World’s oldest chocolate was made 5300 years ago

Our love affair with chocolate is much older than we thought, and newly discovered traces of cocoa on ancient pots suggest it started in the rainforests of what is now Ecuador some 5300 years ago. That’s nearly 1500 years older than earlier evidence, and it shifts the nexus of cocoa production from Central America to the upper Amazon.

“This is an incredibly strong demonstration,” says Rosemary Joyce, an archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new study. “It puts to rest any lingering claims that the use of [cocoa] pods … was an invention of the people of Mesoamerica.”

The ancient civilizations of Central America, including the Olmec and Maya, processed cocoa seeds to produce drinks for use in rituals and feasts as far back as 1900 B.C.E., according to ancient texts and ethnohistoric accounts. Some researchers thought these civilizations were the first to take cocoa pods from the Theobroma cacao tree, drying, fermenting, roasting, and grinding them into a paste used to make the beverages.

But Joyce and other researchers wondered whether cocoa had an earlier, lost history. Genetic studies hinted as much, confirming that the cocoa tree is at its most genetically diverse in the humid forests of the upper Amazon. This suggests the upper Amazon is where all wild cocoa trees originally grew, and where humans would have had the original opportunity to exploit and cultivate it.

That was on the mind of Michael Blake, an archaeologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, as he worked with colleagues—including archaeologist Francisco Valdez of the French Research Institute for Development in Marseille—at Santa Ana-La Florida in Ecuador. This ancient village is the oldest known site of the Mayo-Chinchipe culture, which occupied the western Amazon around 5500 years ago.

“I noticed they had found some very elaborate pottery, and I suggested that the vessels kind of reminded me of the ones that the Maya used to make cacao [drinks],” Blake says. “I asked: ‘Is there any chance that these vessels might also have been used for cacao?’ And the answer came back: ‘Well, nobody’s looked.’”

Blake and his colleagues have now used three independent lines of evidence to argue that the ancient vessels—which include unadorned bowls and elaborately decorated spouted bottles—once held cocoa. They scraped charred cooking residue from the inside of pot sherds for analysis and found they contained starch grains with a shape only seen in cocoa tree seed pods. They also had the chemical signature of theobromine, a compound present only in mature cocoa seeds. The final clincher came from an analysis of ancient DNA extracted from the pottery, which matched sequences from modern cocoa trees.

Collectively, the evidence suggests the inhabitants of Santa Ana-La Florida used cocoa routinely between about 5300 and 2100 years ago, according to pottery from carbon dated layers at the site. That makes the new find the oldest recorded use of cocoa, the team reports today in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Previously, some of the oldest evidence came from 3100-year-old pottery vessels from Honduras, discovered by Joyce and colleagues. Joyce says the fact that Honduras is so far south—and that wild cocoa trees seem to be native to South America—led her to suspect that even earlier evidence of cocoa use would be found farther south. “These findings come as a welcome confirmation.”

But Joyce questions whether the ancient inhabitants of Ecuador actually domesticated cocoa. She points out that they could simply have collected pods from the wild cocoa trees growing there.

Genomic evidence hints at domestication farther north, says Juan Carlos Motamayor Arias, an agricultural engineer at Universal Genetic Solutions LLC in Miami, Florida. Earlier this month, Motamayor Arias and his colleagues published a genomic analysis that traced the genetic fingerprint of cocoa domestication to about 3600 years ago in Central America. He says his research team found no genetic signal of domestication in samples from the upper Amazon region, where Santa Ana-La Florida lies.

Blake and his colleagues counter that the people of Santa Ana-La Florida likely domesticated the plant, given that they found cocoa residue on 19 different artifacts used over the course of thousands of years. The researchers also say domesticating a long-lived tree species might not have left a clear genetic signal until the trees were exported to Central America, where there are no wild cocoa trees to interbreed with domesticated forms.

Exactly how cocoa trees made that journey thousands of kilometers north is, for now, perhaps the biggest mystery. Cocoa seeds quickly lose viability during storage, so they are not easily transported. Some artifacts at Santa Ana-La Florida suggest the site had connections to the Pacific Ocean. “Could people have taken boatloads of seedlings and moved them up the coast?” Blake wonders.

