People in present-day Austria drank beer and ate blue cheese 2,700 years ago | Hacker News Reader

People in present-day Austria drank beer and ate blue cheese 2,700 years ago

phys.org

168 pointsHooke126 comments

This isn't that surprising at all, we do have historical documents from thousands of years ago that describe beer and cheese production, consumption, and trade. For instance, when Xenophon (2500 years ago) was passing through Armenia, he described a local "barley wine" that was an acquired taste:

> There were stores within of wheat and barley and vegetables, and wine made from barley in great big bowls; the grains of barley malt lay floating in the beverage up to the lip of the vessel, and reeds lay in them, some longer, some shorter, without joints; when you were thirsty you must take one of these into your mouth, and suck. The beverage without admixture of water was very strong, and of a delicious flavour to certain palates, but the taste must be acquired.

Even way before that, beer was consumed throughout the ancient Near East, and it even made it to the first work of literature that has survived to modern times, the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh's wild buddy Enkidu is given beer to drink:

> "... he ate until he was full, drank seven pitchers of beer, his heart grew light, his face glowed and he sang out with joy."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabasis_(Xenophon)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer

You can search for the words "cheese" and "wine" in Anabasis to see plenty of mentions, including the passage above:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1170/1170-h/1170-h.htm

Being able to conclusively demonstrate the fact from physical evidence is a long remove fron casual conjecture, or even documentary record (itself often of ... variable reliability).

The most compelling narratives are backed by multiple lines of evidence. Being able to produce and prove that evidence is the interesting aspect. That modern-day anthropologists and geneticists can validate (or refute) written records from 2,500 year ago is remarkable, not casually dismissable.

I know this isn't a good comment, but the title entices me to write that, as a present-day Austrian I did not drink beer 2700 years ago.

I agree it is not a good comment, but I did want to see if somebody else thought as I did. It should start with the time, e.g.: '2700 years ago people in present-day Austria drank beer and ate blue cheese'.

Should probably also be more specific and say 'inhabiting' rather than 'in'.

The phrase "present-day Foo" is used all the time by people writing about history as a way of indicating a geographical area. I don't see the problem.

"50 years ago people in present-day New York consumed three times as many cigarettes".

Present-day is not the problem. There's an ambiguity there because in can refer to at least three things if not more:

people in the location of the present-day New York fifty years ago (as intended)

people in present-day New York right now, physically and fifty years ago

people in present-day New York right now, but not fifty years ago

on closer inspection 'inhabiting' is not much better on these counts

Yes but that was not what was written. What was written was unambiguous.

You use the phrase when the name of a geographical area did not exist, or wasn't the same at the time you are referring to. So you wouldn't say "People in present-day Austria 50 years ago...", you just say "People in Austria 50 years ago." But you could very well say "People in present-day Austria 200 years ago..." since Austria then and now are different geographical areas.

You can say "Mozart was born in Salzburg in present-day Austria" and nobody would think it means he was born today.

Communication is about context.

Agree that my example was bad at least.

The phrase 'present-day x' is also used to denote the setting in a script, novel, or magazine piece completely independent of this historical usage.

The context does not arrive until the end of the sentence and so I feel it is more like a punchline than a well written description.

The title is only indirectly unambiguous through context and logic. It could still be improved and made less ambiguous through better word choice.

The fragment “People in present day Austria” does not alone indicate the past, it requires “2700 years ago” to know for sure.

If you say “People in present day Austria drink beer”, it automatically implies people there today drink beer. If you say “People in present day Austria drank beer”, it implies they drank beer recently. “People in present day Austria drank beer 2700 years ago”, while eventually unambiguous that it means the past, still leads the reader on an unnecessary roller coaster of first implying the present and then clarifying it means the past.

Panda: Eats, shoots, and leaves. Present-day Austrian: Eats blue cheese 2700 years ago.

Reposting a comment I left elsewhere:

"Present-day X" is a common stock phrase in English to talk about a place in the past while identifying it, for convenience, with today's political borders.

"Julius Caesar ruled over territory in present-day Italy, Tunisia, Spain, Turkey, (...etc)" is a perfectly normal sentence.

I had to read the title several times to make sense of it. It could have been clearer. For example, “2,700 years ago in present day Austria, people drank beer and ate blue cheese.”

