The earliest evidence of honey
There is no date for the first honey and there is unlikely ever to be one. There are six separate earliest-known findings, established by different methods and separated by thousands of years, and almost every confident sentence on this subject is two of them run together.
Six firsts, not one
Ask when humans first used honey and the honest answer is a question back: which of these do you mean? Each has a different answer, a different method behind it, and a different margin of error.
| The finding | What establishes it | What it does not establish |
|---|---|---|
| Earliest physical evidence | A residue, a wax lump or a preserved comb showing people had the material | How they got it, what they did with it, or whether honey was involved at all |
| Earliest depiction | An image of people taking honey | The age of the practice — the practice was certainly older than any picture of it |
| Earliest written reference | A text naming honey, wax or bees | Anything about the far longer unwritten period before it |
| Earliest evidence of management | A sign a colony was tended rather than robbed | A date anybody can currently defend |
| Earliest organised beekeeping | An apiary: many hives, sited together, run as production | That this was where beekeeping began, rather than where it is visible |
| Earliest surviving hive | A hive that physically survives to be excavated | Anything about hives made of wood, bark or basketry, which do not survive |
Where each one currently stands
- Physical evidence: beeswax residues have been identified in Neolithic pottery across a wide arc of Europe, the Near East and North Africa, with the earliest secure occurrences in Anatolia. A beeswax and resin compound from a southern African cave is far older still, and is evidence for a bee product rather than for honey.
- Depiction: the honey-gathering figure at the Cueva de la Araña in eastern Spain is the best known, and its date is a broad bracket rather than the single figure usually quoted.
- Written reference: Egyptian records name honey from the third millennium BCE onwards, and the earliest text describing setting up beekeeping rather than merely using honey is a much later Mesopotamian inscription.
- Management: unresolved, and probably permanently. The first managed hive was a hollow log that looked exactly like a hollow log.
- Organised beekeeping: the excavated apiary at Tel Rehov in the Jordan valley, an installation of stacked clay cylinders inside a town.
- Surviving hive: the same clay cylinders, which is not a coincidence — fired clay in a dry region survives and almost nothing else does.
Why the record is shaped the way it is
Almost nothing about honey gathering leaves a trace. Wax degrades, comb degrades, rope and ladders and smoking brands degrade, and the tools are unmodified sticks. What survives is pottery, and pottery survives selectively: the map of early beeswax use is substantially a map of where ceramics were made, where they were excavated, and where somebody has since funded a residue analysis.
That is why the evidence clusters in the Neolithic Near East and Europe rather than in, say, tropical Africa, where honey gathering is likely to have been continuous and intensive for far longer. Absence of evidence here is very close to meaningless, and a timeline that does not say so is a timeline of preservation dressed up as a timeline of behaviour.
The claim to watch for
The sentence to distrust is any one that gives a single round number for the age of beekeeping. It is almost always the Neolithic pottery figure, which is a wax-contact date, silently promoted into a beekeeping date. The two are separated by several thousand years and by a change in what people were doing that nobody has yet found a way to see.
Sources
- Widespread exploitation of the honeybee by early Neolithic farmers — Nature (2015) · Peer-reviewed article
- Early evidence of San material culture represented by organic artifacts from Border Cave, South Africa — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2012) · Peer-reviewed article
- It is the land of honey: beekeeping at Tel Rehov — Near Eastern Archaeology (2007) · Peer-reviewed article
- The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting — Routledge (1999) · Historical text
- Mesolithic rock art of the Cuevas de la Araña, Bicorp, Valencia — Spanish archaeological literature · Historical text
- HoneyHQ editorial synthesis — HEKNO Ltd · HoneyHQ synthesis
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
Documented traditions
Specific practices behind this subject, each naming where it is documented, among whom, and whether anyone still does it.
- Himalayan cliff honey huntingHoney hunting · Practised, decliningHarvesting the open combs of the Himalayan giant honey bee from overhanging rock faces, on rope ladders, with fire and smoke, in mid-hill Nepal and adjacent ranges. The most photographed harvesting tradition in the world and one of the least accurately described.
- Rope and ladder accessHarvesting method · Practised, decliningThe engineering half of honey hunting. Nests sit on overhangs and forty metres up emergent trees, and every tradition that reaches them has solved the access problem with fibre, wood and nerve.
Read next
- A history of honeyThe wider narrative this page supplies the dates and the caveats for.
- Beeswax in Neolithic potteryThe pottery evidence in detail, and what a wax signature can and cannot say.
- Tel Rehov and the oldest excavated apiaryThe excavated apiary that anchors the organised-beekeeping end of the sequence.
Tools that use this
- Honey finder
Which honey should I buy for what I actually want to do with it?
- Flavour selector
I like this taste — which honeys have it?
- Honey comparison
How do these honeys actually differ, beyond colour?