scares me is in 100 years time there will be far less known about 2000-2020 than 1980-2000 I've got 200 year olds pieces of paper in my house, I've got letters and photos from 50 years ago. I have hardly anything left from 2003 (when I started using a digital camera) through 2010 (when I started using an iphone, and it's all on icloud) In the unlikely event apple still exists, and still does this type of storage, It's unlikely anyone will still be paying for my icloud service in 2120. Perversely, digital data that's abandoned degrades far more than analog data.
gremlinsinc 5y ago
So people in present-day Austria are time-travelers?
- d13 5y ago
  Terrible, broken title that confused me too. They meant to suggest something last like “ people who lived a part of the world which is now called Austria”.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    > part of the world which is now called Austria The phrase "present day Austria" is commonly understood to mean exactly that. I see nothing wrong with the title. Surely the ambiguity caused by the possibility that Austrians might be using their time machines to eat ancient cheese didn't cause you too much confusion?
- iso1631 5y ago
  It's odd, I had no problem parsing the title. It's clearly not talking about present day Austrians as it's 2700 years ago, and as Austria is a new country, and its name as a region only dates back c. 1000 years, it's clearly not talking about Austrians from 5000 years ago, as there weren't any, but it is talking about people from the region currently known as Austria. I wonder if it's a language difference between English and American.
  - VortexDream 5y ago
    It is a confusing title. It took me a good 30 seconds to recognize what was actually meant. I'm not sure how else it could've been expressed though. I think it just took a while to connect "people in present day Austria" with "this person lived in the area that is now known as Austria, but wasn't back then".
    - School-Cotton 5y ago
      "Present-day X" is a common stock phrase in English to talk about a place in the past while identifying it, for convenience, with today's political borders. "Julius Caesar ruled over territory in present-day Italy, Tunisia, Spain, Turkey, (...etc)" is a perfectly normal sentence.
cheese_goddess 5y ago
> "The Hallstatt miners seem to have intentionally applied food fermentation technologies with microorganisms which are still nowadays used in the food industry," Maixner says. These news will no doubt be seized upon by the fermentation community and the paleodiet community, by beer and Roquefort producers and a whole other bunch of people who will be happy to argue that their preferred diets or products have ancient roots but all the scientists did was find traces of Penicilium roqueforti and Saccharomyces cerevisiae in ancient human feces. That alone is not enough to know that they were used in fermentation by the people who, er, made the feces, or that they were even consumed on purpose. These two organisms are ubiquitous in the environment. Speaking entirely from personal experience, P. roqueforti is impossible to keep off aging cheese, whether it's wanted or not. It thrives on humid substrates like cheese and it actually loves high amounts of salt (Roquefort cheese has 4% salt, a high amount, exactly to help P. roqueforti grow). On top of that, there are many different strains of P. roqueforti and not all of them have a plasant taste, in fact most don't. A couple taste like blue cheese (often named as P. album and P. glaucum), but most taste like wet wood or dirt. Basically any blue mold you find growing on food is likely some kind of P. roqueforti but if you've ever absent-mindedly bit on a moldy apple and felt your mouth fill with the taste of soil, rather than fruit- that's P. roqueforti. I'm not so sure about S. cerevisiae, since I don't brew, but I suspect the same things go. It's much more likely that the traces of P. roqueforti and S. cerevisiae ended up on the ancient miners' feces either after the er fact, from the environment, or were on the miners' lunch and ingested by them by accident, just because people back then didn't have very good ways to preserve their food in such a pristine condition as we can do it today. Which is another thing to keep in mind. Modern sensibilities mean that any food that looks different than usual is likely to be considered spoiled and thrown away. In days past this was not the case. If your cheese grew mold, you brushed the mold off and ate the cheese. That's probably how all the moldy European cheeses were first created. So again, ancient miners eating food (and we don't even know it was cheese to begin with) with P.roqueforti on it doesn't mean they were eating Roquefort cheese, or even cheese deliberately cultured with mold.
