Conventional wisdom tells us that the world changed at the beginning of the Neolithic period, when people settled in a specific place and developed agriculture. Before that, nomadic bands of hunters survived mostly on meat. That is indeed a big change, but recent research suggests that ancient people ate grains long before they learned to cultivate them. Consider the ruins of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, a settlement dated to 11,600 years ago. The many fossil bones found there led scientists to conclude that it was the site of huge gatherings of hunters who celebrated by eating meat.
Now that view is changing, thanks to researchers such as Laura Dietrich at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin. Over the past four years, Dietrich has discovered that the people who built these ancient structures were fuelled by vat-fulls of porridge and stew, made from grain that the ancient residents had ground and processed on an almost industrial scale1. The clues from Göbekli Tepe reveal that ancient humans relied on grains much earlier than was previously thought — even before there is evidence that these plants were domesticated. And Dietrich’s work is part of a growing movement to take a closer look at the role that grains and other starches had in the diet of people in the past.
In fact, there is some evidence of humans eating grains 100,000 years ago! Why are we just now figuring this out? It's because meat leaves better evidence behind than food made from plants. But new scientific techniques are enabling archaeologists to study remains of plants in ancient dishes. Read about these new and rather different methods for finding out about the everyday diets of our ancestors at Nature magazine.
(Image credit: Dosseman)
