Not nutty; amazing science

 

Hazelnuts aren't just for coffee anymore. By the way, I know they are good for a lot of things besides coffee. Like Nutella, for instance.

Seeing the wood for the trees: how archaeologists use hazelnuts to reconstruct ancient woodlands

Summary: Humans in northern Europe have been snacking on hazelnuts — a key accessible source of energy — since the early Holocene. Now, archaeologists have shown that it is possible to analyze the hazelnuts found at archaeological sites for their carbon isotopes, which preserve a record of the ancient environment: hazelnuts which grew in closed environments, like thick shady forests, have very different carbon isotopes to hazelnuts growing in open, sunny environments. Using this data, scientists can understand what a place humans lived in looked like millennia ago.

And excerpt: "The scientists found that nuts from the Mesolithic had been collected from more closed environments, while nuts from more recent periods had been collected in more open environments. By the Iron Age, most of the people who collected the hazelnuts sampled for this study had gathered the nuts from open areas, not woodlands. Their microhabitats had completely changed. This is consistent with environmental reconstructions from pollen analyses, but isotope analysis can be used to visualize a local environment where pollen records are scarce."

So, scientists who study nuts aren't nuts.