Another article related to prehistoric cooking:
Food residue encrusted on 6,000-year-old pottery fragments from Northern Europe, such as the one above, show traces of mustard seed, which was likely used as a seasoning for fish and meat. Image via Hayley Saul
As the inane car insurance commercials suggest, ancient humans were smarter than we give them credit for. They created some of the same words we still use today. They even brewed beer.
Now evidence suggests that they had some culinary flair as well. A new analysis of food residue encrusted on millennia-old pottery shards collected from sites in Germany and Denmark shows that prehistoric humans used the spice mustard seed to season the plant and animal staples that made up the bulk of their diet.
As part of the new study, published today in PLOS ONE, researchers from the UK’s University of York and elsewhere chemically analyzed the residue on ancient pieces of pottery that are part of the collections of a trio of museums—the Kalunborg and Holbæk Museums, in Denmark, along with the Schleswig-Holstein Museum in Germany. The artifacts were originally excavated from three different sites in the same two countries which are between 5,750 and 6,100 years old, an era during which people in the area were in the midst of transitioning from hunter-gatherer to nomadic societies.
When analyzing the food gunk encrusted on the pottery, the team looked specifically at phytoliths, microscopic granules of silica that plants produce and store in their cells after absorbing silicic acid from the soil. Different plants produce slightly different types of phytoliths, so by closely examining them, the scientists were able to figure out which sorts of plants had been cooked in the pottery.
They found that the residue from the insides of the pots had much larger quantities of phytoliths than the outsides, confirming that the granules were indicative of cooking use. When they compared the size and shape of the phytoliths to databases of hundreds of modern plant phytoliths, they most closely matched that of mustard seed. The team also found oil residue from both land animals and marine life, and other plant residues that come from starchier plants—suggesting that these prehistoric people were cooking fish, meat and plants in the pots and seasoning them with the mustard seed.
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/scie...ed-spices-too/
Abstract
Here we present evidence of phytoliths preserved in carbonised food deposits on prehistoric pottery from the western Baltic dating from 6,100 cal BP to 5750 cal BP. Based on comparisons to over 120 European and Asian species, our observations are consistent with phytolith morphologies observed in modern garlic mustard seed (
Alliaria petiolata (M. Bieb) Cavara & Grande). As this seed has a strong flavour, little nutritional value, and the phytoliths are found in pots along with terrestrial and marine animal residues, these findings are the first direct evidence for the spicing of food in European prehistoric cuisine. Our evidence suggests a much greater antiquity to the spicing of foods than is evident from the macrofossil record, and challenges the view that plants were exploited by hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists solely for energy requirements, rather than taste.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%...l.pone.0070583