- telesilla 5y ago
  I love cheese. I love that in this world there are people who makes the cheese I love. Thank you for posting this. Do you have any good recommended starting points to make cheese in the home? I'm interested to learn more about this fascinating past time.
0xBABAD00C 5y ago
This isn't that surprising at all, we do have historical documents from thousands of years ago that describe beer and cheese production, consumption, and trade. For instance, when Xenophon (2500 years ago) was passing through Armenia, he described a local "barley wine" that was an acquired taste: > There were stores within of wheat and barley and vegetables, and wine made from barley in great big bowls; the grains of barley malt lay floating in the beverage up to the lip of the vessel, and reeds lay in them, some longer, some shorter, without joints; when you were thirsty you must take one of these into your mouth, and suck. The beverage without admixture of water was very strong, and of a delicious flavour to certain palates, but the taste must be acquired. Even way before that, beer was consumed throughout the ancient Near East, and it even made it to the first work of literature that has survived to modern times, the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh's wild buddy Enkidu is given beer to drink: > "... he ate until he was full, drank seven pitchers of beer, his heart grew light, his face glowed and he sang out with joy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabasis_(Xenophon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabasis_(Xenophon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer You can search for the words "cheese" and "wine" in Anabasis to see plenty of mentions, including the passage above: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1170/1170-h/1170-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1170/1170-h/1170-h.htm
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Being able to conclusively demonstrate the fact from physical evidence is a long remove fron casual conjecture, or even documentary record (itself often of ... variable reliability). The most compelling narratives are backed by multiple lines of evidence. Being able to produce and prove that evidence is the interesting aspect. That modern-day anthropologists and geneticists can validate (or refute) written records from 2,500 year ago is remarkable, not casually dismissable.
streamofdigits 5y ago
next thing we'll be told those beer and cheese nibblers were exchanging hacker news as well :-) if we apply the principle that we are more or less the same species for several hundred thousand years, it stands to reason that a similar age and/or occupation demographic must have had conceptually similar interests, communication channels and networks (even if technically implemented in potentially quite distinct ways)
mlang23 5y ago
Not the most constructive comment, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfN6VwPWMds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfN6VwPWMds
a-saleh 5y ago
Yeah, beer 1000 years BC shouldn't be surprising anywhere?
vjust 5y ago
The tests are about the presence of Fungi. Any food, raw or naturally fermented might have had these fungi. To connect that to beer seems a bit of a stretch.
- beowulfey 5y ago
  Within a single species you can often see differentiation in terms of preferred ecological niches. Yeast for bread is not usually the same strain as yeast for brewing beer, even though they are the same species. They compared ~150 different strains of S. cerevisiae and clustered them by the presence of SNPs to determine "categories", and found some that strongly clustered in modern beer brewing, some that clustered together with wine and additional beer strains, sections for Asia- or West Africa-derived strains, and a "mixed" section with bread yeast, some wines, and some other spirits. The ancient yeast clustered squarely within one of the two beer-brewing groups, suggesting it may be a precursor to these modern beer species. So it's not just the presence of the these DNAs they are looking at; they are using functional genomics to determine the biological role these specific species may have had.
Lamad123 5y ago
They dipped beer in blue cheese!
ctdonath 5y ago
Who looked at a stinking frothing puddle of rotted grains, and decided to drink enough of it, repeatedly, to discover and evaluate the consequences & process?

