Prehistoric Europeans Spiced Their Cooking

[ramonmercado]

Prehistoric Europeans spiced their cooking
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23769911
By Suzi Gage
BBC News

Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata), also known as Jack-by-the-hedge, flowering in spring by a roadside

Europeans had a taste for spicy food at least 6,000 years ago, it seems.

Researchers found evidence for garlic mustard in the residues left on ancient pottery shards discovered in what is now Denmark and Germany.

The spice was found alongside fat residues from meat and fish.

Writing in the journal Plos One, the scientists make the case that garlic mustard contains little nutritional value and therefore must have been used to flavour the foods.

"This is the earliest evidence, as far as I know, of spice use in this region in the Western Baltic; something that has basically no nutritional value, but has this value in a taste sense," said Dr Hayley Saul, who led the study from the University of York, UK.

The researchers looked at charred deposits found on the inside of pottery shards that had been dated to between 5,800 and 6,150 years ago.

These deposits contained microscopic traces of plant-based silica, known as phytoliths, which can be used to identify the plants from which they came.

It was these phytoliths that provided the evidence of garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) in the carbonised scrapings.

The team found more phytoliths from residues taken from the inside of pots than from the outside, which they say shows that these were the direct result of culinary practice.

The implications from these findings challenge the previously held belief that hunter-gatherers were simply concerned with searching for calorific food. Dr Saul believes these latest results point to something much more like cuisine.

A phytolith
A scanning electron microscope view of a phytolith in food residue
"That's quite a new idea for hunter-gatherer archaeology in Europe," she told BBC News.

The York scientist said it was likely that prehistoric chefs would have crushed the seeds: "Actually to get the flavour out you have to crush it really. I suspect that if they hadn't been crushing the seeds, we would probably find more intact seeds in residues."

Although this is the first evidence of spice use in Europe, flavouring food may have been a common practice in the Middle East much earlier. "There's a cave in Israel where coriander has been found, and that's dated to around 23,000 years ago. But it's very difficult to build up a picture of exactly how it's used. It's linking it to cooking that's quite important," explained Dr Saul.

It seems that while prehistoric cuisine was flavoursome, it was far from varied. The researchers found no evidence for other spices, with the phytoliths being quite consistent across the sites they investigated.

"I think it was just really creative, and we often don't give hunter-gatherer cultures in the past credit for exactly how inventive and creative they were with things.

"It's often seen as being a period of culinary hardship where people were really struggling, but actually, its people really knew their environments, and knew how to make the best with what they've got. I think they were very clever, really," said Dr Saul.

 

[escargot]

This doesn't surprise me. Ancient people were inventive and innovatory, just as we are now.

 

[ramonmercado]

This doesn't surprise me. Ancient people were inventive and innovatory, just as we are now.

They cooked snails in their shells, with a sprinkle of garlic.

 

[ramonmercado]

More details. http://phys.org/news/2013-08-reveal-hun ... spice.html

 

[escargot]

This doesn't surprise me. Ancient people were inventive and innovatory, just as we are now.

They cooked snails in their shells, with a sprinkle of garlic.

Rubbish. Garlic hadn't been invented.

 

[ramonmercado]

Earliest evidence discovered of plants cooked in ancient pottery
Mon, Dec 19, 2016

UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL—A team of international scientists, led by the University of Bristol, has uncovered the earliest direct evidence of humans processing plants for food found anywhere in the world.

Researchers at the Organic Geochemistry Unit in the University of Bristol's School of Chemistry, working with colleagues at Sapienza, University of Rome and the Universities of Modena and Milan, studied unglazed pottery dating from more than 10,000 years ago, from two sites in the Libyan Sahara.

The invention of cooking has long been recognised as a critical step in human development.

Ancient cooking would have initially involved the use of fires or pits and the invention of ceramic cooking vessels led to an expansion of food preparation techniques.

Cooking would have allowed the consumption of previously unpalatable or even toxic foodstuffs and would also have increased the availability of new energy sources.

Remarkably, until now, evidence of cooking plants in early prehistoric cooking vessels has been lacking.

The researchers detected lipid residues of foodstuffs preserved within the fabric of unglazed cooking pots.

Significantly, over half of the vessels studied were found to have been used for processing plants based on the identification of diagnostic plant oil and wax compounds. ...

http://popular-archaeology.com/issu...scovered-of-plants-cooked-in-ancient-pottery1

 

[ramonmercado]

Evidence that food conservation goes way back.

Scientists in Israel say they have found evidence that early humans deliberately stored bones from animals to eat the fatty marrow later.

It is the earliest evidence that humans living between 200,000 and 420,000 years ago had the foresight to anticipate future needs, they say.Early humans had not previously been thought capable of such dietary planning.

Researchers analysed bone specimens at Qesem cave near Tel Aviv. They identified cut marks on most of the bone surfaces - consistent with preservation and delayed consumption. The researchers suggest the marks came about because the early humans had to make greater effort to remove skin which had dried on bones which had been kept longer. The cut marks were found on 78% of the more than 80,000 animal bone specimens analysed.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-49998934#

 

[Roland Deschain]

Evidence that food conservation goes way back.

Scientists in Israel say they have found evidence that early humans deliberately stored bones from animals to eat the fatty marrow later.

It is the earliest evidence that humans living between 200,000 and 420,000 years ago had the foresight to anticipate future needs, they say.Early humans had not previously been thought capable of such dietary planning.

Researchers analysed bone specimens at Qesem cave near Tel Aviv. They identified cut marks on most of the bone surfaces - consistent with preservation and delayed consumption. The researchers suggest the marks came about because the early humans had to make greater effort to remove skin which had dried on bones which had been kept longer. The cut marks were found on 78% of the more than 80,000 animal bone specimens analysed.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-49998934#

My dog saves bones "for later", it would be shocking if proto humans didn't do likewise.

 

[James_H]

My dog saves bones "for later", it would be shocking if proto humans didn't do likewise.

Squirrels do it
Octopuses do it
Even educated crows do it.

I expect this behavior dates to much earlier than the first recognisable humans.