Bone spoons for prehistoric babies: Detection of human teeth marks on the Neolithic artefacts from the site Grad-Starčevo (Serbia)

Abstract

Around 8000 years ago, throughout the Neolithic world a new type of artefact appeared, small spoons masterly made from cattle bone, usually interpreted as tools, due to their intensive traces of use. Contrary to those interpretations, the small dimensions of spoons and presence of intensive traces of use led us to the assumption that they were used for feeding babies. In order to test that assumption we compared 2230 marks on three spoons from the Neolithic site of Grad-Starčevo in Serbia (5800−5450 cal BC) with 3151 primary teeth marks produced experimentally. This study has shown that some of the marks on spoons were made by primary teeth, which indicate their usage in feeding babies. The production of a new type of artefact to feed babies is probably related to the appearance of a new type of weaning food, and the abundance of spoons indicates that new baby gruels became an important innovation in prehistoric baby-care.

Living off the land: Terrestrial-based diet and dairying in the farming communities of the Neolithic Balkans

“…milk and ground cereals) would have provided Neolithic mothers (as well as other members of the community) with novel options for feeding infants and small children prior to introducing solids in their diet. Such baby gruels were possibly served by bone spoons made from cattle metapodial bones, artefacts ubiquitous in the Neolithic Anatolia and the Balkans, as a recent study of bone spoons from the site of Starčevo-Grad has confirmed [108]. These utensils bore numerous traces of use and damage which corresponded to milk teeth marks, likely produced by children during feeding and/or chewing.…”

The Milky Way: Mobility and Economy at the Turn of the 3rd Millennium in Southern Central Europe

“…In analogy with Balkan Neolithic bone spoons, long thought to be a prestigious ritual artefact but recently revealed to have been used in feeding infants (Stefanović et al . 2019), the artefacts perceived as high status or special by archaeologists could, in practice, have been used by a wide range of social actors. While the Cham culture cups have no particular characteristics that would make them especially suitable for use by small children themselves (in contrast to the Bronze Age vessels with spouts discussed in Dunne et al .…”

Understanding the maternal-infant nexus from dental histology and high-resolution compositional biogeochemistry: implications for bioarchaeological research

“…In recent years, there has been growing recognition of the significance of the mother-infant bond from social and medical perspectives (Brüne and Schiefenhövel, 2019;Kendall et al, 2021), with increasing attention given to understanding the historical and evolutionary aspects of this bond and examining how it has evolved across different periods, regions and cultures (Gowland and Halcrow, 2019;Stefanović et al, 2019;Halcrow et al, 2020;Miller et al, 2020;Rebay-Salisbury and Pany-Kucera, 2020). Taking a broader and long-term view, changes in women's roles and status during motherhood and childcare, including alloparenting, are essential to an in-depth understanding of the evolution of our species (Halcrow et al, 2020).…”