168 points by Hooke 5y ago

They've also discovered neolithic villages that were along the shores of lakes in the alps in present day Switzerland that have been dated to as far back as 1,000 BC. They were already living in post and beam homes on stilts, herding animals, making pottery, and probably living a pretty nice life.

riffraff 5y ago
Did you mean 10000BC? 1000 BC is already Iron Age, we had had entire civilizations with literature, fine metalwork and gigantic monuments all over the place at that point.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  By 1000 BC the pyramids were already as old as the Hagia Sophia is now.
- eru 5y ago
  Different parts of the world were in eg the neolithic at different times. The iron age didn't arrive simultaneously everywhere. (No clue about this specific place in the Alps, though.)
liketochill 5y ago
I feel like the golden age of civilization was pre internet. Text based communication too easily devolves in to flame wars, but the time it took to receive, read, contemplate and respond to a letter seems to moderate tempers.
- meowface 5y ago
  I believe written letters actually weren't much of a thing back in 1000 BC. However, there was still real-time in-person communication, which can certainly lead to heated arguments no matter what year you live in. It seemed to have no problem generating persecution, pogroms, and genocide back then. Maybe I'm a naive futurist, but I think the best time for a person to be alive is right now, if you're fortunate enough to be born in a developed country. And also maybe even if you weren't, as long as you weren't born somewhere awful like North Korea.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > I believe written letters actually weren't much of a thing back in 1000 BC. That very much depends where you were. We have lots of surviving letters from that time period.
- FpUser 5y ago
  >"I feel like the golden age of civilization was pre internet." https://youtu.be/nS5_EQgbuLc https://youtu.be/nS5_EQgbuLc
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  More like instead of Internet flame wars villages simply waged wars against each other over petty bullshit. The world has less war than ever.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    That's not entirely true - pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer societies don't seem to have had any kind of wars at all for all we've been able to find out (obviously they would have had murder and such human-to-human conflict). This actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it - Only with the advent of agriculture did war make any sense, as before it would always be advantageous to just move to a different area rather than risk the few members of your family/tribe in a fight with another family/tribe, especially in the endless forests that populated much of the environment where humans lived.
    - _0ffh 5y ago
      Don't know. It's true that an all-out battle is too risky a proposition. But Chimps e.g. are known to patrol the border areas of their territory in order to catch and kill stray members of neighbouring troupes. You can call that a murder, but I'd go with low-intensity warfare.
    - ekianjo 5y ago
      > pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer societies don't seem to have had any kind of wars at all for all we've been able to find out Its not because it did not leave any trace that it did not exist
    - Mikeb85 5y ago
      Ummm, we've discovered tribes that were/are still at that level of technology. They definitely engage(d) in warfare.
    - eru 5y ago
      Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization
FpUser 5y ago
>"and probably living a pretty nice life" Working round the clock, fighting with other tribes, being eaten by parasites, having all kinds of diseases, I could go on and on. Sounds like "pretty nice life".
- carabiner 5y ago
  Also, ritualized gang rape and subsequent death during childbirth.
  - pedrosorio 5y ago
    > ritualized gang rape ?
    - iso1631 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence#Antiquity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence#Antiqu...
- zwirbl 5y ago
  fighting, parasites, diseases, sure. but working round the clock is more common in industrialized societies than it was befor https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
keewee7 5y ago
>and probably living a pretty nice life. Human remains from other parts of Europe show many people in this Era died violently. 17 percent of skulls in Denmark from this Era had signs of serious violence. Women and children were not given any mercy.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  Yeah people seem to be completely oblivious about the fact that the past was way more violent than the present.
iso1631 5y ago
Skara Brae dates back about 5000 years and there are even older buildings in the area (Knap of Howar)
nothis 5y ago
Ancient life is all romantic until you think of what you're going to do when you need a dentist.
- vidarh 5y ago
  I'm in my 40's. My grandfather told me stories about going to the dentist when he was young: Foot-powered pneumatic drills drills were still in use (electric drills were available and up to about 50% higher rpm by the time he was a little boy) Foot powered drills reached 2,000 rpm and only dates to the mid 1800's. Early electric dental drills reached about 3000 rpm in 1914. Modern dental drills are 40,000 rpm - 800,000 rpm depending on type and use (with the highest rpm being mostly for precision work). I shudder to think what the 2k-3k rpm ones would be like to be subjected to - I find the low rpm current drills used for high torque, low precision work bad enough. But the hand drills that went before them were typically in the region of 15 rpm... So as someone who has been through enough dental work that new dentists tends to marvel at all the exciting work they can see examples of when examining me, I absolutely share the terror when thinking of ancient dentistry. (On the other hand, I'd probably have died of complications in my 20's if I'd had the same dental damage back then)
  - OldHand2018 5y ago
    One might argue that modern dentistry is just barely keeping up with the ability of modern society to destroy teeth.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      As an unintentional connoisseur of modern dentistry techniques (my teeth are unusually soft, as every dentist I've ever had since my first filling at age 4 have told me as they've poked them and marvelled at it), I think it's more than keeping up with our ability to destroy teeth in terms of improving the quality of repairs. E.g. I have no metal fillings left any more - I had many when I was younger - as whenever the old metal fillings came loose the were replaced by composite fillings or porcelain. And I hardly have any plastic composite fillings left either, as they got replaced by porcelain as porcelain have gotten cheaper and faster to do. My teeth overall look better today at 46 than they did in my teens despite far more damage. Today porcelain fillings are about as good as gold fillings used to be, but cheaper and better looking (no, I'm not the type to find gold teeth aesthetically pleasing). Getting work done has gotten more comfortable too (so much so that during my last round of dental work my dentist had to use a bite block as I kept falling asleep in the chair and he got tired of waking me up; though admittedly that is probably at least partly because I'm so used to it) But I fully agree that we absolutely badly need a revolution in preventing decay and/or fully restoring teeth rather than repairing or replacing them, though.
ekianjo 5y ago
Pretty nice life with high infant mortality and 30 years life expectancy with back breaking work and the risk of starvation ever present. Lets not romanticize our ancesters.
- rajin444 5y ago
  To be fair the life expectancy and infant mortality affect one another. If you survived through infancy you would end up living a decent amount of time. I’m sure our lives are more comfortable now but I’m not sure everyone is happier.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    > I’m sure our lives are more comfortable now but I’m not sure everyone is happier. Happiness is a combination of too many different factors - you can't really optimize for it.

