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posted by martyb on Thursday March 19 2020, @11:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-are-what-you...wheat? dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Analysing 2500-year-old teeth has thrown open a window onto life and gender inequality during Bronze Age China.

The University of Otago-led research has cast light on breastfeeding, weaning, evolving diets and the difference between what girls and boys were eating, lead researcher Dr. Melanie Miller, a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Otago's Department of Anatomy, says.

The teeth come from the Central Plains of China and date from the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, between 771 and 221 BC. Despite their extreme antiquity (they are as old as Athens' Parthenon and the Old Testament sacking of Jerusalem's First Temple) the teeth's dentin—the bony tissue forming the bulk of our teeth's structure—was full of information.

Using stable isotope analysis, researchers were able to show the types and amounts of various elements in the dentin, including carbon and nitrogen, unlocking information about the individuals' life and diet. That enabled a picture to be drawn of a changing society, Dr. Miller says.

[...] The analysis of 23 individuals from two different archaeological sites shows children were breastfed until they were between 2.5 and four years old, with weaning onto solids—consisting mostly of wheat and soybean—occurring slightly earlier in females than in males.

"For the two communities we studied, food was an integral aspect of identity, and it was a medium of differentiation between females and males. We found dietary differences between the sexes began in early childhood and continued over the lifetime.

[...] Males continued to eat more of the traditional crop, millet, while females consumed more of the "new" foods such as wheat and soy, Dr. Miller says. That wheat and soy foods were important components of childhood diets suggests they were incorporated into local culinary practices as weaning foods.

The Eastern Zhou Dynasty is a very important period of Chinese history and Chinese cultural change; it is the time of Confucius and other notable intellectuals, Dr. Miller says.

More information: Melanie J. Miller et al. Raising girls and boys in early China: Stable isotope data reveal sex differences in weaning and childhood diets during the eastern Zhou era, American Journal of Physical Anthropology (2020). DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.24033

Journal information: American Journal of Physical Anthropology


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  • (Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @02:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @02:07AM (#973367)

    Maybe the PhD should look closer.
    I assume she'll find she can even tell which are male and which are female just by looking at their skeleton. Now if that isn't unequal, I don't know what is.

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