The order of the title makes it sound like present-day Austrians were around 2,700 years ago. The “present day” is applied to the wrong object.

I agree with you the title could be clearer, and I agree with the sibling comment that your re-wording doesn’t quite fix it. Maybe “2700 years ago in the region that is now present day Austria…”. Even just “People [who lived] in present day Austria…” would be slightly better (but not great) by inserting the past-tense verb. As it stands the title reads like “People [who are currently] in present day Austria…” Context, i.e., the rest of the sentence, immediately fixes this interpretation, but it’s still momentarily jarring.

“Present day” is indeed a common phrase, but contrary to a few claims here, it is not normally used to place the subject of a sentence in the past. It is normally used opposite of that, to identify the time period as the present. Example: people in present day Babylon often drink beer. It would be weird to assume these people were drinking beer 3300 years ago and that I was talking about the past.

> Example: people in present day Babylon often drink beer.

I have never seen anyone use the phrase like this. "present-day Babylon" is meaningless because there is no "Babylon" in the present day. "People drank beer thousands of years ago in present-day Iraq" would be valid, though.

> I have never seen anyone use the phrase like this

Maybe look around? If you google “present day Babylon”, you will find many examples of exactly this usage. Present-day Babylon is referring to the region that used to be called Babylon, it has a perfectly clear meaning. I think this usage is in fact more common than referring to something current using the phrase “present day”. You don’t need to clarify present-day Iraq, because Iraq is the name of a current region, so it would be automatically assumed that you mean today’s borders, and far less confusing in your example if you left out “present day”.

Your example has the same primary problem as the article title, it’s mixing two time periods in a confusing way. The term “present day” is normally meant to signify that the sentence is discussing the present, not to invoke the past. That said, your example is slightly better than the title because it starts with “thousands of years ago”, and it’s clear the people drank beer thousands of years ago before you say “present day”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_day

Edit: BTW, the term “present day” is not really the issue, we don’t need to debate the meaning of those two words. The problem is the larger fragment “people in present day Austria”, which implies by correct and common usage the same thing as “people presently in Austria”. The article title only becomes clear later on, when it clarifies 2700 years ago.

> The order of the title makes it sound like present-day Austrians were around 2,700 years ago.

I simply don’t agree: there was only one possible meaning, and it was obvious to me. I can’t prove it in any other way than citing my intuition as a native English speaker.

To my eyes your rewritten title has the same meaning and is no more or less clear.

I agree it's clear in this case, but it's clear only because the specific details makes the other interpretation impossible, and that's poor writing.

Well no, it's clear because it's a stock phrase in native English - no doubt unclear to non-native English speakers, but that doesn't necessarily make it poorly written.

The fact that there are people in this thread that found it ambiguous is to me sufficient evidence that it is poorly written, even though the context in this specific case makes it possible to reliably infer what was actually meant.

Especially given that there are several trivial ways of reordering the sentence that makes it unambiguous.

The problem is not "present-day X". The problem is the position of "present-day X" within the sentence.

Most people intuitively understand that people do not live for 3,000 years.

so what did you eat and drink back then?

Yeah, can confirm.

Source: am present-day Austrian.

The title is perfectly fine. "Present-day Austria" means the geographical area which today is Austria.

The title is perfectly correct. It is not perfectly clear, therefore not perfectly fine.

It should be perfectly clear to a native English speaker as it's a well-used construction ("Present day X" means "The (thing) that is today called X") - but I could understand if it's confusing to a non-native speaker.

I’m a native speaker, and I think the wording could be improved. Furthermore, I don’t agree that this common phrase is normally used this way. The phrase “present day” is most often used to refer to now, not to refer to a time in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_day

I agree with the meaning of your example, but I don’t think your example illustrates the issue with the title. The title has “People in present day Austria” which implies these people are alive now, then goes on to say the same people ate something 2700 years ago.

Context does clarify the title, despite the confusing wording. Rewordings that would help: “Ancestors of modern day Austrians consumed blue cheese and beer 2700 years ago”, or “People who lived in what is now present-day Austria drank beer and ate blue cheese 2700 years ago.”

Valid points, but just to split this hair a little further in a couple of places:

- "People in present day Austria" doesn't entirely capture the headline either because it's immediately followed by a verb in the past tense, thus specifying something that happened in the past;

- I don't think anyone ever refers to a place as 'present-day X' if they're talking about something that's happening now:

"Where are you going?"

