FOODS EATEN IN PREHISTORIC EUROPE

Copper Age vessel of a woman carrying a churn
According to Archaeology magazine: Analysis of dental plaque from dozens of individuals found in ancient sites across Europe, from northern Scotland to southern Spain, revealed that as far back as 8,000 years ago, people regularly ate seaweed as well as freshwater aquatic plants. It was only in recent centuries that the nutrient-rich vegetable was taken off the menu. [Source: Archaeology, January 2024]
At the site of Barranco Gómez in eastern Spain, a team led by archaeologist Inés Domingo of the University of Barcelona recently discovered a 9,000-year-old Neolithic rock art depiction of a high-flying honey hunter. The panel, made in what scholars call the Levantine rock art tradition, shows a person with seemingly no fear of heights using a 25-foot-tall rope ladder attached to a cliff in pursuit of a large beehive. The artist painted the scene realistically, depicting individual loops of the ladder compressing under the climber’s weight. “We were impressed by the precise execution of the scene and the realism of the action depicted,” says Domingo. “The details of the type of ladder used and the safety measures implemented to secure the rope to the wall are truly exceptional.” She adds that the fidelity of the Levantine rock art tradition gives scholars the chance to tease out details of ancient life previously invisible to archaeologists. [Source: Eric A. Powell, archaeology magazine, March/April 2024]
The 8,000-year-old remains of hazelnuts were found at an excavation on the island of Skye in northern Scotland by archaeologists at the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI). Dan Lee, an archaeologist at UHI, said: “We have found lots of fragments of charred hazelnut shells in the lower soil samples. “They are the ideal thing to date as they have a short life span and were a Mesolithic favourite. [Source: Steven McKenzie, BBC, October 22, 2015]
Must Farm near Peterborough in England was a thriving Bronze Age stilt village until it suddenly burned down 2,850 years ago — creating what has been called “Britain’s Pompeii”. Among the remarkably well-preserved slices of life found there are a spoon abandoned in a half-eaten bowl of porridge, along with other artifacts such as wooden buckets. “One of those buckets … on the bottom of it were loads and loads of cut marks so we know that people living in that Bronze Age kitchen when they needed an impromptu chopping board, were just flipping that bucket upside down,” said Chris Wakefield, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge. [Source: Ashley Strickland, CNN, March 24, 2024]
See Separate Articles:
DIET OF OUR HUMAN ANCESTORS factsanddetails.com ;
STUDYING PREHISTORIC DIETS factsanddetails.com ;
STONE AGE BREAD AND GRAIN CONSUMPTION factsanddetails.com;
MEAT EATING BY LATE STONE AGE HUMANS factsanddetails.com
FOOD OF EARLY MODERN HUMANS (100,000-10,000 YEARS AGO) factsanddetails.com;
MEAT EATING BY HOMININS 500,000 to 10,000 YEARS AGO factsanddetails.com ;
EARLY MODERN HUMAN HUNTING factsanddetails.com ;
HOMININS, HOMO ERECTUS AND FIRE factsanddetails.com ;
HOMININS, HOMO ERECTUS AND COOKING factsanddetails.com
Good Websites Archaeology News Report archaeologynewsreport.blogspot.com ; Anthropology.net anthropology.net : archaeologica.org archaeologica.org ; Archaeology in Europe archeurope.com ; Archaeology magazine archaeology.org ; HeritageDaily heritagedaily.com; Livescience livescience.com/ ; Food Timeline, History of Food foodtimeline.org ; Food and History teacheroz.com/food ;
Varied Diet of Hunter-Gatherers in Denmark Ate 7,000 Years Ago
According to York University: Hunter-gatherer groups living in the Baltic between seven and six thousand years ago had culturally distinct cuisines, analysis of ancient pottery fragments has revealed. An international team of researchers analysed over 500 hunter-gatherer vessels from 61 archaeological sites throughout the Baltic region. They found striking contrasts in food preferences and culinary practices between different groups — even in areas where there was a similar availability of resources. Pots were used for storing and preparing foods ranging from marine fish, seal and beaver to wild boar, bear, deer, freshwater fish, hazelnuts and plants. The findings suggest that the culinary tastes of ancient people were not solely dictated by the foods available in a particular area, but also influenced by the traditions and habits of cultural groups, the authors of the study say. [Source: University of York, April 22, 2020]
Dr Harry Robson from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, lead author of the study published in April 2020 in the journal Royal Society Open Science, said: “People are often surprised to learn that hunter-gatherers used pottery to store, process and cook food, as carrying cumbersome ceramic vessels seems inconsistent with a nomadic life-style. Our study looked at how this pottery was used and found evidence of a rich variety of foods and culinary traditions in different hunter-gatherer groups.”
