Question: What fossils have you looked at ?

Jennifer Bates answered on 8 Nov 2016:

My data isn’t quite old enough to be fossilised, its usually burnt. That’s because burnt seeds survive in the soil (I don’t want to eat burnt seeds and neither do bacteria). I have been looking at burnt food from archaeological sites about 5000 years old in South Asia. It has wheat, barley, rice, lentils, peas and beans in it, as well as parts of the plant that tell us about how people made the plant ready to eat after harvesting it, and some samples have wood and dung in it from the fires that people cooked on. A few are from rubbish pits so had weed seeds in there as well and I’ve used them to think about the environment and how people grew their food.

BUT… one thing I do look at that could be thought about as a ‘fossil’ is something called ‘phytoliths’. These are microscopic casts of plant cells in silica (glass) that are made in the plant while it is alive and left behind when the plant dies and the organic bits rot away. These glass cell fossils are left in the soil and we can use them to look at what plants were around, what bits of plants were being used by people and what the environment was like. I have used them on lots of sites, and am now looking at a cave in Libya that is about 150,000 years old to look at how plants coped during climate change during the Ice Age.