My guess is that she chewed it aggressively, giving side-eye glances and issuing insults to the hapless man who was supposed to hunt while she was gathering. Thor always let her down and she was sassy enough to insult him about it.
True? We're not sure, but that's one possible outcome after archaeologists extracted a human genome out of 5,700-year-old chewing gum found in Denmark.
Yes. The chewing gum was 5,700 years old, which means the person chewing it was around even before Tom Brady began his NFL career.
The results of the DNA tests were published in Nature Communications and revealed a lot more about the woman (I call her Gladys) chewing it than you would expect from a single piece of gum. In fact, researchers constructed an entire human genome, the first genome to come out of something other than bones or teeth. (In the interest of transparency, I considered buying a Hyundai Genome in 1988 before settling on another model.)
The research team, led by Hannes Schroeder, a paleogeneticist at the University of Copenhagen, concluded that the woman (Gladys) had dark hair, dark skin and blue eyes. The fact that she was chewing gum also suggests (my opinion) that she was spunky, like Flo in the 1970s sitcom "Alice" (or myriad other spunky TV and movie characters who chew gum aggressively).
Researches found traces of what may have been Gladys' last meal (duck and hazelnuts) as well as discovering that she had traces of Epstein-Barr virus, which can cause malaria and probably contributed to the exasperation she must have felt when her man, who I'll call Thor, returned empty-handed after a day of hunting in my imagined scenario.
"I've been gathering all day," she presumably said, perhaps using a series of hand gestures and grunts while chomping her gum. "You and your pals were just out screwing around. Again."
"Oh yeah?" Thor would say. "We invented this." And then he held up the very first pair of scissors.
"Oh, real cutting-edge technology," Gladys presumably said, chomping the gum and looking at a prehistoric studio audience, who roared with laughter.
"Sorry for the low-brow humor," she'd add, raising her sunken eyebrows at the audience, who adored her spunk.
Of course, that's all speculation, not included in the report. But Gladys was chewing gum, so it's logical, right?
The biggest question about this discovery is this: Ancient people had chewing gum?
According to an article about the discovery by NPR, Schroeder said the gum was a black-brown substance, known as birch pitch, which "was obtained by heating birch bark." NPR quoted Schroeder as saying it wasn't clear why the ancients chewed the pitch, but it was likely to soften it up before using it as a kind of glue to stick sharp points onto weapons or tools. Schroeder said the people may have even used it for medicinal purposes, such as a pain remedy for toothaches, because it is a mild antiseptic.
The more likely reason, though, is that Gladys was a spunky, opinionated woman who didn't really care what Thor and the others thought of her. She voiced her opinions while chomping the gum. People loved her!
Isn't science amazing? Because of this discovery – and my groundless speculation – we know that ancient people were just like characters on situation comedies.
Science again shows that we haven't really changed.
Thank goodness for spunky Gladys!
Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.
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