The researchers also identified unexpected evidence of dairy products in some of the pottery vessels, suggesting that some hunter-gatherer groups were interacting with early farmers to obtain this resource. Dr Robson said: “The presence of dairy fats in several hunter-gatherer vessels was an unexpected example of culinary ‘cultural fusion’. The discovery has implications for our understanding of the transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to early farming and demonstrates that this commodity was either exchanged or perhaps even looted from nearby farmers.”
Lead author of the study, Dr Blandine Courel from the British Museum, added: “Despite a common biota that provided lots of marine and terrestrial resources for their livelihoods, hunter-gatherer communities around the Baltic Sea basin did not use pottery for the same purpose. Our study suggests that culinary practices were not influenced by environmental constraints but rather were likely embedded in some long-standing culinary traditions and cultural habits.”
The study, led by the Department of Scientific Research at the British Museum, the University of York and the Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology (Stiftung Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesmuseen, Germany), used molecular and isotopic techniques to analyse the fragments of pottery.
British Diet 6000 Years Ago

Cheddar Man
Studies of old rubbish dumps and dirty dishes have revealed that, 6,000 years ago, ancient Britons gave up their passion for fish to begin a love affair with milk. According to the University of Bristol: “The change by our ancestors from hunter-gathers to farmers is one of the most intensively researched aspects of archaeology. Now a large-scale investigation of British archaeological sites dating from around 4,600 B.C. to A.D. 1,400 has examined millions of fragments of bone and analysed over 1,000 cooking pots. [Source: University of Bristol, February 12, 2014 ||||]
“The team, led by Professor Richard Evershed of the University of Bristol's School of Chemistry, developed new techniques in an effort to identify fish oils in the pots. Remarkably, they showed that more than 99 per cent of the earliest farmer's cooking pots lacked sea food residues. Other clues to ancient diets lie within human bones themselves, explored by the Cardiff group led by Dr Jacqui Mulville. The sea passes on a unique chemical signature to the skeletons of those eating seafood; while the early fisher folk possessed this signature it was lacking in the later farmers. ||||
“Lead author of the study, Dr Lucy Cramp said: "The absence of lipid residues of marine foods in hundreds of cooking pots is really significant. It certainly stacks up with the skeletal isotope evidence to provide a clear picture that seafood was of little importance in the diets of the Neolithic farmers of the region." Returning to the pots, the Bristol team used a compound-specific carbon isotope technique they have developed to identify the actual fats preserved in the cooking pots, showing that dairy products dominated the menu right across Britain and Ireland as soon as cattle and sheep arrived. ||||
“The ability to milk animals was a revolution in food production as, for the first time humans did not have to kill animals to obtain food. As every farmer knows, milking stock requires a high level of skill and knowledge. In view of this, team member, Alison Sheridan from the National Museum of Scotland concludes that: "The use of cattle for dairy products from the earliest Neolithic confirms the view that farming was introduced by experienced immigrants. Viewed together the findings show that Early British hunters feasted on venison and wild boar and ate large quantities of sea food, including seals and shellfish. With the introduction of domestic animals some 6,000 years ago they quickly gave up wild foods and fishing was largely abandoned, and people adopted a new diet based around dairying. ||||
Dr Cramp continued: "Amazingly, it was another 4,000 years before sea food remains appeared in pots again, during the Iron Age, and it was only with the arrival of the Vikings that fish became a significant part of our diet." Dr Mulville said: "Whilst we like to think of ourselves as a nation of fish eaters, with fish and chips as our national dish, it seems that early British farmers preferred beef, mutton and milk." Why people changed so abruptly from a seafood to farming diet remains a mystery. Professor Evershed said: "Since such a clear transition is not seen in the Baltic region, perhaps the hazardous North Atlantic waters were simply too difficult to fish effectively until new technologies arrived, making dairying the only sustainable option."
