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Dirty dishes reveal what ancient civilizations ate. Food scraps on 8,000-year-old ceramic shards found in Turkey include barley, wheat, peas, and bitter vetch.
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- Title
- Ancient Proteins From Unwashed Dishes Reveal the Diets of a Lost Civilization
- Authors
- Follow @boissolm
- Word count
- 1114 words
I'm interested in how they can deduce which plants were eaten from just proteins. The way they find specific proteins is described in the article, but that doesn't answer how they know which protein goes with which food. Do different types of plants have different types of proteins? Sorry if this is incredibly obvious, I'm not very knowledgeable with biology.
Yup, they do! For example, a particular plant might have a specific enzyme (a protein catalyst) that makes a toxin or pigment. But even when plants have the same general protein with the same function, there are slight differences due to evolution.
Or thinking about it another way, the way we often look at differences in plants and animals is by looking at their genetic code, their DNA. And the vast majority of genes in DNA are instructions for making proteins, so the differences we see between species in their DNA are then reflected in those proteins.
I was curious to see which proteins they used to distinguish them, now that you've asked, so I decided to take a look at the paper. Taking a peek at the supplemental material, the proteins they found varied. For example, Legumin K was traced to Pisum sativum (peas), while B1-hordein was traced to Hordeum vulgare (barley). (Basically once they'd determined protein sequences, they compared them to a large database of known sequences to figure out what plants they could have come from.)
A detail I thought was cool was that they weren't just able to determine the plants. In some cases they could also make a guess as to what the food itself was based on the proteins present:
I don't know the answer either! Those are good questions.