What is the oldest evidence of beeswax use?
Short answerIt depends
The oldest widely accepted evidence is a beeswax and plant resin adhesive on a fibre artefact from Border Cave in South Africa, tens of thousands of years old. The oldest large body of evidence is beeswax absorbed into Neolithic pottery across Europe, the Near East and North Africa, earliest securely in Anatolia in the seventh millennium BCE.
Two different kinds of find
The southern African adhesive is a single exceptional survival: wax mixed with resin, preserved on a fragment of fibre in conditions that almost never occur. It is much older than anything else and it is one object.
The Neolithic pottery evidence is the opposite. No single sherd is remarkable, and the study behind it examined several thousand of them across three continents. That is why it can answer a question about distribution rather than about one moment, and why it is the more useful body of evidence despite being younger.
What wax evidence does not tell you
Sources
- 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
- Widespread exploitation of the honeybee by early Neolithic farmers — Nature (2015) · Peer-reviewed article
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.