Earliest Use of Spices: 23,000 Years Ago?

ginger
Spices have been used for a long time by humans but it is hard to pin down exactly when their use began. The word “cumin” can be traced back to Sumerian. Archeological evidence in the Americas indicates that chili peppers have been cultivated and consumed for around 5,000 years. In a cave in Israel, researchers found coriander seeds that were dated to 23,000 years old. Ginger is described in very old ancient medicinal texts. Garlic was popular with the ancient Egyptians
Dr Hayley Saul of the University of York, UK, told the BBC: “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,” [Source: Suzi Gage, BBC News, August 21, 2013 |::|
On the use of spices 6000 years ago in Europe, described below, the BBC reported: “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.” |::|
Europeans Spiced Their Food 6000 Years Ago
Europeans began using spices on their food at least 6,000 years ago. Suzi Gage reported for the BBC: “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. [Source: Suzi Gage, BBC News, August 21, 2013 |::|

garlic mustard
“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. “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.” |::|
Early Uses of Salt
Throughout history, the availability of salt has been or grat importance. What is regarded as oldest town in Europe, Solnitsata in Bulgaria, was a salt production center. It dates back to 5400 BC. The name Solnitsata means "salt works". See Below [Source: Wikipedia +]
Salt was the best-known and most widely-used food preservative, especially for meat, until canning and artificial refrigeration were invented a hundred or so years ago. A very ancient salt-works operation has been discovered at the Poiana Slatinei archaeological site next to a salt spring in Lunca, Neam County, Romania. Evidence indicates that Neolithic people of the Precucuteni Culture boiled the salt-laden spring water through the process of briquetage to extract the salt as far back as 6050 B.C.. The salt extracted from this operation may have had a direct correlation to the rapid growth of this society's population soon after its initial production began. The harvest of salt from the surface of Xiechi Lake near Yuncheng in Shanxi, China, dates back to at least 6000 BC, making it one of the oldest verifiable saltworks. +
There is a fair amount of salt in animal meat, blood, and mil and thus nomads and herders who subsist on their flocks and herds do not need additional salt. Plants do not have much salt and thus agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers that feed primarily on cereals, fruits, vegetable and plant matter need to supplement their diet with salt. With the spread of civilization, salt became one of the world's main trading commodities. Highly valued by the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and Hittites, it was used to ceremonially seal agreements and as a purifying agent in sacrifices. +
Salt may have been used for barter in connection with the obsidian trade in Anatolia in the Neolithic Era. Salt was included among funeral offerings found in ancient Egyptian tombs from the third millennium BC, as were salted birds, and salt fish. From about 2800 BC, the Egyptians began exporting salted fish to the Phoenicians in return for Lebanon cedar, glass, and the dye Tyrian purple; the Phoenicians traded Egyptian salted fish and salt from North Africa throughout their Mediterranean trade empire +
Europe’s ‘Oldest Town’: A 6,700-Year-Old Salt Production Center in Bulgaria

Tell Yunastite in Bulgaria
In 2012, a Bulgarian professor said he had Europe’s ‘oldest town’ near Varna in Bulgaria. The Sofia Globe reported: “Europe’s oldest urban settlement is near Provadia, a town of about 13,000 people about 40 kilometers inland from Bulgaria’s Black Sea city of Varna, according to archaeology Professor Vassil Nikolov, citing evidence from work done at the Provadia – Solnitsata archaeological site in summer 2012. [Source: Sofia Globe, October 8 2012, from Sofia, Bulgaria]
“The team of archaeologists headed by Nikolov excavated stone walls estimated to date from 4700 to 4200 B.C.” about 1,500 years before the start of ancient Greek civilisation. “The walls are two metres thick and three metres high, and according to Nikolov are the earliest and most massive fortifications from Europe’s pre-history. There were about 300 to 350 people living at the site in those times, living in two-storey houses and earning their living by salt mining. To this day, Provadia is an important salt centre, with a large-scale foreign investor represented in the area. Estimates are that salt has been extracted in the area for about 7500. Nikolov said that salt was the currency of ancient times, both in terms of value and prestige. As the only place in the Balkans used to produce salt at the time, Provadia –Solnitsatsa of the fifth century B.C. was the “mint” of the region, Nikolov said.