m0zg 5y ago

Ironically people in today's Australia are forbidden by their government from buying beer: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/covid-19-coronavirus-australia-nsw-health-limits-alcohol-for-residents-of-locked-down-tower-block/QEOAVR3IWOHP3MKAYMCJZU3O5A/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/covid-19-coronavirus-austra...

reducesuffering 5y ago
Not even the right country
yesenadam 5y ago
Uh the actual story seems to be that people in apartment blocks "in NSW Health's Special Health Accommodation, where Covid-positive patients and close contacts are sent for isolation", are being limited to 6 beers a day each. "Residents can consult with a clinician if they think they need more than the allowed limit."
- m0zg 5y ago
  Sounds like a concentration camp to me. And a profound lack of freedom as well. In the US I don't (yet) have to ask anyone whether drinking seven beers is OK, nor am I forcibly sent anywhere if I get the sniffles.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    >>Sounds like a concentration camp to me Just piss off with these comparisons. As someone who lives next to an actual concentration camp museum, you have absolutely not a slightest hint of a clue what comparison you just made. >>In the US I don't (yet) have to ask anyone whether drinking seven beers is OK So patients in institutions can just drink however many beers they want? Fascinating. >>nor am I forcibly sent anywhere if I get the sniffles. You wouldn't be sent anywhere for sniffles here either so you can sleep well at night.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

theonemind 5y ago

That's crazy. They almost discovered hot wings and beer.

MrYellowP 5y ago

I know this isn't a good comment, but the title entices me to write that, as a present-day Austrian I did not drink beer 2700 years ago.

corobo 5y ago
I was wondering if they'd buried the lede in that time travel had been invented
goto11 5y ago
The title is perfectly fine. "Present-day Austria" means the geographical area which today is Austria.
- jnsie 5y ago
  The title is perfectly correct. It is not perfectly clear, therefore not perfectly fine.
  - danparsonson 5y ago
    It should be perfectly clear to a native English speaker as it's a well-used construction ("Present day X" means "The (thing) that is today called X") - but I could understand if it's confusing to a non-native speaker.
    - dahart 5y ago
      I’m a native speaker, and I think the wording could be improved. Furthermore, I don’t agree that this common phrase is normally used this way. The phrase “present day” is most often used to refer to now, not to refer to a time in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_day I agree with the meaning of your example, but I don’t think your example illustrates the issue with the title. The title has “People in present day Austria” which implies these people are alive now, then goes on to say the same people ate something 2700 years ago. Context does clarify the title, despite the confusing wording. Rewordings that would help: “Ancestors of modern day Austrians consumed blue cheese and beer 2700 years ago”, or “People who lived in what is now present-day Austria drank beer and ate blue cheese 2700 years ago.”

nxpnsv 5y ago

I live in Austria, and i had no idea people were that old.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

