When we try to visualize human ancestors, the image that comes to mind is often of groups of gatherers and hunters gathering for huge barbecues, having adopted meat as their staple food, which is in part correct. But did it occur to you that ancient man cooked grains on fire and knew soaking, fermentation, mashed potatoes, stews and porridge, which we know well today? Even more surprisingly, this was not exclusive to our fellow human beings, but the Neanderthals did the same!
Until recent years, it was believed among researchers that the Neolithic transition revolution that took place ten thousand years ago, called the Agricultural Revolution, was the time when man began to eat cereals in the meals of the old kitchen, after learning agriculture and began to domesticate plants. From this point of view, agriculture was the revolutionary event that laid the brick of the first human civilization, and humans turned after it to settle in cities and inhabit agricultural settlements, and the "Fertile Crescent" area, which includes Palestine, Transjordan and Lebanon and extends east to Iraq and west to the Nile River, was one of the first human societies that practiced agriculture, so they planted wheat and barley in the period between 10 thousand to 8 thousand years BC, and began to domesticate livestock.
Before that, humans lived in small tribal groups of hunters and gatherers, so historians and scientists did not speculate that these small groups had their own kitchen or that they knew how to grind and eat grain, but recent discoveries prove that this belief was not accurate anyway.
Neanderthals that cooked by plants
Neanderthals lived about 400,30 to <>,<> years ago, spreading in a huge strip stretching from southern Europe to Central Asia. (Shutterstock)
Research on carbon isotopes in hominin tooth enamel reveals that if you enjoy eating mashed potatoes with corn, you probably have a 3.5 million-year-old eating habit, when ancient humans turned to eating meat, after being plant eaters, with the earliest evidence of human species using hunting tools dating back millions of years. However, we still have little information about this ancient period, so we still don't know how they cooked their food.
The human race (Homo) is a term that includes "Homo sapiens", which is represented by all humans on the surface of the earth currently, along with several other closely related species that were apparently many, extinct for reasons that scientists are trying to identify so far, and the age of this race is estimated at more than 2.3 million years with the beginning of the emergence of what we call "skilled man", which was characterized by several characteristics, for example, the size of its skull was large enough to allow a large space for the brain, as well as this race has been able to From walking on only two limbs with hands and legs longer than usual, he also managed to build complex tools.
Neanderthals are one of those species, and Neanderthals lived about 400,30 to 2021,100 years ago, spreading in a huge strip stretching from southern Europe to Central Asia. Neanderthals knew how to cook plants and eat foods rich in carbohydrates, so they cooked grains and tubers, as genetics researchers revealed in a recent study published in <>, after analyzing DNA samples of the teeth of Neanderthals, and the oldest member of them was about <>,<> years old. The study looked at bacteria found in dental plaque, which revealed bacteria specific to breaking down starch and converting it into sugars, which means that Neanderthals relied on plant carbohydrates in their diet.
As for how they cooked their food, evidence shows that they used various methods, including heat as soon as they could light fires, and sometimes fermentation, and the third method was by (soaking) in water, which made researchers think about the need to consider leftovers as artifacts, because cooking is an activity that requires craft and skill, and by exploring it can write a missing part of history.
Human beings
Ancient man loved carbohydrates and relied on them to give him the calories needed for living, especially when game was scarce. (Shutterstock)
Now let's move on to a more modern kitchen, only 300,2017 years old, at the top of the menu of early humans you will find a lot of "deer meat", which the ancestors seem to have especially preferred, along with the meat of wild animals such as buffaloes, rabbits and zebras, and ostrich eggs were also present on their tables. This is revealed by the fossil discoveries at Mount Erhoud in the Maghreb, published in a <> study, and clearly show where the ancients found their protein. But does that mean humans have stopped eating plants?
The surprising fact is that ancient humans never gave up eating plants, to prove this Paleobotanist at the University of Cambridge Cynthia Larby spent years of her life preparing her study, which was published in 2019, and researched cooking stoves in several locations in South Africa dating back 120,<> years, and from the remains of charred meals Larbie took samples of what our ancestors ate, which turned out after microscopic examination to be starchy plant cell tissue.
If plant carbohydrates today make up about 55-80% of the diet of modern humans, this indicates an increasingly starch diet in our ancestors. This is confirmed by geneticists after they researched the copies of the gene that produces starch digestion enzymes in modern humans, and its existence is a natural result of the ancients eating starch in abundance. This is also what Larby noticed after discovering that the first humans in that region of South Africa cooked dishes rich in carbohydrates and protein, which formed the basis of their diet, suggesting that early humans, even after learning to hunt and turned into carnivores, never stopped cooking and eating plants.
The above refutes the prevailing idea of the global "paleo" system, a well-known diet in the United States and other countries, whose proponents advocate the need to return to the food of hunters in pre-civilized times, as they believed that the cuisine of the ancients relied mainly on meat and fish, while eating grains, potatoes and other foods rich in carbohydrates they considered the main cause of "civilizational diseases" such as the heart, high blood pressure, diabetes and cancer, and therefore urged to remove them from our diet.