“He said that finds of gravesites at a necropolis showed that people in the town were wealthy. Ritual burial practices also were strange and complex, he said. Copper needles and pottery found in graves at the site showed that people had been wealthy, but in some cases the corpses had been cut in half and buried from the pelvis up.”
The BBC reportedly: The walled fortified settlement, near the modern town of Provadia, is thought to have been an important centre for salt production. Its discovery in north-east Bulgaria may explain the huge gold hoard found nearby 40 years ago. Archaeologists believe that the town was home to some 350 people and dates back to between 4700 and 4200 BC. That is [Source: October 31, 2012 |::|]
“The residents boiled water from a local spring and used it to create salt bricks, which were traded and used to preserve meat. Salt was a hugely valuable commodity at the time, which experts say could help to explain the huge defensive stone walls which ringed the town. Excavations at the site, beginning in 2005, have also uncovered the remains of two-storey houses, a series of pits used for rituals, as well as parts of a gate and bastion structures. "We are not talking about a town like the Greek city-states, ancient Rome or medieval settlements, but about what archaeologists agree constituted a town in the fifth millennium BC," Vasil Nikolov, a researcher with Bulgaria's National Institute of Archaeology, told the AFP news agency. |::|
Archaeologist Krum Bachvarov from the institute said the latest find was "extremely interesting". "The huge walls around the settlement, which were built very tall and with stone blocks... are also something unseen in excavations of prehistoric sites in south-east Europe so far," he told AFP. Similar salt mines near Tuzla in Bosnia and Turda in Romania help prove the existence of a series of civilisations which also mined copper and gold in the Carpathian and Balkan mountains during the same period.” |::|
Svetla Dimitrova wrote in se times.com: “The site is more than 100 metres in diameter.The settlement is one part of a much larger complex from the same period, which includes a salt production unit, a sanctuary and a necropolis. Archeologists said they believe Provadia’s ancient residents made a living by producing salt. They suspect production began in 5500 BC and by 4500 BC produced 5,000 kg annually. The salt trade helped the ancients obtain raw materials, some of which were used to craft luxury goods like jewelry, and also gain enormous economic power, Nikolov added. The Provadia finds may provide significant clues about the origin of the Varna Chalcolithic Necropolis riches, dating back to around 4300 B.C. [Source: Svetla Dimitrova, se times.com. January 18, 2013]
Beehive Products Exploited at Least 8,500 Years Ago

bees swarming around a beehive
Humans have been exploiting bees at least 8,500 year ago according to the paper ‘Widespread Exploitation of the Honeybee by Early Neolithic Farmers’ in Nature in 2015. Dr Mélanie Roffet-Salque, of the University of Bristol, was the lead author of the paper. According to the University of Bristol: “Previous evidence from prehistoric rock art is inferred to show honey hunters and Pharaonic Egyptian murals show early scenes of beekeeping. However, the close association between early farmers and the honeybee remained uncertain. This study has gathered together evidence for the presence of beeswax in the pottery vessels of the first farmers of Europe by investigating chemical components trapped in the clay fabric of more than 6,000 potsherds from over 150 Old World archaeological sites. [Source: University of Bristol, November 12, 2015 |=|]
“The distinctive chemical ‘fingerprint’ of beeswax was detected at multiple Neolithic sites across Europe indicating just how widespread the association between humans and honeybees was in prehistoric times. For example, beeswax was detected in cooking pots from an archaeological site in Turkey, dating to the seventh millennium BC – the oldest evidence yet for the use of bee products by Neolithic farmers. |=|
