Posted on 02/04/2020 9:26:50 AM PST by SunkenCiv
Charred fragments found in 170,000-year-old ashes in a cave in southern Africa are the earliest roasted root vegetables yet found. The finding suggest the real "paleo diet" included lots of roasted vegetables rich in carbohydrates, similar to modern potatoes.
"I think people were eating a very balanced diet, a combination of carbohydrates and proteins," says team leader Lyn Wadley of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.
In 2016, her team found dozens of bits of charcoal in an ash layer in the Border cave in South Africa. This ash layer is what is left from the fires of early people.
By studying the charred remains of hundreds of modern plants under a microscope over the following years, the team were finally able to identify the charcoal fragments as being the rhizomes -- subterranean stems -- of a plant from the genus Hypoxis.
Seeds of root vegetables and other plants have found at an 800,000-year-old site in Israel where early humans lived, but Wadley's find is the earliest clear evidence of roasting.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
I prefer something fresher.
Roasting would have been easy. But re-creating the paleo way of boiling water requires a bit more imagination. On a blustery day in October, Andrew Langley and 13 other graduate students headed to the woods to learn to boil water. They were allowed no obvious cooking vessels: no pots, no pans, no bowls, no cups, no containers at all. But they did bring deer hides, which Langley had carefully procured from deer farms. They were to boil water the Paleolithic way. Langley is a doctoral student in archaeology at the University of York, and he studies how prehistoric humans cooked without pottery. Ceramics are a relatively recent invention in the long arc of human history. Pottery shards appear in the archaeological record only 20,000 years ago, first in China and then many millennia later in the Near East and Europe...
- How Did Humans Boil Water Before the Invention of Pots? | Sarah Zhang | The Atlantic | January 16, 2020
If Slick Willy was still in office, he’d offer to eat them.
Re: Post #19 funny...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.