The Importance of Porridge

It is known that in early historical times various peoples enjoyed eating porridges--stewed grains of various types, flavored with spices and additions such as onions, fruit, or small amounts of meat. For example, it is said that the Roman legions objected strenuously if their favorite meal of porridge was not available.  

But the eating of porridges and other boiled starch sources go much farther back in human history, according to archaeologists.  Research has revealed that the development of porridge happened early in human history.  It was also critically important, as it enabled humans to obtain glucose--the human body's fundamental fuel--from plants.

Dr. Amanda Henry, a paleobiologist and associate professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, heads a project called HARVEST, which is researching why and how early humans ate plant material.    Horizon magazine recently published an article about the research by HARVEST and by a different project called HIDDEN FOODS; that article can be read here.  

Contrary to some moderns' beliefs about the "paleo" diet, paleolithic people ate tubers and grains--they needed whatever calorie sources they could find.  According to the Horizon article, the earliest plant material eaten included wild tubers, such as water lily tubers, and wild grains.  Grains might have been eaten young (and raw) sometimes, but tubers are often poisonous unless cooked, and there is some archaeological evidence that at least some foods were boiled before being eaten.  Archaeologists can tell whether a plant was eaten raw or cooked by examining starch grains in the dental calculus (i.e., plaque) on the teeth of human skeletal remains.  In addition, cooked tuber remains have been found in the remains of a fireplace in South Africa that is over 100,000 years old.  The use of flour made by grinding up things like acorns, wild oats, and legumes goes back at least 30,000 years, according to evidence found in Russia, the Czech Republic, and Italy.  

What is important about this evidence is that it confirms the date of the fundamental discovery that boiling starchy plant matter such as tubers and grains makes it possible for the human body to use the glucose they contain.   Of course, paleolithic people didn't know about glucose, but they surely knew that after boiling, plant matter often became filling, perhaps even palatable.  

Today, many people turn up their noses at boiled root vegetables and porridge.  But the discovery that tubers and grain could be eaten once boiled was critical to human survival--it made a new source of glucose available and enabled people to survive longer and breed more.  It is a key development in the history of food.

Convenience Food

Most of us think of "convenience foods" as modern inventions.  Food that comes in boxes, jars, or cans to be kept edible for a while, perhaps even quite a while, for future use. 

Those of us who know a bit more about history know that food storage goes back further than, say, the last two hundred years.  Smoking, fermenting, drying foods would make them last much longer than if they were fresh.  Storing starches in the form of grain, which could be stewed or converted into flour.   Those inventions go back a few thousand years at least.

But a recent archaeological discovery in Israel shows that people were storing food for future consumption more than 400,000 years ago.  What kind of food is that?  Animal bones with the marrow intact inside, according to this article from The Independent.

Researchers studying animal remains at Qusem cave near Tel Aviv found the remains of bones--but only limbs and skulls--that had not been stripped of their skin.  They theorize that these bones were deliberately stored for future consumption of the bone marrow inside them.

Unfortunately, the article isn't very detailed, but it's still a useful reminder that human beings have had the same needs for millennia, and human ingenuity has been finding ways to meet those needs as long as humans have been around.

EDIT:  (10/11/2019)  BBC News has a somewhat more fact-filled article about this find here.

Stone Age Bread

This seems to be a month for discoveries relating to Stone Age food.

This article from The Independent, a British newspaper, reports on an archaeological find from Jordan that goes back approximately 14,000 years, to the Upper Paleolithic period of the Stone Age.

In a surviving fireplace at a site called Shubayqa 1, archaeologists from the University of Copenhagen found a piece of flatbread, made with a strain of wild, uncultivated wheat--approximately 3,500 years before the beginnings of agriculture.  The researchers stress the fact that, given the relatively poor nutritive value of this strain of wheat, the work involved in making the wheat into bread would not have made it more nutritious.  Instead, they believe that the flatbread was made for a special communal meal--a forerunner of communal meals eaten in the same region of the world today.

Also of interest is the fact that, although barley was the most common cereal plant in the Near East at that time, the food maker chose to use wheat.  This may well have been because wheat contains more gluten, and dough made from wheat rather than barley can be more easily used to make bread.  Moreover, wheat can be used to make much thinner flatbreads than barley.  

The researchers believe that this discovery tends to show that cuisine--the creation of more interesting foods to be eaten for social purposes as well as for mere sustenance--came before agriculture, not the other way around.  

The researchers' report on the find will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, should any of readers of this blog be motivated to track down the actual report.