But recent research, as we have explained, confirms the opposite: ancient humans loved carbohydrates and relied on them to give them the calories needed for living, especially when game was rare or when it had difficulty hunting.
Göbklitepe banquets
Researchers recently discovered that "oat porridge" was on the human menu more than 32,<> years ago. (Shutterstock)
In general, it is difficult to monitor meals eaten by humans in ancient times, but meat in the ancient kitchen is much easier to monitor than grains or other plants, because the fragile nature of plant remains makes it difficult to fossilize them and thus monitor them, unlike the bones of slaughtered animals that petrify more easily.
But researchers have recently tended to examine burnt and charred foods, which were previously classified as ugly and useless substances, removing broken pottery pieces covered in food debris and disposing of them, but analyzing them turned out to be untapped wealth.
The first to start that journey was the paleobotanist at Aristotle University, Soltana Valamamotti, by excavating inside the remains of burning food in the kitchens of the first humans, and then proceeded to collect evidence that came in the form of a stew or porridge left for a long time on the fire, or a piece of bread that fell into the stove of an oven, and even turned her laboratory into an experimental kitchen that simulates ancient cooking accidents. In her study, Valamotti examines Bronze Age cuisine, which is relatively new, which makes us wonder what we will discover if we go back in time and eat "pre-civilization cuisine"?
If we look, for example, at the history of bread, we will find most studies linking it to the beginning of the Neolithic era, after man inhabited cities, learned the origins of agriculture and the best domestication of plants, but an amazing new discovery will come in a study published in 2018 showing that the beginning of bread was much earlier. At an archaeological site in northeastern Jordan, the oldest piece of bread in history was found inside the stoves of hunters and fruit collectors, and by examining it, they found that its history dates back to 14400,5 years ago, about <>,<> years before the domestication of plants, and chefs used to make it a kind of "wild wheat" spikes.
From northeastern Jordan we move to southern Italy, where researchers recently discovered that "oat porridge" was on the human menu more than 32,<> years ago, Marta Marriotti Lippi of the University of Florence noted after discovering starchy traces on a Paleolithic millstone tool at a site in southern Italy. According to the researcher, the ancients seem to have heated the grains before grinding them, with the aim of drying them in the cooler climate. Marriotti Libby also noted that this would also make the grains easier to grind and last longer, which is important for Paleolithic nomads, who used this flour to make flatbread and oatmeal porridge that seemed to have been one of the main dishes at the time.
Then we move to the site of "Göbekli Tepe" in Turkey, which is classified as the oldest archaeological building in the world, as the history of the construction of Göbekli dates back to more than 11600 years BC, and because it precedes the stage of the Neolithic revolution, with which humans began to learn agriculture, researchers initially thought that these huge stone structures are for an ancient tribal group of hunters, where they used to gather for major barbecues, a view that has changed over the past four years, thanks to Laura Dietrich and her team at the German Archaeology Institute in Berlin.
A whole new history
Göbkli Tepe archaeological site. (Shutterstock)
In 2019, Laura published a study on the cuisine of the first humans who inhabited Göbklitepe, after discovering that they knew how to grind and process grains, and that their diet was full of porridge and stews prepared from grains, which means that ancient humans relied on grains for food much earlier than scientists thought, and even before any evidence of domestication of these plants appeared.
When Laura Dietrich and her team stood on this land for the first time, they called the place "Garden of Stones", a reference to a small field next to the site of Göbklitepe, in which researchers threw all the basalt stones they found at the site, and as excavation and excavation continued, the number of stones increased significantly, reaching 10,<> stones, which later turned out to be millstones.
Over the course of two decades, researchers found millstones and nearly 650 vessels and dishes carved from stones, some of which could fill 200 liters of liquid, which Dietrich wondered, because there had never been so many millstones at any other site in the ancient Near East until the late Neolithic. What the researchers later learned was that the inhabitants of the area used millstones to grind grains, used flour to make porridge and stews, and they also knew about fermentation and made beer, which they seemed to have drunk on a wider range of occasions, so their menu had many satisfying meals and drinks for the celebration.
In their study, the researchers used many techniques, from examining microscopic effects on tools used by ancient humans in Göbklitepe to analyzing DNA residues in their dishes. Researchers, such as Laura Dietrich, began experimenting with recooking 12,<>-year-old meals, using methods from the same era: they made millstones out of black basalt and grinded fine, coarse wheat grains, and from flour they made dishes such as porridge and stews with the same nutritional ingredients that the ancients used.
These researches have produced startling results that clearly indicate that humans in Göbklitepe loved carbohydrates and used cereals as a daily staple food, even before the spread of agriculture, refuting the prevailing belief that early humans were mainly meat-feeding.