New research suggests beekeeping dates back farther that previously thought, which would mean honeybees have been regularly domesticated longer.
Published in the journal Nature, the new study consists of two decades' worth of research and examinations of thousands of pieces of evidence, according to The Washington Post.
"The most obvious reason for exploiting the honeybee would be for honey, as this would have been a rare sweetener for prehistoric people," study lead author Mélanie Roffet-Salque, a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Bristol, said in a press release. "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."
The study places the start of beekeeping more than 8,000 years ago, according to evidence of beeswax present in ancient pottery, The Post noted. The benefits of honeybees are well documented; they pollinate flowers and their honey and wax are used for various products still used today.
"The lack of a fossil record of the honeybee means it's ecologically invisible for most of the past 10,000 years. 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, a professor of biogeochemistry at Bristol, said in the release. "Our study is the first to provide unequivocal evidence, based solely on a chemical 'fingerprint', for the palaeoecological distribution of an economically and culturally important animal. It shows widespread exploitation of the honeybee by early farmers and pushes back the chronology of human-honeybee association to substantially earlier dates."
