Researchers are now one step closer to understanding how apples made the journey from wild populations to grocery stores and farmers markets around the world, and how that process differed from the domestication of grasses such as wheat and rice. The first people to make use of these grasses encountered fields of densely packed wild cereals. The seeds of these self-pollinating annuals drop to the ground when ripe, allowing a fresh crop to grow each year. Over the course of millennia, beginning about 12,000 years ago, humans first harvested, and then domesticated, these crops. Apple trees, on the other hand, reproduce poorly when fallen apples are left to rot, or when second-generation trees grow too close to their parents. They rely on animals—including humans—to disperse their seeds and carry out pollination.

The fossil record suggests that apples developed across Europe and Asia as early as 11.6 million years ago. Apple specimens from a Neolithic site in Switzerland date back to 3160 B.C. Archaeologists have discovered an apple seed from the end of the first millennium B.C. at a village site in the Tian Shan Mountains in Kazakhstan. This is thought to be where the modern apple originated. As part of a quest to determine how apples were domesticated, archaeobotanist Robert Spengler of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has combined the fossil and archaeological evidence with genetic studies comparing modern apples to their ancient ancestors. He has concluded that the first human populations to encounter wild apples took on a role once performed by now-extinct megafauna, dispersing seeds and pollen, and, inadvertently, expanding the fruit’s range. Says Spengler, “It’s clear that humans are enticed by the same food sources that would have enticed a mastodon.”

Neolithic Britons not only traveled hundreds of miles to attend celebrations at sacred sites, they also brought their own pigs with them to be consumed in the festivities. The food that an animal or person eats when young leaves a chemical signature in their teeth and bones that scientists can analyze to determine where they were—or were not—raised. An investigation led by Richard Madgwick of Cardiff University recently analyzed pig bones discarded more than 4,000 years ago at four henge sites in southwest England, including Durrington Walls. Madgwick concluded that many of the pigs butchered at the henges were not bred nearby, but were instead brought from as far north as modern Scotland and northwest England. “This shows that there was a much more mobile, connected society than we once thought,” he says. “Knowledge of these events and monuments reached far and wide. People were clearly very organized and went to great lengths to adhere to the symbolic regulations these monuments required.” One such requirement may have been to contribute a pig that they themselves had raised. “People from across Britain would gather for these feasts and consume food from across Britain,” Madgwick says. “This is a potent act in constructing group identity.”

Ultramarine, a brilliant blue pigment, was so dearly coveted in the European Middle Ages that at times it fetched a higher price than gold. The coloring was prepared from the mineral lapis lazuli, which was mined at a single remote location in Afghanistan. A multidisciplinary team was, therefore, surprised to detect an abundance of ultramarine particles embedded in the dental plaque of a woman buried in the eleventh or early twelfth century at a German monastery. “We wondered how on earth a woman at this early date, in a kind of backwater location, came into contact with this incredibly expensive mineral,” says Christina Warinner, a molecular archaeologist at Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

The most likely explanation, the researchers concluded, was that the woman was a scribe who used the pigment to illustrate sacred manuscripts. Their method of analysis may point the way to identifying more early medieval female scribes, who have gone unrecognized because they rarely, if ever, signed their work. “We do have a few surviving manuscripts written by women around the same time period,” says Warinner. “But how many more artists are out there waiting to be found if we just look at their teeth?”