An examination of fatty molecules called lipids, for example, tucked into the pores of three ceramic bottles from Bavaria suggests that mothers living between 1200 BCE and 450 BCE were weaning or supplementing their kids’ diets with animal milk, Julie Dunne and her colleagues reported in 2019.
Dunne, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Bristol in England, speculates that the bottles’ creators may have been inspired to amuse their children. “They make us laugh today,” she says. More importantly, studying them “gives you such a close connection to the past.”
There aren’t many ways to study the feeding of infants in ancient times, Dunne says. Ancient bones have yielded insights about when infants were weaned, but “we know very little about how mothers brought up their babies.” The same is true of the eating lives of the ancients in general — much of the evidence has been indirect. READ MORE