“The paper bring together over 20 years of research carried out at Bristol’s Organic Geochemistry Unit (School of Chemistry) led by Professor Richard Evershed. Co-authors of the paper include archaeologists involved in the large scale investigation of sites across Europe, the Near East and Northern Africa. Dr Roffet-Salque said: “The most obvious reason for exploiting the honeybee would be for honey, as this would have been a rare sweetener for prehistoric people. However, beeswax could have been used in its own right for various technological, ritual, cosmetic and medicinal purposes, for example, to waterproof porous ceramic vessels.” |=|
The lack of evidence for beeswax use at Neolithic sites above the 57th parallel North as in Scotland and Fennoscandia points to an ecological limit to the natural occurrence of honeybees at that time. Professor Evershed said: “The lack of a fossil record of the honeybee means it’s ecologically invisible for most of the past 10,000 years. Although evidence from ancient Egyptian murals and prehistoric rock art suggests mankind’s association with the honeybee dates back over thousands of years, when and where this association emerged has been unknown – until now. Our study is the first to provide unequivocal evidence, based solely on a chemical ‘fingerprint’, for the palaeoecological distribution of an economically and culturally important animal. It shows widespread exploitation of the honeybee by early farmers and pushes back the chronology of human-honeybee association to substantially earlier dates.”
Corpses and 4,000-Year-Old Preserved Fruit Shows Honey’s Preservative Power
Tara MacIsaac wrote in Epoch Times: “An Early Bronze Age burial mound in Georgia, known as a kurgan, held in its depths astonishingly well preserved wild fruits. Sitting underground for thousands of years, left as nourishment for the hungry souls of the dead, these fruits even exuded the aroma of fresh fruit when researchers sliced into them.They were preserved in honey. Honey was also found on the bones in the burial chamber, suggesting it may have been used for embalming the corpses. [Source: Tara MacIsaac, Epoch Times, August 12, 2014]
“Honey has a low concentration of water and a high concentration of sugar. Much like salt, it can push the water out of bacteria cells, drying them up before they can get to the food (or corpses) the honey is protecting. Honey is essentially a combination of sugars and hydrogen peroxide. Just as hydrogen peroxide is used to clean bacteria from wounds, it can also kill bacteria that cause food to spoil.
Ancient Assyrians, who lived in a region east of Egypt, also preserved corpses in honey. When Alexander the Great conquered the Persian city of Susa in the 4th century B.C., he found large quantities of 200-year-old purple dye well-preserved under a layer of honey.
Skipping ahead to 2011, researchers isolated a bacterial strain in some types of honey that has very unusual properties. One of it’s surprising characteristics is its ability to produce a compound, thurincin H, that forms into a helical structure. This structure may allow it to infiltrate the membranes of other bacteria to destroy it. “Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the compound mimics the structure of the molecules that form bacterial membranes … but it may disrupt those membranes by forming a rigid pore,” explained a Cornell University article.
Nut Eating by Our Human Ancestors
Some of our earliest human ancestors are believed to have been avid nut eaters, prefering nuts to fruit. Gabriele Macho, a professor of paleoanthropology at the University of Bradford, and colleague Daisuke Shimizu analyzed the teeth of Australopithecus anamensis, a hominid that lived in Africa 4.2 to 3.9 million years ago of whom "Lucy" is the most famous. Based on actual tooth finds and sophisticated computer models showing multiple external and internal details of the teeth, they determined that tooth structure on wear and tear on teeth was more consistent with eating nuts than fruits.
