Off the Beaten Path

What in the World?
A Collection of Some of the World's Oldest Finds

Elmer would be pleased to know that glue has stuck around for over 8,000 years. A discovery of artifacts in a cave near the Dead Sea in Israel revealed that the ornaments attached to such artifacts as fabrics, arrowheads, utensils, masks and human skulls were held there by a sticky substance—believed to be collagen extracted from skin, sinews and cartilage of animals. Archaeologists have yet to put the pieces together about the Neolithics who concocted the glue, but such an adhesive was used by the Egyptians as well.

Archaeologists toasted the recent discovery that wine existed 2,000 years earlier than thought. A jar excavated in 1968 from a Neolithic village site in Iran contained residue of 7,000-year-old wine. The team found calcium salt from tartaric acid, which occurs naturally in grapes. Traces of a preservative substance were found also, indicating that the wine was deliberately made and didn't result from the fermentation of grape juice.

Another site in Western Iran provided the earliest known chemical evidence of beer in the world. In the grooves of an ancient jug, chemists discovered yellowish residue later found to be a chemical component of fermented barley.

While conducting excavations at a site in Switzerland in 1996, archaeologists found what they think is the oldest piece of chewing gum dating back at least 6,500 years. The chewy substance, used by a middle-aged person with a cavity, was made out of birch-bark tar that must be heated to more than 800 degrees Celsius in the absence of air. How they did this remains a mystery.