World's oldest drinking straws are 3 feet long and made of gold and silver

By Laura Geggel published about 23 hours ago

They were likely used to sip beer communally.



An illustration showing how people may have drank beer together with long straws during the Bronze Age. (Image credit: Kelvin Wilson)


Slender gold and silver tubes crafted during the Bronze Age are the world's oldest drinking straws, a new study finds.

Archaeologists found the 3-foot-long (1 meter) metal tubes in 1897 while excavating a burial mound known as a kurgan from the ancient Maikop (also spelled Maykop) culture in the northwestern Caucasus, which primarily includes modern-day Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and parts of southern Russia. Until now, scientists couldn't decipher the tubes' purpose. The new research suggests that people would have used the tubes, some of which are attached to tiny bull figurines, to drink beer with buddies from a communal vessel.

"The fine tubes are not as simple as they seem at first glance," study first author Viktor Trifonov, an archaeologist at the Institute for the History of Material Culture at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, told Live Science in an email. "Even [the] exquisite bull figurines attached to them can be both a decoration and a technical element for balancing the device."

Archaeologists found the roughly 5,500-year-old straws in a large kurgan with three compartments, each of which held the remains and grave goods of an individual from the Maikop culture (about 3700 B.C. to 2900 B.C.). The largest chamber held the most luxurious grave goods, including hundreds of beads made of semiprecious stones and gold, ceramic vessels, metal cups, weapons and tools. Most of the goods lined the walls of the chamber. However, a bundle of eight lengthy metal tubes, four of which had a gold or silver bull figurine, were placed on the right side of the skeleton, the researchers wrote in the study.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/oldest-drinking-straws-on-record