Health & Science

The bread that cavemen ate; The sound of tasteless food; Wiping out a viral disease; The anti-alcoholism gene

The bread that cavemen ate

Anthropologists have long believed that our caveman ancestors survived mostly on meat. But a new analysis of Stone Age tools suggests that early modern humans ate ground flour as long as 28,000 years ago—some 20,000 years before the dawn of farming. The study examined grinding stones found at ancient settlement sites in Russia, Italy, and the Czech Republic. The flour came not from wheat or barley but from the ground-up roots of cattails and ferns, which are rich in starch and were likely peeled and dried first. Adding water would have created a dough that might have been added to soup or cooked as an unleavened flatbread. Meat certainly was a major part of the Paleolithic diet, with early humans spending much of their time hunting. The preparation of flour and vegetables left behind less durable evidence for anthropologists to find—until now. “It’s another nail in the coffin of the idea that hunter-gatherers didn’t use plants for food,” Ofer Bar-Yosef, a Harvard archaeologist not involved in the study, tells NatureNews.com. The researchers went so far as to replicate the recipe. “You make a kind of pita and cook it on the hot stone,” says Laura Longo of the Italian Institute of Prehistory and Early History. The result, Longo says, was “crispy like a cracker but not very tasty.”

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