Humans may also have been using honey and beeswax even before these pots reveal, she said; it’s just that earlier people left no record behind.
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Bees are a key link in ensuring plants are pollinated and produce fruit, and are worth more than £200million per year to the economy according to the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA).
Beeswax was found in pottery from Neolithic Europe, the Near East, and North Africa, which shows bee products were used and possibly traded over a wide geographic range.
The paper, published in the journal Nature, is the result of 20 years of research carried out at Bristol’s Organic Geochemistry Unit.
But they were exploiting wax and honey, says Gene Kritsky, a professor and chairman of biology at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati and an expert on ancient beekeeping.
“The most obvious reason for exploiting the honeybee would be for honey, as this would have been a rare sweetener for prehistoric people”, said Dr Mélanie Roffet-Salque, lead author of the study. “However, beeswax could have been used in its own right for various technological, ritual, cosmetic and medicinal purposes, for example, to waterproof porous ceramic vessels”.
Previously the use of bee products was dated to around 2400BC with ancient Egyptian murals and iconography depicting beekeeping. They could have taken a hollow log, put the bees in it and covered it with a slate, she explains.
However, there has been little direct evidence of when and where ancient people began harvesting honey and wax from the insects. It’s not very hard to keep a beehive, Roffet-Salque said, but there’s no way to prove that Neolithic farmers did so.
As for Neolithic farmers, it’s easy to understand what they were doing with honey: gorging on it, much as modern honey hunters do.
The painting, Roffet-Salque says, is younger than the oldest beeswax in Turkey, but the one country in her survey whose potsherds have not yet yielded evidence of beeswax is Spain.
By a few thousand years later, beeswax was detected across the Balkan peninsula, including Greece, Romania, Serbia, and then at sites occupied by early farmers in Central Europe.
Beeswax is made up of complex lipids that are regular in composition, meaning they can act as a chemical fingerprint on archaeological artefacts such as pottery vessels.
But Roffet-Salque thinks humans were using both honey and beeswax. “Although evidence from ancient Egyptian murals and prehistoric rock art suggests mankind’s association with the honeybee dates back over thousands of years, when and where this association emerged has been unknown – until now”, study co-author Richard Evershed said in the press release.
Dr. Evershed goes on to say that the chemical evidence is “unequivocal”.
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This no-bee zone stretches across regions like modern-day Scotland, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Ireland too. Because bee exploitation seemed to exist in other parts of Europe during the same time period, the most logical explanation is that bees simply didn’t occupy these northern areas.
