World’s Earliest Evidence Of Food Fermentation Discovered In Southern Sweden

AncientPages.com -  9,000-year-old fish bones discovered in southern Sweden provides earliest evidence of fermentation for food preservation anywhere in the world.

The discovery of the world’s oldest storage of fermented fish in southern Sweden provides earliest evidence of fermentation of food  and could rewrite the Nordic prehistory with findings indicating a far more complex society than previously thought.

"These findings indicate a different time line, with Nordic foragers settling much earlier and starting to take advantage of the lakes and sea to harvest and process fish."

The unique discovery was made while excavating a 9,200 year-old settlement at what was once a lake in Blekinge, in southern Sweden.

The team found both bark and enormous amounts of fish, about 30,000 fish bones per square meter.

“Our findings of large-scale fish fermentation, a traditional way of preserving fish, indicate that not only was this area settled at that time, it was also able to support a large community”, says Adam Boethius, from Lund University, in a press release.

“These findings indicate a different time line, with Nordic foragers settling much earlier and starting to take advantage of the lakes and sea to harvest and process fish,” says Adam Boethius, adding that from a global perspective, the development in the Nordic region could correspond to that of the Middle East at the time.”

30,000 fish bones were recovered from the site located at what was once a lake near the outlet of the Baltic Sea in Solvesborg in Blekinge province. Photo: Blekinge Museum

Boethius said that a find like this has never been made before. That is partly because fish bones are so fragile and disappear more easily than, for example, bones of land animals. In this case, the conditions were quite favorable, which helped preserve the remains.

This type of fermentation requires a cold climate and is quite complex process. People did not have access to salt or the ability to make ceramic containers, they acidified the fish using, for example, pine bark and seal fat, and then wrapped the entire content in seal and wild boar skins and buried it in a pit covered with muddy soil.

At least 60 tons of freshwater fish must have been caught in this location.

Findings are published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

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