On a side note, the observation that the Stone Age residents of Jordan, despite living in a barley-rich area, chose to use wheat to make flatbread, suggests that I've been going about my Viking flatbread experiments wrong.  Although the Vikings may well have incorporated barley in their bread-making, they probably would have used wheat in their flatbreads, either alone or combined with barley--for the same reason the Stone Age Jordinians used it--because it makes better bread!  My future flatbread experiments will be conducted with this knowledge in mind.

The Iceman's Last Meal

Replicas of the items of clothing worn by Ötzi the Iceman,
made for the documentary film Der Ötztal-Mann und 
seine Welt, Naturhistorisches Museum Wien.
Found on Wikimedia Commons.

In this week's Economist, of all places, there's a report about a recent analysis of the last meal of Ötzi, the Stone Age "Iceman" whose well-preserved body was discovered in the alps over 20 years ago.

A study of the contents of Ötzi's stomach was done by two researchers with the Institute for Mummy Studies in Balzano, Italy, named Frank Maixner and Albert Zink.  Drs. Maixner and Zink's study appears in the journal Current Biology.  Readers who do not have subscriptions either to the Economist or to Current Biology can check out other summaries of the findings here and here.  The National Geographic article in particular contains some interesting details about how the samples were obtained.

From prior scans of Ötzi's body, the researchers knew that his stomach had been full at the time of his death, so they resolved to cut into the stomach and perform a detailed analysis, including a chemical analysis, of his stomach contents.  The results of the chemical analysis enabled Drs. Maixner and Zink to identify the contents as meat and fat from the ibex and red deer, mixed with einkorn wheat.  Small amounts of bracken fern were also found.  Bracken is toxic, but tiny bits of it may have ended up in Ötzi's stomach if the meat had been wrapped in bracken leaves. The analysis indicated that the meat had been exposed to temperatures of less than 140 degrees Fahrenheit, supporting the idea that it had been smoked rather than cooked.  (Flecks of carbon found in the samples also support this idea.)

Of interest to nutritionists, as well as to those of us who attempt to "eat healthy," is the fact that the total contents of Ötzi's stomach were approximately 46% animal fat.  This result also raises new questions about Ötzi's final journey, as well as about Stone Age diet in general.  Did Ötzi eat a higher fat meal than normal before setting out, to fuel himself for trekking through the mountains?  The information gleaned about the meal suggests that he brought food with him for his journey, adding to the picture of careful preparation for a mountain journey drawn by his clothing and equipment.  But that preparation for a special trip still doesn't rule out the possibility that his meal might have been typical for a man of his age, occupation, and time.  If so, what does that tell us about Stone Age life?

Only one thing is certain; we have yet to learn everything there is to learn from the mortal remains of this famous traveller from the Stone Age.

EDIT:  Correcting the reference to the heat to which the meat is believed to have been exposed.  

"New" Cookbook About Ancient Food

Through the Norsefolk_2 list on Yahoo, I learned that some Danish archaeologists are about to publish a new English-language edition of a book they had previously published, in Danish, about European food from the Stone Age until the Middle Ages. The article states that the authors have analyzed food finds from graves, archaeological discoveries of fire rings and similar information to ascertain what was eaten and deduce how it was cooked.  Thus, the book provides recipes that at least have some foundation in hard information about period food. 

There's an article about the book here, and it can be ordered for 25 Euros from this site. The English title will be "A Culinary Journey Through Time," and I, for one, am looking forward to eventually obtaining a copy to read and enjoy; if it has recipes I can experiment with (i.e., that I can use with the equipment and ingredients available to me), all the better!  I am especially looking forward to learning the authors' take on Viking era food.

EDIT:  (3/28/2012)  I contacted one of the authors of the book by e-mail and she told me that the book is not yet available in e-book form.  It is, however, available in an English-language paper edition.  She told me that to purchase a copy from her and have it sent to the United States would cost me a total of $50 USD and that she can only accept payment by personal check. So I just mailed my check to her.  With luck, I should be able to review the book on this blog in early April.  Wish me luck!

Paleolithic Grain

This article discusses a series of new archaeological finds; stones used for grinding grain that date back to the Stone Age. The archaeologists know that the stones were used for grinding grain not simply because of the shape, but because the stones are still coated with a microscopic layer of grain. Such stones have been found in Italy, southern Moravia in the Czech Republic and the Pokrovsky Valley in Russia as well.

Yes, the grains are wild grains, not cultivated; microscopic analysis identifies them as belonging to cattail, a fern, and a type of grass. Not nearly as nourishing as barley, or wheat, or rye would become. But at least a sign that humanity was looking to eat things other than meat or berries earlier than had formerly been thought.