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We tend to think of cavemen as pretty serious carnivores, hunting game and then roasting the yummy bits over a roaring campfire. But scientists just reported discovering traces of starch on some ancient stone tools. Which suggests that there were probably more than a few bakers in the bunch way back when. The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Anna Revedin et al., "Thirty thousand-year-old evidence of plant food processing"]
Researchers collected stone tools from three archaeological sites in Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic. Our Paleolithic ancestors called these digs home some 30,000 years ago. The markings on the recovered tools suggest that they were used like grindstones and pestles for processing grains. And they still contained traces of flour.
The flour grains came mostly from cattails and ferns, plants whose roots are rich in starch, kind of like a potato. Processing these plants probably involved peeling, drying and grinding their roots. The resulting flour could then be whisked into a dough and cooked.
The finding pushes back the first known use of flour by some 10,000 years. Which means that 300 centuries ago, Fred and Wilma might have had a kind of prehistoric pita bread on the menu.
—Karen Hopkin
[The above text is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
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7 Comments
Add CommentWouldn't Russia, the current Czech Republic and maybe even Italy have been covered by miles of ice sometime after 30kya?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf that is the case, I wonder if those presumedly agricultural societies migrated South for the ice ages or simply disappeared with their technology? Perhaps agriculture had to be redeveloped 20ky later...
I think you are cutting these people short when you say they lived in the stone age. There are some people today that you could say lives in the stone age, but that doesn't mean they are not advanced. There were some people who was so advanced 30 thousand years ago and beyond that time that we still cannot understand how they did things or understand their technology.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEvery object leaves an image in the Earth. If you could develop a machine that could detect shadow objects that are not naturally made, you may discover these people could make more than just flour.
nice article, very interesting.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@jamesdavis, you're the only person, until now, to use the phrase "stone age" so it seems odd to criticise other people for using it. but why do you find the use of that phrase pejorative? i don't get the impression from those that take an interest in ancient technology that the cognitive capacities used to hunt and gather with stone tools are so very different to that used with gps and rifles. however, perhaps, writing may be prerequisit to producing gps, not so for stone tools.
of course, trying to understand ancient technology is not easy, little is preserved, and until someone invents a shadow object detector i applaud anna revedin et al's efforts with plant grains.
by the way, from personal experience, bullrush risomes roasted over an open fire are very tasty.
http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/449/gobekli_tepe_paradise_regained.html
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExcavations are proceeding at Gobekli Tepe, Turkey, the first known massive monolithic stonehenge known, about 12,000 years old. The world's wheat genetically derives from this place as do all domestic cats from the area's wildcat - there are 13 types world wide. Wikipedia also reports on it, but I like the enthusiastic writeup here.
Very interesting. If I understand correctly, isn't it possible that the ancient wheat and cats found at Gobekli Tepe, Turkey are the genetic descendants of some of the 30kyo wheat reported here? Thanks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@jtdwyer - I've no idea, just passing on what I've seen on the subject matter - I first encountered it on a dvd "How Art made the World" which avers that the end of cave painting came at the same time as Gobekli Tepe's construction - no idea if either that is so or if the wheat derivation also asserted there (I think it was either there or in the article referred to above) is true. I noticed the domestic cat association either in a NYTimes article or an SA article, I can't remember which.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are referring above to an ice age which occurred 11,900 years ago, the Younger Dryas, which was caused by a meteorite that resulted in an enormous flash flood in eastern Canada that halted the Ocean's Thermohaline Conveyor Current. The resultant rapid glaciation resulted in a 1000 year ice age which ended the Clovis People's northern habitat and killed off all of North America's larger mammals. This is about to occur again because the Oil Spill and dispersants have ended the Gulf Stream section of the Conveyor current. Here's the breaking story on that.
http://www.littlechicagoreview.com/view/bookmark/9984984/article-There-s-oil-at-the-bottom-of-the-Gulf?instance=news
Extremely bad news if so. (Chill, baby, Chill)
it would be very intersting to find a link suggestive of a culture and technology relocating from and surviving the increasingly steppelike conditions after 30k culminating in the last glacial maximum around 14 - 22k, then popping up in turkey. the technology may be similar but the article discusses cattail and fern grains, not wheat, so may be hard to link to modern crop varieties.
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