Evidence from an archeological dig in Israel shows that nuts formed a major part of man's diet 780,000 years ago. Seven varieties of nuts — wild almond, prickly water lily, water chestnut and two kinds of both acorns and pistachios — along with stone tools to crack them open was found buried deep in a bog. The pistachios and water chestnut are similar to those eaten today. Over 50 pitted stones and a depression were found at the Israel site. The depression and the stones appear to have used to crack open large quantities of hard nuts. These stone tools, called "nutting stones"

pistachios
Hebrew University reported: “The remains of seven types of 780,000-year-old nuts have been found at the Gesher Benot Ya'aqov site in Israel's Hula Valley. The nuts and the stone tools found with them are the first evidence that various types of nuts formed a major parts of man's diet 780,000 years ago and that hominins (prehistoric men) had developed an assortment of tools to crack open nuts during the Early-Middle Pleistocene Period, according to researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University, who explained that the nuts were anaerobically preserved because the site has been waterlogged since its destruction. [Source: Hebrew University, February 17, 2002 =]
“Prof. Naama Goren-Inbar and PhD candidate Gonen Sharon, of the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology, and Prof. Mordechai Kislev and PhD candidate Yoel Melamed of the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Life Sciences, outline the conclusions that can be drawn from these findings about life in the Hula Valley three-quarters of a million years ago in an article that will be printed in the prestigious journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA) on February 19,” 2002.
“Seven species of edible fruits covered with a hard shell were found at the site: wild almond; prickly water lily; acorns from the Q. calliprinos evergreen and the Mt. Tabor oak; Atlantic pistachio; pistachio; and water chestnut. Most of them only can be cracked open by a hard hammer. They all have a high nutritional value and no doubt played a key role in the diet of the hominins at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov. (The pistachios and water chestnuts found at the site are similar to those available today in the Far East and northern Europe.) "Ethnographic studies of the contemporary hunter-gatherer population show that nuts were part of the human diet in all parts of the world. There is extensive documentation of the use of hammers and anvils to crack open nuts. The tools of contemporary hunter-gather tribes exhibit great similarity to the artifacts found at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov," Prof. Goren-Inbar said. "Some 50 pitted stones with at least one pit were found at the site. The pits appear to have been formed when the stones were used to crack open large quantities of hard nuts. Some of the stones are the size of hammers, while larger stones, some weighing as much as 30 kg, could be used as anvils." =
“Research on chimpanzees in Western Africa found many cases in which chimpanzees consumed a variety of nuts after using tools to crack them open. The chimpanzees would match the stone to the type of nut, using wooden tools to crack nuts with softer shells and stone tools to crack those with harder shells. The tools the chimpanzees used have pits in them that resemble those in the stones found at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov. "The wide range of activities (hunting, gathering, tool-making, etc) performed at the site show that Gesher Benot Ya'aqov was inhabited for an extended period and that its residents were very familiar with their surroundings and used a variety of strategies to survive and live in the Hula Valley in prehistoric times. Research on chimpanzees and on contemporary hunter-gather tribes show that nut-gathering was performed mainly by women and children. It can be concluded that the people living on the Lake Hula shore 780,000 years ago already had developed a complex society composed of members of various ages and both genders," Prof. Goren-Inbar concluded. “=
Ancient Nuts
The Natufians (12,500 -9500 B.C.) — hunter- gathers who are believed to have played a role in the development of agriculture — may have collected almonds, acorns and pistachios. Pistachios are a member of the cashew family, originating from trees native to Central Asia and the Middle East. Archaeology shows that pistachio seeds were a common food as early as 6750 B.C. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were said to have contained pistachio trees during the reign of King Merodach-Baladan about 700 B.C.. The modern pistachio P. vera was first cultivated in Bronze Age Central Asia, where the earliest example is from Djarkutan, modern Uzbekistan. [Source: Wikipedia +]
