What is the oldest evidence of honey use?
Short answerIt depends
It depends which kind of evidence you mean, and there are six answers rather than one. The oldest chemical evidence is beeswax in Neolithic pottery. The oldest picture is a rock painting in eastern Spain. The oldest excavated apiary is in the Jordan valley. These are separated by thousands of years and established by completely different methods.
The six answers
| Kind of evidence | The current earliest known |
|---|---|
| Physical trace of a bee product | Beeswax and resin adhesive from a southern African cave |
| Beeswax in a container | Neolithic pottery, earliest securely in Anatolia |
| Depiction of honey collecting | The Cueva de la Araña rock painting, eastern Spain |
| Written reference to honey | Egyptian records from the third millennium BCE |
| Depiction of beekeeping | A Fifth Dynasty Egyptian temple relief |
| Excavated apiary and surviving hives | Tel Rehov, Jordan valley, Iron Age |
Why they cannot be ranked
A residue, a painting, a text and an excavated building answer different questions. The residue proves a material was present and says nothing about how it was obtained. The painting proves the practice was worth depicting and does not date the practice. The apiary proves organised production existed by that date and says nothing about where it began.
Popular reporting compares them anyway, which is how the oldest wax date becomes the age of beekeeping. Every one of these findings is provisional and each has moved at least once.
Sources
- Widespread exploitation of the honeybee by early Neolithic farmers — Nature (2015) · Peer-reviewed article
- It is the land of honey: beekeeping at Tel Rehov — Near Eastern Archaeology (2007) · Peer-reviewed article
- Mesolithic rock art of the Cuevas de la Araña, Bicorp, Valencia — Spanish archaeological literature · Historical text
- The Tears of Re: Beekeeping in Ancient Egypt — Oxford University Press (2015) · Monograph
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.