August 20, 2007: Oldest gum

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It's Neatorama Collaboration Monday!



From the Guardian via Spluch comes this item: a 5,000 year old piece of chewing gum, found by a British archeology student.

The gum is made from birch bark tar, and the reason they think it's gum is that it has a big ol' human tooth print in it. Kinda weak, but that's how archaeologists think isn't it?

Also, it was stuck to the bottom of a prehistoric theater seat.

Future archaeologists will determine that pen caps are the gum of the year 2000, designed to be colorful and long-lasting and as flavorful as regular gum after use.

Trevor Brown, her tutor at the University of Derby, said: "Birch bark tar contains phenols, which are antiseptic compounds. It is generally believed that Neolithic people found that by chewing this stuff if they had gum infections it helped to treat the condition."

Sini Annala, from the Kierikki Centre, said: "The actual material is some kind of tar, that was made by heating birch bark. After the tar was made ... it was boiled, and when it cooled, it became solid. "When it was heated again, it became softer, and it was used as some kind of chewing gum."

Obviously prehistoric man was much more intelligent than we moderns, able to work out all sorts of medicine and a complicated manufacturing process. Unfortunately they were unable to write any of this down and so their knowledge was lost to the ages. Who knows, maybe birch tar gum is the secret to curing cancer. Break me off a piece and boil and cool and reheat it, won't you? Mmm tasty.

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