"I'm going to present-day New York"

Using 'present-day' as an adjective to me necessarily implies a discussion of some past event. Can you imagine anyone talking about Austrians who are alive today as "people living in present-day Austria"?

Maybe this is why I'm a programmer and not an author...

I literally read “present-day Australia” and thought: now that‘s surprising.

as a fellow present-day Austrian that was exactly my first thought before even reading your comment. Must be a linguistic thing

"Austrians have been drinking beer and eating blue cheese for 2600 years" would be a lot simpler and clearer.

But would mean something different. Also it doesn't make sense to call those people Austrian. The point of the phrase "present day Austria" is to describe the geographical area which is now Austria, while recognizing Austria did not exist (or was something else) at the time.

Just as an example, Mozart was born in present-day Austria, but he was not born in Austria, since Salzburg were not part of Austria at the time.

There's always reincarnation though. Maybe if you meditate on your past lives it'll come back?

I had a chuckle over it.

I was wondering if they'd buried the lede in that time travel had been invented

nice try, buddy, but now we know you people are functionally immortal we're going to invade and torture to find out your secret real quick! C'mon, tell me - is it the blue cheese?

TIL Dracula was (is?) Austrian.

> "The Hallstatt miners seem to have intentionally applied food fermentation technologies with microorganisms which are still nowadays used in the food industry," Maixner says.

These news will no doubt be seized upon by the fermentation community and the paleodiet community, by beer and Roquefort producers and a whole other bunch of people who will be happy to argue that their preferred diets or products have ancient roots but all the scientists did was find traces of Penicilium roqueforti and Saccharomyces cerevisiae in ancient human feces. That alone is not enough to know that they were used in fermentation by the people who, er, made the feces, or that they were even consumed on purpose.

These two organisms are ubiquitous in the environment. Speaking entirely from personal experience, P. roqueforti is impossible to keep off aging cheese, whether it's wanted or not. It thrives on humid substrates like cheese and it actually loves high amounts of salt (Roquefort cheese has 4% salt, a high amount, exactly to help P. roqueforti grow). On top of that, there are many different strains of P. roqueforti and not all of them have a plasant taste, in fact most don't. A couple taste like blue cheese (often named as P. album and P. glaucum), but most taste like wet wood or dirt. Basically any blue mold you find growing on food is likely some kind of P. roqueforti but if you've ever absent-mindedly bit on a moldy apple and felt your mouth fill with the taste of soil, rather than fruit- that's P. roqueforti.

I'm not so sure about S. cerevisiae, since I don't brew, but I suspect the same things go. It's much more likely that the traces of P. roqueforti and S. cerevisiae ended up on the ancient miners' feces either after the er fact, from the environment, or were on the miners' lunch and ingested by them by accident, just because people back then didn't have very good ways to preserve their food in such a pristine condition as we can do it today.

Which is another thing to keep in mind. Modern sensibilities mean that any food that looks different than usual is likely to be considered spoiled and thrown away. In days past this was not the case. If your cheese grew mold, you brushed the mold off and ate the cheese. That's probably how all the moldy European cheeses were first created. So again, ancient miners eating food (and we don't even know it was cheese to begin with) with P.roqueforti on it doesn't mean they were eating Roquefort cheese, or even cheese deliberately cultured with mold.

Saccharomyces cerevisiae is domesticated brewing yeast. While yeast is ubiquitous in the environment it will generally be other saccharomyces, brettanomyces, and so on. Saccharomyces pastorianus would have been interesting, as it' used for modern lagers but is believed to have evolved much more recently.

S. cerevisiae is believed to have originally been isolated from grape skins, but no one is sure. But it's mostly found in and around breweries and in people's homes today and not in the wild. If it's in old human waste, they were drinking something fermented.

Here's a cool paper about it[1].

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://www.mdpi....

Thanks for correcting me. I'll have a look at the paper. I'm no brewer so my knowledge of brewing yeasts is non-exsistent. Although I had some problems with my early attempts at cheesemaking that developped unpleasant chemical smells (plasticine, acetone, hand cream etc) and I've always thought (but couldn't really confirm) those were caused by either Acetobacteria or by alcohol-producing yeasts, because those chemical smells are, apparently, the hallmark of alcoholic fermentation (gone wrong, I guess).