He also thinks the new discoveries hint that the ancient cultures of South America had far more influence on the development of the later grand civilizations of Central America than researchers have thought, particularly given that the vessels at Santa Ana-La Florida are of a similar style to those used later in Central America. “That’s definitely something we want to look at and research further.”

The origin of Scotch Whisky

What is the origin of the name ‘whisky’?

The term ‘whisky’ derives originally from the Gaelic ‘uisge beatha’, or ‘usquebaugh’, meaning ‘water of life’. Gaelic is that branch of Celtic spoken in the Highlands of Scotland.

When was Scotch Whisky first distilled?

Whisky has been distilled in Scotland for hundreds of years. There is some evidence to show that the art of distilling could have been brought to the country by Christian missionary monks, but it has never been proved that Highland farmers did not themselves discover how to distil spirits from their surplus barley.

The earliest historical reference to whisky comes much later, Mr J Marshall Robb, in his book ‘Scotch Whisky’, says: ‘The oldest reference to whisky occurs in the Scottish Exchequer Rolls for 1494, where there is an entry of ‘eight bolls of malt to Friar John Cor wherewith to make aquavitae’. A boll was an old Scottish measure of not more than six bushels. (One bushel is equivalent to 25.4 kilograms)

When King James IV was in Inverness during September 1506, his Treasurer’s Accounts had entries for the 15th and 17th of the month respectively: ‘For aqua vite to the King. . .’ and ‘For ane flacat of aqua vite to the King. . .’. lt is probable that the aquavitae in this case was spirit for drinking.

The earliest reference to a distillery in the Acts of the Scottish Parliament appears to be in 1690, when mention is made of the famous Ferintosh distillery owned by Duncan Forbes of Culloden.

There is also a reference to distilling in a private house in the parish of Gamrie in Banffshire in 1614. This occurs in the Register of the Privy Council, where a man accused of the crime of breaking into a private house, combined with assault, was said to have knocked over some ‘aquavitie’.

One of the earliest references to ‘uiskie’ occurs in the funeral account of a Highland laird about 1618.

An unpublished letter of February 1622, written by Sir Duncan Campbell of Glenorchy to the Earl of Mar, reported that certain officers sent to Glenorchy by the King had been given the best entertainment that the season and the country allowed. It stated: ‘For they wantit not wine nor aquavite.’ This ‘aquavite’ was no doubt locally distilled whisky.

Another writer affirms that aquavitae occasionally formed part of the rent paid for Highland farms, at any rate in Perthshire, but no actual date is given for this practice.

What is the history of charging duty on Scotch Whisky?

The Scots Parliament in 1644 passed an Excise Act fixing the duty at 2/8d (13p) per pint of aquavitae or other strong liquor - the Scots pint being approximately one third of a gallon. For the remainder of the 17th century various alterations were made to the types and amounts of duty collected.

After the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, English revenue staff crossed the border to begin their lengthy attempts to bring whisky production under control. Ninety years later the excise laws were in such a hopeless state of confusion that no two distilleries were taxed at the same rate. Illicit distilling flourished, the smugglers seeing no good reason for paying for the privilege of making their native drink.

After a lengthy Royal Commission, the Act of 1823 sanctioned legal distilling at a duty of 2/3d (12p) per gallon for stills with a capacity of more than 40 gallons. There was a licence fee of £10 annually and no stills under the legal limit were allowed. The first distillery came into ‘official’ existence in the following year and thereafter many of the more far-sighted distillers came over on to the side of the law.

In 1840, the duty was 5d (2.5p) per bottle and by the beginning of the First World War it had risen to 1/81/2d (9p). In 1939, a typical bottle of Scotch whisky cost 14/3d (72p) of which 9/71/2d (48p) was duty. By 1992, after a succession of duty increases, the same bottle was costing around £10.80. The duty on it was £5.55, equivalent to £19.81 per litre of pure alcohol.

In 1995, for the first time in one hundred years, the tax on Scotch whisky was reduced. Duty fell from £5.77 to £5.54 a bottle (70cl). In 1996, the tax on Scotch whisky was again reduced.

Since 1973 the price of a bottle of whisky, including the Excise Duty, has been subject to a Value Added Tax.

https://www.scotchwhiskyexperience.co.uk/about-whisky/history

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