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There's never been a better time to eat — and cook with — American apple varieties.One day in 2004, Brooke Hazen noticed something unusual about one of his Golden Delicious apple trees. “Some people are lucky enough in their career to have their own bud mutation variety that they get to name,” says Hazen. “Out of the thousands of trees I have, one branch on one tree decided to do its own thing.” What it did was yield an apple with the typical green-yellow skin but an unusual pink patch where it faced the sun and a sweetness and fragrance...

Astronauts face significant perils while in space. Multiple studies indicate that humans who spend long enough in orbit may experience a range of health maladies that include weight loss, immune system weakening, loss in bone density, vision loss, and even mysterious headaches. However, new research is revealing how an ancient food product used for millennia may help alleviate some of the risks that astronauts face, and it tastes good too. In a joint project between the European Space Agency, the Italian Space Agency, and the Council for Agricultural Research and Analysis of Agricultural Economics, a team of researchers and astronauts...

"This is the earliest evidence for the loss of seasonal egg laying yet identified in the archaeological record," says Dr Robert Spengler, leader of the Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution research group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Germany, and principal investigator on the study."This is an important clue for better understanding the mutualistic relationships between humans and animals that resulted in domestication."The research team collected tens of thousands of eggshell fragments from archaeological sites along the main Central Asian corridor of the Silk Road. Using a method of biomolecular analysis known as ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry) they were...

National Beer Day is celebrated every year on April 7th. This unofficial holiday was first celebrated in 2009 via social media activity by a man named Justin Smith. Shortly after, a beer drinking app called Untappd created a National Beer Day badge that was awarded to users. And the hashtag has been trending on social media ever since. But why April 7th? National Beer Day will be celebrated on Sunday, April 7, 2024. New Beer’s Eve is Saturday, April 6, 2024. April 7th was selected as National Beer Day because it marks the date that the Cullen-Harrison Act went into...

The Industrial Revolution started more than 100 years earlier than previously thought, new research suggests, with Britons already shifting from agricultural work to manufacturing in the 1600s. Seventeenth century Britain can be understood as the start of the Industrial Revolution, laying down the foundations for a shift from an agricultural and crafts-based society to a manufacturing-dominated economy, in which networks of home-based artisans worked with merchants, functioning similarly to factories. The period saw a steep decline in agricultural peasantry and a surge in people who manufactured goods, such as local artisans like blacksmiths, shoemakers and wheelwrights, alongside a burgeoning network...

Çatalhöyük is noteworthy because it is one of the first human proto-cities to have been built. Full of densely packed mud brick houses covered in paintings and symbolic decorations, its population hovered around 8,000. That made it one of the biggest settlements of its era, somewhere between an outsized village and a tiny city. People, mud-brick homes through ceiling doors, and they navigated sidewalks that wound around the city’s rooftops.Archaeologists have discovered an oven structure in the area called "Mekan 66”. Around the largely destroyed oven, wheat, barley, pea seeds, and a handful find that could be food were found.Analyses...

The rise of farming in late Stone Age Europe was no smooth transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles but a bloody takeover that saw nomadic populations wiped out by farmer-settlers in a few generations, a new study has found.In fact, twice in just a thousand years, the population of southern Scandinavia was entirely replaced by newcomers to the area, whose remains bear next to no trace of their predecessors in DNA profiles, analyzed by an international team of researchers."This transition has previously been presented as peaceful," explains study author and palaeoecologist Anne Birgitte Nielsen of Lund University...Using a technique called shotgun sequencing,...

Recent research challenges the traditional view of early human diets in the Andes, suggesting a shift from “hunter-gatherers” to “gatherer-hunters.” The study, analyzing remains from the Wilamaya Patjxa and Soro Mik’aya Patjxa sites in Peru, reveals an 80 percent plant-based and 20 percent meat diet among early Andeans. This finding, based on isotope chemistry and statistical modeling, contradicts previous beliefs and influences current perceptions of diets such as the Paleodiet. It also indicates a need to reassess archaeological frameworks globally. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The commonly used term “hunter-gatherers” for describing early humans should be revised to “gatherer-hunters” in the context of the...

A team of anthropologists at Université Bordeaux has found evidence of nine distinct cultures living in what is now Europe during the Gravettian period. In their study, reported in the journal Nature Human Behavior, the group analyzed personal adornments worn by people living in the region between 24,000 and 34,000 years ago...Prior research has shown that humans have been adorning themselves for thousands of years. In this new effort, the researchers looked at the types of adornments that were worn by people living in Europe during the Gravettian period—a time during the Paleolithic when a culture known as the Gravettian...

Indoctrination or Ignorance? 28-Year-Old Woman Learns You Can Eat Fruit From a Tree

Watch as Otzi, a 5000-year-old mummy, is brought to life and preserved with 3D modeling. (Aired February 17, 2016)He was stalked, attacked and left to die alone. Murdered more than 5,000 years ago, Otzi the Iceman is Europe's oldest known natural mummy. Miraculously preserved in glacial ice, his remarkably intact remains continue to provide scientists, historians, and archeologists with groundbreaking discoveries about a crucial time in human history. But in order to protect him from contamination, this extraordinary body has been locked away, out of reach, in a frozen crypt—until now. NOVA joins renowned artist and paleo-sculptor Gary Staab as...

