Were Stone Age people better cooks than we thought?
- Published
If you were to follow a recipe today, you're likely to need quite a few ingredients to make it tasty.
New research shows hunter-gatherers also ate a variety of plants as well as animal meat during the Stone Age.
Scientists led by Lara González Carretero from the University of York used a new technique to look at ancient pottery.
From this, they could see what ingredients early humans used to cook with.
They found that not only did they use a variety of plants and berries, but the way the ingredients were combined were unique to different areas.
Until now, scientists used a technique called lipid residue analysis to understand what ingredients remained on ancient pottery.
But while this technique is very good for finding remains of animal fat, plants are much harder to see with this technique.
So researchers used special microscopes to look at the remains of the gunk left on pots that were around 8,000 years old from 13 archaeological sites across Northern and Eastern Europe.
The analysis showed that hunter-gatherers didn't just live off fish, but also a variety of grasses, berries, leaves and seeds.
Pots like this one were analysed as part of the study
What was interesting to the archaeologists was how these ingredients were combined.
Within the remains of one pot were viburnum berries which are bitter and can be poisonous if they're not cooked, but by combining them with the fats from fish, they're nicer to eat.
Evidence of these berries have only been found inside the pots which makes scientists believe they were only cooked with fish.
By looking at pots from different regions, they could see that the types of ingredients used together varied from place to place.
This suggests it depended not only on what was available to them but also their cultural practices because even when two areas had access to the same ingredients, they decided to use them differently.
