The inhabitants of the Border Cave in southern Africa were cooking starchy plants 170,000 years ago. “This discovery is much older than earlier reports for cooking similar plants and it […]
Tag: ancient
Food in the Ancient World
by John Wilkins and Shaun Hill From the publisher: In Food in the Ancient World, a respected classicist and a practising world-class chef explore a millennium of eating and drinking. […]
Evolution’s Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins
by Peter S. Ungar From the publisher: Whether we realize it or not, we carry in our mouths the legacy of our evolution. Our teeth are like living fossils that […]
Ancient humans stored leftovers at least 200,000 years ago
Neanderthals or early Homo sapiens humans were storing bone marrow in a cave in modern-day Israel 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. Researchers have discovered deer bones with cut marks where […]
Food and Cooking in Ancient Rome
by Clive Gifford and Paul Cherrill From the publisher: The civilization of Ancient Rome grew from a small community on the Mediterranean to become one of the largest empires of […]
Ancient barley in Finland shows hunter-gatherers also farmed 5,000 years ago
A discovery of 5,000-year-old barley grains reveals that hunter-gatherers took to farming already that long ago in eastern Sweden and on islands along the southwest coast of Finland. These representatives […]
Bread discovered that predates agriculture by 4,000 years
At an archaeological site in northeastern Jordan, researchers have discovered the charred remains of a flatbread baked by hunter-gatherers 14,400 years ago. It is the oldest direct evidence of bread […]
Were insects a major food source for early humans?
Insects, specifically termites, could have accounted for almost half the diet of hominins about 1.8 million years ago, according to researchers at Heriot Watt-University in the UK and Wayne State […]
Did an ancient mutation let us consume alcohol?
A genetic mutation in mammals 10 million years ago greatly enhanced their ability to break down alcohol in the food they ate. That’s the finding of researcher Matthew Carrigan at […]
Ötzi the Iceman’s last meal 5,300 years ago
Twenty years after his frozen body was discovered in an Alpine glacier on the Austrian-Italian border, researchers found Ötzi’s stomach full of food tucked under his ribs. In the hour […]