...Archaeologists already knew that the São Luís area, also called Upaon-Açu, meaning "big island" in the Tupí-Guaraní Indigenous languages, held traces of prehistoric human activity. For instance, a prehistoric jawbone was discovered at Farm Rosane in the 1970s and other artifacts found in São Luís have dated to 6,000 years ago, Wellington Lage, the lead archaeologist of the recent excavations, told Live Science. The remains were attributed to the Sambaquian peoples. This group relied on marine resources and built shell mounds with leftover food refuse that reached up to 100 feet (30 meters) high.The latest excavation, which began in June...

Early human hunter-gatherers ate mostly plants and vegetables, according to archeological findings that undermine the commonly held view that our ancestors lived on a high protein, meat-heavy diet.The evidence, from the remains of 24 individuals from two burial sites in the Peruvian Andes dating to between 9,000 and 6,500 years ago, suggests that wild potatoes and other root vegetables may have been a dominant source of nutrition before the shift to an agricultural lifestyle...Some have previously suggested that the shift to agricultural economies was driven by over-hunting, but the latest findings raise the possibility of a more gradual transition from...

Swiss scientists have found what they say may be Europe's biggest mushroom - covering an area about the size of 35 football pitches. The fungus was discovered in a national park near the eastern town of Ofenpass, said the Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Countryside Research (WSL). Spanning 35 hectares (86 acres), the mostly underground fungus is believed to be 1,000 years old, the WSL added. The Honey Mushroom (Armillaria ostoyae) is edible, but it can kill trees. "The majority of the fungus is an underground network that looks a bit like shoelaces," WSL's spokeswoman Muriel Bendel said. "The...

Archaeologists in Greece have discovered a 1,600-year-old wine shop that was destroyed and abandoned after a "sudden event," possibly an earthquake or building collapse, left broken vessels and 60 coins scattered on the floor, according to new research.The shop operated at a time when the Roman Empire controlled the region. It was found in the ancient city of Sikyon (also spelled Sicyon), which is located on the northern coast of the Peloponnese in southern Greece. Within the wine shop, archaeologists found the scattered coins, as well as the remains of marble tabletops and vessels made of bronze, glass and ceramic.The...

It's no secret that the ancient Romans were lovers of wine. So gripped by the grape were they, that they even worshiped a god—Bacchus—devoted to wine and merriment.But, little is known about what their wine actually tasted like. Was it bitter or sweet? Fruity or earthy? According to a pioneering new study, it was rather spicy and smelled like toast...By comparing these vessels, which have long been overlooked, to similar containers used in modern wine-making, researchers were able to demystify the ancient flavors and the processes that created them.The findings "change much of our current understanding of Roman winemaking," researchers,...

The settlement occupants left an abundant and continuous record of seeds, legumes and other foods...By studying these archaeological layers, Professor Kennett and colleagues were able to discern the types of plants that were being collected in the warmer, humid days before the climate changed and in the cooler, drier days after the onset of what we know now as the Younger Dryas cool period.Before the impact, the inhabitants' prehistoric diet involved wild legumes and wild-type grains, and small but significant amounts of wild fruits and berries.In the layers corresponding to the time after cooling, fruits and berries disappeared and their...

I, Harambe, saw this viral video the other day about the "12 Days of Christmas" gifts ALL being birds and I decided I had to do a little digging because the Not the Bee folks need to know about this. It's always been a joke about the song that after 4 days of birds, it must have been a relief to get the five golden rings. Except, according to some theories, EVERY gift in the 12 days of Christmas is a different bird. The song was originally written in a children's book called Mirth Without Mischief way back in the...

On a clear day at Nome City Cemetery (AK), you can watch planes take off over the Bering Sea. Within the field of white graves, you might also see a small black obelisk that shines brilliantly when it catches the sun. Getting closer, you’ll note an unmistakable symbol engraved near its base. It’s not a cross, nor a Star of David, but a sacred container of sorts in many American households: a tub of Cool Whip.The grave belongs to Bonnie Johnson, a mother, former flight attendant, and creator of a cookie recipe whose batches always arrived at birthdays, holidays, and...

The oldest layers of the Gruta de Oliveira, which includes a number of passages, date back to about 120,000 years ago, the most recent to about 40,000: It is believed that Neanderthals inhabited this place between 100,000 and 70,000 years ago...In this case however, what caught the attention of archaeologists were the traces of hearths intentionally built and used in the cave. The archaeologists found about a dozen hearths at various stratigraphic levels in an excavation area of about 30 square meters and six meters deep. The unmistakable basin-like, circular structures were filled with remains.Findings from inside and near the...