That acetone flavor is ethyl acetate, which can come from some wild yeast, stressed domesticated yeast, and some bacteria. Commercial yeast doesn't eat lactose tough, so I'd assume a different micro organism. Have you improved sanitation in your process since?

> Have you improved sanitation in your process since?

Yes, very much indeed. Although the wild yeasts came from the starter culture I used at the time: milk kefir. Long story :)

Kefir cultures include lactose fermenting yeasts, in particular Cluyveromyces marxianus. It could be the culprit. Anyway something in my culture was producing alcohol because I could see bubbles in bottles of whey and I even had a small explosion once. Ahhh, the joys of washing goat-smelling whey from the walls of the kitchen...

Edit: In my experience almost everyone in home cheesemaking says they have impecable sanitation and that can't be the source of problems like early blowing etc. I like to buck the trend and admit that I try my best, but it's never possible to have 100% sanitation in a home kitchen and even less so when making cheese which is a protracted process with many opportunities for contamination. At least, since I've switched to using lyophillised cultures I've had only one cheese exhibit late blowing. And most of my hard cheeses have squeaky clean natural rinds without a spot of yeasts or moulds. That's probably a good sign.

Interesting, k. marxianus could be producing fusel alcohols which have sort fo a nail polish remover flavor/smell.

> because I could see bubbles in bottles of whey and I even had a small explosion once. Ahhh, the joys of washing goat-smelling whey from the walls of the kitchen...

bottle bombs are scary. I switched all of my beer making to kegging, because of how much of a hassle bottles can be.

Milk seems like a great host for lots of organisms, I don't envy the work cheese makers have to put it to get the right kinds of microorganisms established first. Beer is easy, b/c s. cerevisiae out competes everything in a high glucose environment.

Although is seems like kefir cultures contain s. cerevisiae sometimes. There must be some yeast/bacteria that converts lactose to another sugar in there as well.

> bottle bombs are scary. I switched all of my beer making to kegging, because of how much of a hassle bottles can be.

I was trying to make whey mead a.k.a. "blaand" as I imagine a cheesemaker would do it using cultures one would expect to find in milk or dairy like C. marxianus, rather than how a brewer would do it with C. cerevisiae. I got... something, not particularly pleasant to drink.

> Milk seems like a great host for lots of organisms, I don't envy the work cheese makers have to put it to get the right kinds of microorganisms established first. Beer is easy, b/c s. cerevisiae out competes everything in a high glucose environment.

Yes, you gotta be very careful with milk. There's a bit of a fashion in home cheesemaking for raw milk (inherited from artisanal cheesemaking, which in turn inherited it from European cheesemaking traditions). But I always pasteurise. If I had a proper dairy plant and could easily test the milk I use for pathogens and spoilage orgranisms, then OK, but I'm making cheese in a kitchen! Everything I can do to make the process safer and more predictable in outcome is worth it.

> Although is seems like kefir cultures contain s. cerevisiae sometimes. There must be some yeast/bacteria that converts lactose to another sugar in there as well.

Kefir is a wild culture so there's all sorts of organisms in there. I'm not sure anyone really knows them all. I've read a few papers that analyse the bacteria and yeasts in kefir "grains" from different parts of the world. It's a very varied bunch. It basically has the kind of variety of organisms that you can expect in raw milk, plus a whole bunch of yeasts and that makes it very hard to control as a cheesemaking culture. Part of why I gave up on using it as a starter. It's great for making yogurt though because the higher heat needed in yogurt making effectively filters out mesophilic organisms and leaves only the thermophiles used to make yogurt.

So, what do you brew? :)

I love cheese. I love that in this world there are people who makes the cheese I love. Thank you for posting this. Do you have any good recommended starting points to make cheese in the home? I'm interested to learn more about this fascinating past time.

Start with a good book for the home cheesemaker. I recommend Giannaclis Caldwell's "Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking". There's a lot of information to digest in there so take your time.

Whatever you do, stay away from the "quick mozzarella" recipes and videos on the internet that claim you can make cheese in 30 minutes. They lie.

If you know what you are doing, you can probably make something like Quark pretty quickly.

Though with all the draining etc, I don't think you'll be done in half an hour as a beginner.

