According to a new study, three-foot gold and silver drinking straws are the oldest in the world.

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They were probably used for communal beer drinking.

According to a new study, the world's oldest drinking straws are slender gold and silver tubes made during the Bronze Age.

While excavating a kurgan from the ancient Maikop (sometimes called Maykop) culture in the northwestern Caucasus region, which predominantly comprises modern-day Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and sections of southern Russia, archaeologists discovered the 3-foot-long metal tubes. The purpose of the tubes had been a mystery to scientists until recently. According to the latest findings, people may have drank beer from a common jug using the tubes, some of which are tied to small bull sculptures.

First author Viktor Trifonov, a Russian archaeologist, tells Live Science that "the thin tubes are not as simple as they appear at first look." To balance the device, "even the magnificent bull figurines affixed to them" might serve both aesthetic and functional components.

In a massive kurgan with three separate compartments, archaeologists discovered the 5,500-year-old straws, each of which contained the remains and other belongings of a person from the Maikop culture (about 3700 B.C. to 2900 B.C.). Hundreds of semiprecious stone and gold beads, ceramic containers, metal cups, swords, and tools filled the largest compartment. The majority of the items were stacked against the chamber's walls. According to the study's findings, the right side of the skeleton was fitted with an eight-piece metal bundle, four of which included a gold or silver bull figurine.

Archaeologists have debated whether the tubes were scepters, canopy poles, or even a bundle of rods that could be used to make arrowheads. None of the proposed explanations, however, convinced Trifonov and his colleagues. They instead opted to reexamine these objects to see if they could explain why they were tubes rather than solid poles.

How did they know? Because the tubes appeared to be drinking straws, made to be used to drink beer.

Archaeological evidence supports this theory. Around 13,000 years ago, ancient inhabitants in the Near East brewed beer from barley, according to academics. In the fifth to the fourth millennium B.C., large-scale brewing developed in Western Asia, and seal impressions from that time show individuals drinking from straws. Findings such as Queen Puabi's burial with long straws in the Royal Cemetery at Ur (modern-day Iraq) show that drinking beer through long straws was popular among the ancient Sumerians.

One of the items was examined for residue, and the investigators discovered barley starch, cereal particles, and a lime tree pollen grain. Nonetheless, "these results should thus be taken with care, as more analyses are needed," the researchers wrote in the study published in the journal PLOS ONE.

As Trifonov put it in a press release: "The design, quantity of tubes, residue analysis, and several important parallels with Sumerian straws lead us to infer that Maikop tubes are drinking straws." As "Ancient Near East art displays numerous long straws put in a communal cup, allowing individuals standing or sitting nearby to drink together," he noted, it is likely that the Maikop individual drank with pals.

According to Trifonov, the metal strainers in the Maikop tubes would "help filter out the contaminants found in ancient beer."

Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, an archaeologist who has studied similar drinking straws from later Bronze and Iron Age Levant contexts but was not involved in the new study, said the research "sounds quite convincing, in light of other parallels, of the analyses of residues, and the importance of alcoholic beverages in most ancient and modern societies."

As Maeir explained in an email to Live Science, "I would have loved to have had further examinations of the straws for additional residue analysis (of other types)."

It is 1,000 years older than the next-oldest straws on record, which were unearthed in Ur and date back to 4,500 years, according to Trifonov's statement.

St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum has put the straws on exhibit. Antiquity, a peer-reviewed magazine, released the findings online on Wednesday, Jan. 19.

This article first appeared on Live Science.

Reference : https://www.livescience.com/oldest-drinking-straws-on-record

Image source : https://pixabay.com/id/vectors/jus-minuman-kotak-apel-31730/

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