I always find things like this pretty fascinating. Some salt miner from 3 millennia ago kindly took a poop in his mine so that present day scientists could discern he liked a good Roquefort. Just so cool to be able to figure this stuff out from so long ago.

tomcam 5y ago
A lot of people are doing us the exact same favor in places like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles right now!
nickysielicki 5y ago
I come at it from the other direction, I’m constantly in awe of the fact that I don’t even know the names of my great great grandparents. I know generally where they lived and I can assume what they did for a living, but I know nothing more. How do we know so little about things that were a mere 5-10 generations ago? We don’t even know the kinds of foods and drinks that existed 40 generations ago? We are the first generation ever to have a permanent digital paper trail and it scares the hell out of me. We’re meant to be forgotten.
- jhugo 5y ago
  What permanent digital paper trail? I've been on this internet since the mid 90s and most of what I remember from those years has vanished without a trace. Seems to me that information in the digital world is at least as ephemeral as what came before.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  It's okay, the future humans in their mud huts won't be able to read the data.
- iso1631 5y ago
  > We are the first generation ever to have a permanent digital paper trail and it scares the hell out of me. We’re meant to be forgotten. What scares me is in 100 years time there will be far less known about 2000-2020 than 1980-2000 I've got 200 year olds pieces of paper in my house, I've got letters and photos from 50 years ago. I have hardly anything left from 2003 (when I started using a digital camera) through 2010 (when I started using an iphone, and it's all on icloud) In the unlikely event apple still exists, and still does this type of storage, It's unlikely anyone will still be paying for my icloud service in 2120. Perversely, digital data that's abandoned degrades far more than analog data.

gremlinsinc 5y ago

So people in present-day Austria are time-travelers?

d13 5y ago
Terrible, broken title that confused me too. They meant to suggest something last like “ people who lived a part of the world which is now called Austria”.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  > part of the world which is now called Austria The phrase "present day Austria" is commonly understood to mean exactly that. I see nothing wrong with the title. Surely the ambiguity caused by the possibility that Austrians might be using their time machines to eat ancient cheese didn't cause you too much confusion?
iso1631 5y ago
It's odd, I had no problem parsing the title. It's clearly not talking about present day Austrians as it's 2700 years ago, and as Austria is a new country, and its name as a region only dates back c. 1000 years, it's clearly not talking about Austrians from 5000 years ago, as there weren't any, but it is talking about people from the region currently known as Austria. I wonder if it's a language difference between English and American.
- VortexDream 5y ago
  It is a confusing title. It took me a good 30 seconds to recognize what was actually meant. I'm not sure how else it could've been expressed though. I think it just took a while to connect "people in present day Austria" with "this person lived in the area that is now known as Austria, but wasn't back then".
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    "Present-day X" is a common stock phrase in English to talk about a place in the past while identifying it, for convenience, with today's political borders. "Julius Caesar ruled over territory in present-day Italy, Tunisia, Spain, Turkey, (...etc)" is a perfectly normal sentence.

cheese_goddess 5y ago

> "The Hallstatt miners seem to have intentionally applied food fermentation technologies with microorganisms which are still nowadays used in the food industry," Maixner says. These news will no doubt be seized upon by the fermentation community and the paleodiet community, by beer and Roquefort producers and a whole other bunch of people who will be happy to argue that their preferred diets or products have ancient roots but all the scientists did was find traces of Penicilium roqueforti and Saccharomyces cerevisiae in ancient human feces. That alone is not enough to know that they were used in fermentation by the people who, er, made the feces, or that they were even consumed on purpose. These two organisms are ubiquitous in the environment. Speaking entirely from personal experience, P. roqueforti is impossible to keep off aging cheese, whether it's wanted or not. It thrives on humid substrates like cheese and it actually loves high amounts of salt (Roquefort cheese has 4% salt, a high amount, exactly to help P. roqueforti grow). On top of that, there are many different strains of P. roqueforti and not all of them have a plasant taste, in fact most don't. A couple taste like blue cheese (often named as P. album and P. glaucum), but most taste like wet wood or dirt. Basically any blue mold you find growing on food is likely some kind of P. roqueforti but if you've ever absent-mindedly bit on a moldy apple and felt your mouth fill with the taste of soil, rather than fruit- that's P. roqueforti. I'm not so sure about S. cerevisiae, since I don't brew, but I suspect the same things go. It's much more likely that the traces of P. roqueforti and S. cerevisiae ended up on the ancient miners' feces either after the er fact, from the environment, or were on the miners' lunch and ingested by them by accident, just because people back then didn't have very good ways to preserve their food in such a pristine condition as we can do it today. Which is another thing to keep in mind. Modern sensibilities mean that any food that looks different than usual is likely to be considered spoiled and thrown away. In days past this was not the case. If your cheese grew mold, you brushed the mold off and ate the cheese. That's probably how all the moldy European cheeses were first created. So again, ancient miners eating food (and we don't even know it was cheese to begin with) with P.roqueforti on it doesn't mean they were eating Roquefort cheese, or even cheese deliberately cultured with mold.

