Archaeologica.org

Rokcet Scientist wrote:If "they lacked agriculture and pottery", what did they do for a living? Hunting? Trading? Both?

If they lacked pottery, what did they store their foodstuffs in? If they didn't store foodstuffs, they'd have had to go out every day to hunt and/or gather that days meal. That might indicate that their living patterns revolved around very short term planning, and virtually no long-term planning.

What was Ontario's climate like in that era? Could it have sustained year round hunting and gathering? Or were these people a kind of proto Inuit with the know-how to live year round in arctic climates?

Minimalist wrote:I thought "Eskimo" was mainly used in Alaska?

Rokcet Scientist wrote:If Adrenalin, Dopamine, Serotonin and others are mood-altering neurotransmitters – applied succesfully in many psychologic/psychiatric therapies – then maybe there is also one that governs this 'insulted' feeling! If we could find and isolate it we could perhaps turn it into something useful. Like a food additive...

Ancient Nubians drank beer laced with antibiotics
Tetracycline found in bones of 2,000-year-old mummies

People have been using antibiotics for nearly 2,000 years, suggests a new study, which found large doses of tetracycline embedded in the bones of ancient African mummies.

What's more, they probably got it through beer, and just about everyone appears to have drank it consistently throughout their lifetimes, beginning early in childhood.

While the modern age of antibiotics began in 1928 with the discovery of penicillin, the new findings suggest that people knew how to fight infections much earlier than that — even if they didn't actually know what bacteria were.

Some of the first people to use antibiotics, according to the research, may have lived along the shores of the Nile in Sudanese Nubia, which spans the border of modern Egypt and Sudan.

"Given the amount of tetracycline there, they had to know what they were doing," said lead author George Armelagos, a biological anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta. "They may not have known what tetracycline was, but they certainly knew something was making them feel better."

Armelagos was part of a group of anthropologists that excavated the mummies in 1963. His original goal was to study osteoporosis in the Nubians, who lived between about 350 and 550 A.D. But while looking through a microscope at samples of the ancient bone under ultraviolet light, he saw what looked like tetracycline — an antibiotic that was not officially patented in modern times until 1950.

At first, he assumed that some kind of contamination had occurred.