We humans can’t help but play with food – whole books have been written about the thousand and one ways to cook potatoes. The restaurant industry was born out of our love for new and interesting flavors in food.
Charred leftovers
My team’s analysis of the oldest charred remains of food ever discovered shows that spicing up dinner is a human habit dating back at least 70,000 years.
One could well imagine our ancestors chopping raw materials with their bare hands or roasting meat over a fire, in keeping with the clichés anchored in our collective imagination. But our new study shows that the diets of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were complex, involved multiple stages of preparation, and they strove to flavor their dishes and use plants with bitter and pungent flavors.
This level of culinary complexity has never before been documented by Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Prior to our study, the oldest known plant food remains were from Southwest Asia; They came from a 14,400-year-old Jordanian hunter-gatherer site discovered in 2018.
Scanning electron micrographs of charred leftover food. Left: The bread-like food found in Franchthi Cave. Right: Charred food fragment from Shanidar Cave with wild peas. | Ceren Kabukcu
We examined food remains from two Late Paleolithic sites spanning nearly 60,000 years to study diets of early hunter-gatherers. Our evidence is based on prepared vegetable food fragments (burnt pieces of bread, flatbreads, pieces of porridge) found in two caves.
To the naked eye or under a low-power microscope, they look like charred crumbs or bits of food with seed fragments. But a powerful scanning electron microscope allowed us to see the details of the plant cells.
The prehistoric chiefs
We have found charred food fragments in Franchthi Cave (Aegean, Greece) dating from around 13,000 to 11,500 years ago. There we discovered a fragment of finely ground food that could be bread, dough or some kind of porridge, but also food rich in legumes and coarsely ground.
In the Shanidar Cave (Zagros, Iraqi Kurdistan), which has been associated with the first modern humans around 40,000 years ago and Neanderthals around 70,000 years ago, we also found fragments of ancient food. These included wild mustard and terebinth (wild pistachios) mixed with foods. In the charred remains of Neanderthal layers we discovered seeds of wild herbs mixed with legumes. Previous studies at Shanidar found traces of wild grass seed in the tartar of Neanderthal teeth.
At both sites we frequently found ground or pounded legume seeds such as bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia), chickpea (Lathyrus spp.) and wild pea (Pisum spp.). The people who lived in these caves added the seeds to a mixture that was heated with water while grinding, pounding, or crushing the soaked seeds.
Most wild legume mixtures were characterized by a bitter taste. In modern cooking, these legumes are often soaked, heated, and shelled (removal of the seed coat) to reduce their bitterness and toxins. The ancient remains we have found indicate that humans have been doing this for tens of thousands of years. But the fact that the seed coats weren’t completely removed suggests these people wanted to retain some of their bitter taste.
View of the Shanidar Cave in Zagros, Iraqi Kurdistan. | Chris Hunt / Image courtesy of the author
What previous studies have shown
The presence of wild mustard, with its distinctive pungent flavor, is a condiment well documented in the Pottery Period (beginning of village life in Southwest Asia, 8500 BC) and for later Neolithic sites in the region. Plants such as wild almond (bitter), pistachio terebinth (tannic and oily), and wild fruit (hot, sometimes sour, sometimes tannic) are present in the plant remains of Southwest Asia and Europe during the Upper Palaeolithic (40,000 to 10,000 years ago).
Their inclusion in dishes based on herbs, tubers, meat and fish would have added a special flavor to the meal. These plants have therefore been eaten in regions thousands of kilometers apart for tens of thousands of years. These dishes could be the origin of human culinary practices.
Based on the plants found, there is no doubt that the diets of Neanderthals and early modern humans included a wide variety of them. Previous studies have found food scraps trapped in the tartar of Neanderthals in Europe and Southwest Asia, providing evidence that they cooked and ate herbs and tubers such as wild barley and medicinal plants. The remains of charred plants show that they collected legumes and pine nuts.
Plant remains found on European milling or pounding tools from the Upper Paleolithic suggest that early modern humans crushed and roasted seeds of wild herbs. Remains from an Upper Palaeolithic site on the Pontic Steppe in Eastern Europe show that ancients pounded the tubers before eating them. Archaeological evidence from South Africa shows that Homo sapiens used crushed wild grass seeds as early as 100,000 years ago.
A Neanderthal hearth discovered in the Cave of Shanidar. | Graeme Barker / Image provided by the author
When Neanderthals and early modern humans ate plants, this is not as consistently reflected in stable isotopic data from skeletons, which tell us about the major sources of protein in the diet over the course of a human’s life.
Recent studies suggest that Neanderthal populations in Europe were high-level carnivores; others show that Homo sapiens appears to have had a more diverse diet than Neanderthals, with a greater proportion of plants. But we are sure that this evidence of a certain complexity in the preparation of food and the search for taste is the starting point for many discoveries about the first sites of hunter-gatherers in the region.
This article was republished by The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