Btw, milk kefir is an easy one to get started with. You just need to get the kefir grains from someone (or the Internet). It produces something sort-of like yoghurt.

>stay away from the "quick mozzarella" recipes

Ah there goes my hopes for Queso Oaxaqueno for dinner!

Yeah, queso oaxaca is difficult. Better start with something simpler, like a paneer or a queso... fresco, I think? The kind that doesn't need rennet. Once you get the hang of it, you can move on to something harder.

Edit: queso blanco, really.

I love cheese too. I don't currently make it (yet), but out of the same interest as you, I had searched on YouTube earlier. There are some videos there about home cheese-making. One guy I came across, in particular, maybe Australian, has what seemed like good knowledge, and a series of videos there.

Update: Searched again. His name is Gavin Webber. Just saw that he has launched an ebook. HTH.

Gavin Webber is a celebrity in the home cheesemaking world!

I love his videos, although there are a few times I caught him saying things I know to be wrong. But he's a great resource to get you started. And he's a lovely man :)

Good to know, thanks :)

I always find things like this pretty fascinating. Some salt miner from 3 millennia ago kindly took a poop in his mine so that present day scientists could discern he liked a good Roquefort. Just so cool to be able to figure this stuff out from so long ago.

I come at it from the other direction, I’m constantly in awe of the fact that I don’t even know the names of my great great grandparents. I know generally where they lived and I can assume what they did for a living, but I know nothing more. How do we know so little about things that were a mere 5-10 generations ago? We don’t even know the kinds of foods and drinks that existed 40 generations ago?

We are the first generation ever to have a permanent digital paper trail and it scares the hell out of me. We’re meant to be forgotten.

> We are the first generation ever to have a permanent digital paper trail and it scares the hell out of me. We’re meant to be forgotten.

What scares me is in 100 years time there will be far less known about 2000-2020 than 1980-2000

I've got 200 year olds pieces of paper in my house, I've got letters and photos from 50 years ago. I have hardly anything left from 2003 (when I started using a digital camera) through 2010 (when I started using an iphone, and it's all on icloud)

In the unlikely event apple still exists, and still does this type of storage, It's unlikely anyone will still be paying for my icloud service in 2120.

Perversely, digital data that's abandoned degrades far more than analog data.

> Perversely, digital data that's abandoned degrades far more than analog data

On top of that, I've got 30,000+ digital photos, and I can never find the one that I'm looking for.

I have document-dumped myself.

That's a solvable problem, searching images is one of the things ML is already pretty good at.

I understand if giving Google your photos is a nonstarter, but have you tried putting them in Google Photos? You can search by face and by objects in the photo.

Thank you. I keep my photos out of the cloud, but it's helpful to know that this is an option.

Don't worry, we leave enough garbage for future archaeologists to dig through.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden

different take: there wont be anything left from 1980 to 2000 era either as it will be burnt to ashes by the subsequent generations who could not accept what was said before they were born.

If the world is on fire 80 years from now, I kind of don't blame the survivors for deciding to hide all the dangerous learning from the time that nearly destroyed the world.

I don't agree with it but there's a possibility that particular fantasy/scifi scenario will come to pass. As a young person during the Cold War, I was not particularly enamored of technology due to the fear of nuclear destruction, the environmental destruction all around me, and the prevalence of suburbs.

What permanent digital paper trail? I've been on this internet since the mid 90s and most of what I remember from those years has vanished without a trace. Seems to me that information in the digital world is at least as ephemeral as what came before.

If it interests you, there are a number of genealogy resources where you might be able to track down those names and perhaps learn more about what they did.

One resource is your local library. My local one has a genealogy group that meets every month.

Your github.io page says you are in Houston. Here's details from your local libarary: https://houstonlibrary.org/genealogy-7314 .

Tomorrow there's the online event "Clayton Library Presents: Discovering Your Female Ancestors - Genealogy" at 2pm - https://houstonlibrary.libcal.com/event/8125372

On Friday there's another online event, "Clayton Library Presents - Did I Get Everything? - Genealogy" - https://houstonlibrary.libcal.com/event/7992172 .

It's okay, the future humans in their mud huts won't be able to read the data.

> I’m constantly in awe of the fact that I don’t even know the names of my great great grandparents. > ... > How do we know so little about things that were a mere 5-10 generations ago?

