Austrians were making bacon thousands of years ago. And a researcher says they were probably the first in Europe to do it on an industrial scale.

Hans Reschreiter of Vienna's Museum of Natural History says DNA traces from more than 6,000 pig bones at what was a prehistoric slaughter house near the Upper Austrian town of Hallstatt shows they are more than 3,000 years old.

He told the Austria Press Agency on Friday that excavations at the site show that the pigs were all castrated, methodically slaughtered and their meat cured in huge wooden barrels before it was hung to dry in nearby caves.

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