Wednesday, July 26, 2017

MUNICH, GERMANY—A wooden box containing traces of grains has been recovered on Switzerland’s Lötschberg Mountain, according to a report in The International Business Times. The 3,500-year-old box is thought to have been lost or forgotten at the summit of an alpine pass, some 8,500 feet above sea level. Molecular traces of spelt, emmer, and barley were detected in the box by a team including Jessica Hendy of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. “We knew that cereals were around but don’t know how important they were in the general economy,” she said. “Now we’ve developed this, we can try to apply it more widely to understand how important cereals were for these early farmers.” For more, go to “Switzerland Everlasting.”