I share your overall point.

But to this part specifically, if you haven't looked (if you want to try looking into your great great grandparents and want recommendations for a few places to search, I'd be happy to help) you'd be surprised how much is available. Genealogy is easier than ever, thanks to vast amounts of digitised information.

Between half a dozen sites or so you can dig into censuses and church records and newspaper records going back hundreds of years. My dad did a lot of genealogy in the 1980's and 1990's, and spent a lot of time in archives looking at microfilm and paper records, but it took me just hours to fill in huge gaps via online records, from birth, marriage and death records dating back hundreds of years to minutiae like my grandfathers ads for his housepainting business in the 1960's, or ads for the drycleaning business descendants of some distant relatives who emigrated to the US midwest ran in the 30's, or pictures of the house in Brooklyn where my great great grandparents lived (and died) after emigrating. Even pictures of grave stones are being collected. Of course just how much people are able to dig up varies greatly.

In fact I just heard back from ta granddaughter of my grandmothers half-brother online after tracking down her mother via records searches, and then finding the daughter via Facebook...

Of course there are still huge, gaping gaps, but there's also still a huge amount of information about the "recent" past (last few hundred years) locked up in paper archives that are still not easily searchable.

> We are the first generation ever to have a permanent digital paper trail and it scares the hell out of me. We’re meant to be forgotten.

Don't put too much store in our digital records. We don't know yet how permanent they'll turn out to be.

But: we are producing absolutely giant piles of rubbish. Glass, cans and plastics don't decays quickly. So there'll be plenty for future archaeologists to dig through.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden

(Of course, many aluminum cans will be recycled, because they are worth enough to do that. Less so far plastic with current technology, and it'll likely never be useful to recycle glass.)

People used to attach much more importance to family history. As best as I can tell, that changed sometime in the 20th century. It was not uncommon prior to that for people to know not just the names but detailed stories and lives of their ancestors going back several generations.

It's less permanent than you think. Link rot is a serious problem. News articles from as little as year ago are sometimes broken.

A lot of people are doing us the exact same favor in places like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles right now!

Touch your navel, that navel, was connected in a long line, to the first mammal. Time like a canyon, so deep it gives one vertigo.

They've also discovered neolithic villages that were along the shores of lakes in the alps in present day Switzerland that have been dated to as far back as 1,000 BC. They were already living in post and beam homes on stilts, herding animals, making pottery, and probably living a pretty nice life.

>and probably living a pretty nice life.

Human remains from other parts of Europe show many people in this Era died violently.

17 percent of skulls in Denmark from this Era had signs of serious violence. Women and children were not given any mercy.

Yeah people seem to be completely oblivious about the fact that the past was way more violent than the present.

Ancient life is all romantic until you think of what you're going to do when you need a dentist.

I'm in my 40's. My grandfather told me stories about going to the dentist when he was young: Foot-powered pneumatic drills drills were still in use (electric drills were available and up to about 50% higher rpm by the time he was a little boy)

Foot powered drills reached 2,000 rpm and only dates to the mid 1800's. Early electric dental drills reached about 3000 rpm in 1914. Modern dental drills are 40,000 rpm - 800,000 rpm depending on type and use (with the highest rpm being mostly for precision work).

I shudder to think what the 2k-3k rpm ones would be like to be subjected to - I find the low rpm current drills used for high torque, low precision work bad enough.

But the hand drills that went before them were typically in the region of 15 rpm...

So as someone who has been through enough dental work that new dentists tends to marvel at all the exciting work they can see examples of when examining me, I absolutely share the terror when thinking of ancient dentistry. (On the other hand, I'd probably have died of complications in my 20's if I'd had the same dental damage back then)

One might argue that modern dentistry is just barely keeping up with the ability of modern society to destroy teeth.

As an unintentional connoisseur of modern dentistry techniques (my teeth are unusually soft, as every dentist I've ever had since my first filling at age 4 have told me as they've poked them and marvelled at it), I think it's more than keeping up with our ability to destroy teeth in terms of improving the quality of repairs.

E.g. I have no metal fillings left any more - I had many when I was younger - as whenever the old metal fillings came loose the were replaced by composite fillings or porcelain.

