A new study suggests that small pottery cups from Stone Age central Europe were, in fact, basically sippy cups used to feed animal milk to children, allowing earlier weaning and, very likely, a population boom.
It’s not a new notion that these were likely essentially prehistoric sippy cups; many have been found over the years in the graves of children and infants. But the study offers hard chemical evidence, thanks to residue testing the pots:that three such objects, all found in the graves of children in Bavaria dating from about 2,500 to 3,200 years ago, once held dairy products, most likely milk from ruminants, like cows or goats.
Proving exactly how any ancient bit of pottery was used is difficult. But Julie Dunne, a geochemist at the University of Bristol in England and one of the authors of the report, said the location of the feeding cups in child graves along with the new chemical evidence is “as close as you’re going to get” to that proof.
“This could lead to some of the population changes that we see around the Neolithic [period], with the major demographic explosion,” she says.Luckily the course of human history did not depend on assembling any of those damn straw cups that now follow the sippy cup, because none of us would be here.
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