Two kinds of carbon molecules, or more accurately, two isotopes of carbon, carbon-13 and carbon-12?
2
They look impossible to clean.
The picture above the article doesn't show the drinking spout, although the photograph of the baby shows where it must be.
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The other day I reading an article asking the question: why do European drink milk? After reading this article, I think the answer is because it increases the number of babies that survive. Many mothers do not have enough milk. Especially if they had twins or two babies in one year*, then the chances of one of them dying was pretty good. But if there was a supplement food source like goat or cow milk, the baby might live.
*it happens. My brother and sister are 11 months apart
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From the shape of the horns on the cup I would guess they were used to serve cow milk
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The opening paragraph dates the earliest such vessels to "as long as 7,000 years ago" in Central Europe; but the vessels that have been examined are less than half that age -- "2,500 to 3,200 years ago." It's frustrating that the article makes no mention of whether the oldest such vessels could be examined for chemical evidence of what they contained, since if they did show traces of dairy, that would date the use of animal milks to feed children to a time before the development of settled agriculture.
The traditional diet of the Maasai of Kenya, with a stone-age technology based on herding, not settled agriculture, consisted almost entirely of meat, blood and milk.
There is certainly evidence in the Hebrew Bible of the use of dairy to feed humans, including young humans: the description of Canaan as "a land flowing with milk and honey," the instruction not to boil a lamb or kid in its mother's milk, and the description of the promised "Emmanuel" child in Isaiah as eating "curds and honey" after his weaning. The first two of these descriptions are in the book of Exodus, which describes a period in which the Israelites were in transition from herding to agriculture, but the written form of the text dates to a later time.
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Wonderful story and picture! Such appealing shapes (and biodegradable, needless to say).
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@Julie
Ceramics are not biodegradable. These have lasted about 3000 years.
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@Julie
I know. I want one.
Not too biodegradable since they lasted 1,000s of years
7
@Julie Um, when exactly do they biodegrade? It has been a few thousand years already and they don't look very degraded to me.
11
Ah, comments are on today. I saw the picture of the great containers with their horns and thought "you'll put your eye out, kid!".
Completely guessing, but I'd say these might have been for toddlers instead of babies. After weaning, they'd be eating other foods as well, so whatever milk they might have been drinking was part of a bigger supply of nutrients. And with the animal shapes, it's easy to picture kids getting attached to their very own toy/cup. (I saw plastic dinosaur sippy cups in the store yesterday, we haven't changed.)
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@b fagan: Whereas my first thought was that the horns were basically where the adult's finger(s) would hold the container while the baby was being fed.
And for older children, perhaps they could hold the container using the horns by themselves.
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@b fagan
They may look the way they do because of the cuteness factor. I can't think that people in the past didn't have the same impulse to indulge their children.
40
Wonder how many currency shells they paid nursing consultants to tell them they were bad mommies for giving up like that
63
As a potter, artist and mother, I am fascinated and inspired by this article. I'm curious to see more photos of these treasures. Thanks for publishing this article. I will be on the lookout for a follow-up with more findings.
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@Lara Odell
Make me one, I'll buy it.
16
How women with children cared for them, and how they managed raising families has been left out of so much of what has presented as history. What were "normal" days really like? This is one of te those discoveries which opens that part of the ancient world to us.
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@cheryl One of the things I like about the historical fiction/fantasy series Outlander is that the (female) author really digs deep into the nuts and bolts of what it would be like bearing and raising children in that age.
36