And I hardly have any plastic composite fillings left either, as they got replaced by porcelain as porcelain have gotten cheaper and faster to do. My teeth overall look better today at 46 than they did in my teens despite far more damage.

Today porcelain fillings are about as good as gold fillings used to be, but cheaper and better looking (no, I'm not the type to find gold teeth aesthetically pleasing).

Getting work done has gotten more comfortable too (so much so that during my last round of dental work my dentist had to use a bite block as I kept falling asleep in the chair and he got tired of waking me up; though admittedly that is probably at least partly because I'm so used to it)

But I fully agree that we absolutely badly need a revolution in preventing decay and/or fully restoring teeth rather than repairing or replacing them, though.

I read about some amoeba you can colonize your mouth with that will eat the caries causing bacteria.

Main downside is aesthetic: the amoeba colonization apparently turns your teeth grey or so.

Did you mean 10000BC?

1000 BC is already Iron Age, we had had entire civilizations with literature, fine metalwork and gigantic monuments all over the place at that point.

By 1000 BC the pyramids were already as old as the Hagia Sophia is now.

Different parts of the world were in eg the neolithic at different times.

The iron age didn't arrive simultaneously everywhere.

(No clue about this specific place in the Alps, though.)

>"and probably living a pretty nice life"

Working round the clock, fighting with other tribes, being eaten by parasites, having all kinds of diseases, I could go on and on. Sounds like "pretty nice life".

fighting, parasites, diseases, sure. but working round the clock is more common in industrialized societies than it was befor https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

Also, ritualized gang rape and subsequent death during childbirth.

> ritualized gang rape

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence#Antiqu...

Skara Brae dates back about 5000 years and there are even older buildings in the area (Knap of Howar)

Pretty nice life with high infant mortality and 30 years life expectancy with back breaking work and the risk of starvation ever present. Lets not romanticize our ancesters.

To be fair the life expectancy and infant mortality affect one another. If you survived through infancy you would end up living a decent amount of time.

I’m sure our lives are more comfortable now but I’m not sure everyone is happier.

> I’m sure our lives are more comfortable now but I’m not sure everyone is happier.

Happiness is a combination of too many different factors - you can't really optimize for it.

I feel like the golden age of civilization was pre internet. Text based communication too easily devolves in to flame wars, but the time it took to receive, read, contemplate and respond to a letter seems to moderate tempers.

More like instead of Internet flame wars villages simply waged wars against each other over petty bullshit.

The world has less war than ever.

That's not entirely true - pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer societies don't seem to have had any kind of wars at all for all we've been able to find out (obviously they would have had murder and such human-to-human conflict).

This actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it - Only with the advent of agriculture did war make any sense, as before it would always be advantageous to just move to a different area rather than risk the few members of your family/tribe in a fight with another family/tribe, especially in the endless forests that populated much of the environment where humans lived.

Don't know. It's true that an all-out battle is too risky a proposition. But Chimps e.g. are known to patrol the border areas of their territory in order to catch and kill stray members of neighbouring troupes. You can call that a murder, but I'd go with low-intensity warfare.

> pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer societies don't seem to have had any kind of wars at all for all we've been able to find out

Its not because it did not leave any trace that it did not exist

Ummm, we've discovered tribes that were/are still at that level of technology. They definitely engage(d) in warfare.

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization

Yes, that book mostly confirms what I'm saying l, at least as far as the wikipedia summary can be trusted:

> About 90-95% of known societies engage in war. Those that did not are almost universally either isolated nomadic groups (for whom flight is an option)

This perfectly describes hunter-gatherer societies. All of the other examples cited in the wikipedia summary, going back as far as the Mesolithic, are settled agricultural societies.

Hmm, ok.

See perhaps https://books.google.com.sg/books/about/Violence_and_Warfare...

I believe written letters actually weren't much of a thing back in 1000 BC. However, there was still real-time in-person communication, which can certainly lead to heated arguments no matter what year you live in. It seemed to have no problem generating persecution, pogroms, and genocide back then.

Maybe I'm a naive futurist, but I think the best time for a person to be alive is right now, if you're fortunate enough to be born in a developed country. And also maybe even if you weren't, as long as you weren't born somewhere awful like North Korea.

> I believe written letters actually weren't much of a thing back in 1000 BC.

That very much depends where you were. We have lots of surviving letters from that time period.