Almonds come from a species of tree native to Mediterranean climate regions of the Middle East, from Syria and Turkey to India and Pakistan. It was spread by humans in ancient times along the shores of the Mediterranean into northern Africa and southern Europe. The wild form of domesticated almond grows in parts of the Levant and is believed to be native to Armenia and western Azerbaijan where it was apparently domesticated. Wild almond species were grown by early farmers, "at first unintentionally in the garbage heaps, and later intentionally in their orchards". +
Almonds were one of the earliest domesticated fruit trees due to "the ability of the grower to raise attractive almonds from seed. Thus, in spite of the fact that this plant does not lend itself to propagation from suckers or from cuttings, it could have been domesticated even before the introduction of grafting". Domesticated almonds appear in the Early Bronze Age (3000–2000 BC) such as the archaeological sites of Numeria (Jordan), or possibly earlier. Another well-known archaeological example of the almond is the fruit found in Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt (c. 1325 BC), probably imported from the Levant. +
Archaeologists have found large quantities of hazelnut shells in Mesolithic (1200- 9000 B.C., dates vary) and Neolithic (9000-4000 B.C., dates vary) sites in what is now Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. Evidence fo hazelnuts in China dates to around 3000 B.C. In 1995, evidence of large-scale nut processing, some 9,000 years old ago, was found in a midden pit on the island of Colonsay in Scotland. The evidence consists of a large, shallow pit full of the remains of hundreds of thousands of burned hazelnut shells. The nuts were radiocarbon dated to 7720+/-110BP, which calibrates to circa 6000 BC. Similar sites in Britain are known only at Farnham in Surrey and Cass ny Hawin on the Isle of Man. [Source: Hazelnut Hill, Wikipedia]
Well Preserved 3,500-Year-Old Lunch Box Discovered in Swiss Alps
According to Archaeology magazine: A Late Bronze Age traveler hiking high in the Bernese Alps 3,500 years ago seems to have dropped a cereal box, which was eventually buried in the ice. Analysis of the wooden container identified lipids and preserved proteins associated with wheat and rye or barley. Seldom do the biomarkers of plants survive in ancient storage vessels, so, with this new discovery, researchers are hoping to gather valuable information about the early use, cultivation, and spread of cereals in Europe. [Source: Jason Urbanus, Archaeology magazine, November-December 2017]
The wooden box still has traces of the grains it carried in 1500 B.C.. Martha Henriques wrote in the International Business Times: The box was found at the summit of the Lötschenpass, a transit through a glacier, at an elevation of about 2,650 meters above sea level. It’s thought to have remained frozen since it was lost or abandoned by its owner in 1500 B.C. Such discoveries are rare. Only one other similar artefact has been discovered, found in another alpine pass, the Schnidejoch, about 25 kilometers to the west of the Lötschenpass. Perhaps the most famous discovery from the ice-packed Alps is Ötzi the iceman, a human discovered dating from about 3300 B.C.. [Source: Martha Henriques, International Business Times, July 26, 2017]
Analysis of the box showed traces of spelt, emmer and barley, according to a study in the journal Scientific Reports. The research is the first time that such detailed information on food contents has been retrieved from a Bronze Age artefact. “The box has this kind of strange amorphous residue on it. Cereal grains quite rarely survive thousands of years. Sometimes they survive when they’re charred, but then they lose some of their diagnostic traits,” study author Jessica Hendy of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany told IBTimes UK. “Now we have a method to study this in a lot more detail.”
Instead of relying on the preservation of whole grains to identify a species, preserved molecules can be used to trace which grain they came from. “What we’re doing here is extracting biomolecules from residue and identified a marker for cereals. We’d like to apply this to less well-preserved remains. What’s quite exciting is that it can be applied to lots of different cases.”
This could help shed light on how cereal farming developed in Bronze Age Europe, shedding light on the social and political structures of the time. “We knew that cereals were around but don’t how important they were in the general economy. Now we’ve developed this, we can try to apply it more widely to understand how important cereals were for these early farmers.”
Also See: OTZI, THE ICEMAN'S HEALTH'S HEALTH, DIET AND DISEASES europe.factsanddetails.com
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Ancient Foods ancientfoods.wordpress.com ; Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
Last updated May 2024