Secrets of the Ancient Gum

Humans have been chewing gum for thousands of years—to freshen our breath, clean our teeth, and relieve our toothaches. But Lola’s gum may have had a different purpose. To understand what it might have been, let’s journey back in time.

Lola lived during a prehistoric era called the Neolithic period. Back then, life wasn’t exactly glamorous. Lola couldn’t turn on a faucet to get a drink. Plumbing hadn’t been invented. Instead, she would have walked to a lake or a stream­­—and there were no cushy sneakers to soften her step. At night, she didn’t curl up in a cozy bed. Like most people, she probably slept on the floor of a hut, on top of some branches and leaves. And all around her lurked dangers­: sharp-clawed bears and boars with flesh-piercing tusks.

Yet despite how brutal life could be, it was an exciting time to be a human—because huge changes were taking place. Lola’s people were hunter-gatherers. They hunted, caught fish, and foraged for berries and nuts in fields and forests. This way of life wasn’t new; all humans were once hunter-gatherers. But improved tools were making this way of life safer and simpler than ever before. Stone axes and chisels enabled people to better fight off predators, hunt, and build shelters.

These new stone tools were helping to make other changes possible too. Around the world, some people were beginning to farm­. They were learning to sow seeds and grow food, using their axes to clear woodlands for planting and their blades to harvest crops.

So what does Lola’s gum have to do with all this? It played a key role in making and repairing tools.

Here’s how: Lola’s gum was a substance called pitch. To make pitch, bark from a birch tree was heated until it turned into a sticky goo. That goo was then used like glue. For example, it could be used to attach an ax head to a wooden handle. That’s because as it cooled, pitch hardened, which helped pieces stick together.

To soften a bit of hardened pitch, people would chew on it. That’s likely why Lola was chewing her pitch. And at some point, perhaps after using some to, say, fix a chisel, she spit it out. Of course, Lola couldn’t know that thousands of years later, her gum would prove to be an archaeological gold mine.

When Lola’s gum was discovered, it still contained traces of her saliva. Like detectives searching for clues, scientists studied the genetic material in that prehistoric spit for evidence of what Lola’s life was like.

They discovered that before chewing the gum, Lola had feasted on hazelnuts and duck. They found that like many ancient hunter-gatherers, she couldn’t digest milk. They even concluded that Lola likely had blue eyes, with dark skin and hair—and that her ancestors had probably migrated from mainland Europe.

“This gum is a time capsule,” says Hannes Schroeder from the University of Copenhagen, who led a study of the gum.

Still, the gum can’t tell us everything about Lola. It doesn’t reveal how old she was or how long she lived. We don’t know if she liked to sing or stare out at the sea. Because while a wad of gum may stick around for thousands of years, some mysteries are lost to time.