>"I feel like the golden age of civilization was pre internet."

https://youtu.be/nS5_EQgbuLc

I live in Austria, and i had no idea people were that old.

Yeah, beer 1000 years BC shouldn't be surprising anywhere?

Who looked at a stinking frothing puddle of rotted grains, and decided to drink enough of it, repeatedly, to discover and evaluate the consequences & process?

That's crazy. They almost discovered hot wings and beer.

The tests are about the presence of Fungi. Any food, raw or naturally fermented might have had these fungi. To connect that to beer seems a bit of a stretch.

Within a single species you can often see differentiation in terms of preferred ecological niches. Yeast for bread is not usually the same strain as yeast for brewing beer, even though they are the same species. They compared ~150 different strains of S. cerevisiae and clustered them by the presence of SNPs to determine "categories", and found some that strongly clustered in modern beer brewing, some that clustered together with wine and additional beer strains, sections for Asia- or West Africa-derived strains, and a "mixed" section with bread yeast, some wines, and some other spirits.

The ancient yeast clustered squarely within one of the two beer-brewing groups, suggesting it may be a precursor to these modern beer species.

So it's not just the presence of the these DNAs they are looking at; they are using functional genomics to determine the biological role these specific species may have had.

next thing we'll be told those beer and cheese nibblers were exchanging hacker news as well :-)

if we apply the principle that we are more or less the same species for several hundred thousand years, it stands to reason that a similar age and/or occupation demographic must have had conceptually similar interests, communication channels and networks (even if technically implemented in potentially quite distinct ways)

So people in present-day Austria are time-travelers?

It's odd, I had no problem parsing the title.

It's clearly not talking about present day Austrians as it's 2700 years ago, and as Austria is a new country, and its name as a region only dates back c. 1000 years, it's clearly not talking about Austrians from 5000 years ago, as there weren't any, but it is talking about people from the region currently known as Austria.

I wonder if it's a language difference between English and American.

It is a confusing title. It took me a good 30 seconds to recognize what was actually meant. I'm not sure how else it could've been expressed though. I think it just took a while to connect "people in present day Austria" with "this person lived in the area that is now known as Austria, but wasn't back then".

"Present-day X" is a common stock phrase in English to talk about a place in the past while identifying it, for convenience, with today's political borders.

"Julius Caesar ruled over territory in present-day Italy, Tunisia, Spain, Turkey, (...etc)" is a perfectly normal sentence.

I know, but your sentence has additional context

1) ruled is in past tense

2) "over territory in" establishing geographical context

The title starts with "People in present-day Austria" (implies the people there now) then switches to past tense and adds 2700 years ago.

> The title starts with "People in present-day Austria" (implies the people there now)

No, I don't think it implies this. That would just be "people in Austria"; or if you want to make the presentness explicit, "people in Austria now".

> then switches to past tense

It's not a switch. "People in present-day Austria" doesn't have any tense (there are no verbs).

It implies present tense with "People in present-day". At least that's what confused me.

Honestly, I don't care what you think. It confused me. What more do you want from me?

I didn't realize the title was confusing until I saw some of the comments in here. I suppose the title could say "People in the region of present-day Austria" to clear things up to those confused by it.

It is confusing to you, and more. It's not confusing to me, and more.

I find that interesting.

It is interesting, yeah. I had to laugh when I finally "got" it. Sort of makes you think about how our experiences, expectations, etc shape how we interpret even simple things like this.

Even the briefest of glances at TFA shows the full title, too long for HN's submission form: "Ancient poop shows people in present-day Austria drank beer and ate blue cheese up to 2,700 years ago".

Describing places, times, and people is difficult over long intervals. Both titles are reasonable efforts under constraints, and there is far more interesting content in the article to discuss: saline preservation, copralytic analysis, genetic sequencing, the discovery and persistence of fermantation, and more.

In Comments ... Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

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Terrible, broken title that confused me too. They meant to suggest something last like “ people who lived a part of the world which is now called Austria”.

> part of the world which is now called Austria

The phrase "present day Austria" is commonly understood to mean exactly that.

I see nothing wrong with the title. Surely the ambiguity caused by the possibility that Austrians might be using their time machines to eat ancient cheese didn't cause you too much confusion?

They dipped beer in blue cheese!

Not the most constructive comment, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfN6VwPWMds

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