telesilla 5y ago
I love cheese. I love that in this world there are people who makes the cheese I love. Thank you for posting this. Do you have any good recommended starting points to make cheese in the home? I'm interested to learn more about this fascinating past time.

0xBABAD00C 5y ago

This isn't that surprising at all, we do have historical documents from thousands of years ago that describe beer and cheese production, consumption, and trade. For instance, when Xenophon (2500 years ago) was passing through Armenia, he described a local "barley wine" that was an acquired taste: > There were stores within of wheat and barley and vegetables, and wine made from barley in great big bowls; the grains of barley malt lay floating in the beverage up to the lip of the vessel, and reeds lay in them, some longer, some shorter, without joints; when you were thirsty you must take one of these into your mouth, and suck. The beverage without admixture of water was very strong, and of a delicious flavour to certain palates, but the taste must be acquired. Even way before that, beer was consumed throughout the ancient Near East, and it even made it to the first work of literature that has survived to modern times, the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh's wild buddy Enkidu is given beer to drink: > "... he ate until he was full, drank seven pitchers of beer, his heart grew light, his face glowed and he sang out with joy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabasis_(Xenophon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabasis_(Xenophon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer You can search for the words "cheese" and "wine" in Anabasis to see plenty of mentions, including the passage above: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1170/1170-h/1170-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1170/1170-h/1170-h.htm

dredmorbius 5y ago
Being able to conclusively demonstrate the fact from physical evidence is a long remove fron casual conjecture, or even documentary record (itself often of ... variable reliability). The most compelling narratives are backed by multiple lines of evidence. Being able to produce and prove that evidence is the interesting aspect. That modern-day anthropologists and geneticists can validate (or refute) written records from 2,500 year ago is remarkable, not casually dismissable.

streamofdigits 5y ago

next thing we'll be told those beer and cheese nibblers were exchanging hacker news as well :-) if we apply the principle that we are more or less the same species for several hundred thousand years, it stands to reason that a similar age and/or occupation demographic must have had conceptually similar interests, communication channels and networks (even if technically implemented in potentially quite distinct ways)

mlang23 5y ago

Not the most constructive comment, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfN6VwPWMds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfN6VwPWMds

a-saleh 5y ago

Yeah, beer 1000 years BC shouldn't be surprising anywhere?

vjust 5y ago

The tests are about the presence of Fungi. Any food, raw or naturally fermented might have had these fungi. To connect that to beer seems a bit of a stretch.

beowulfey 5y ago
Within a single species you can often see differentiation in terms of preferred ecological niches. Yeast for bread is not usually the same strain as yeast for brewing beer, even though they are the same species. They compared ~150 different strains of S. cerevisiae and clustered them by the presence of SNPs to determine "categories", and found some that strongly clustered in modern beer brewing, some that clustered together with wine and additional beer strains, sections for Asia- or West Africa-derived strains, and a "mixed" section with bread yeast, some wines, and some other spirits. The ancient yeast clustered squarely within one of the two beer-brewing groups, suggesting it may be a precursor to these modern beer species. So it's not just the presence of the these DNAs they are looking at; they are using functional genomics to determine the biological role these specific species may have had.

Lamad123 5y ago

They dipped beer in blue cheese!

ctdonath 5y ago

Who looked at a stinking frothing puddle of rotted grains, and decided to drink enough of it, repeatedly, to discover and evaluate the consequences & process?