“The consumption of wild cereals among prehistoric hunters and gatherers appears to be far more ancient than previously thought,” said study author Julio Mercader.
Indeed, scientific evidence until now showed the practice started only 12,000 years ago at the closing stages of the last Ice Age.
Mercader said in his study he found the oldest example of early man’s extensive consumption of cereal and root staples in a deep limestone cave near Lake Niassa in Mozambique.
Scientists studying a 160-year-old can of soup found in the Canadian Arctic have detected lead levels in its broth and sealant that are “off the scale” — further evidence, they say, of the lead poisoning believed to have doomed the 19th-century Franklin Expedition during its quest to transit the Northwest Passage.
Researchers from McMaster University in Hamilton and Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum — which had the historic tin of ox-cheek soup in its collection — performed tests on the can and its contents to try to confirm a controversial theory about the ill-fated polar voyage of the British ships Terror and Erebus in the late 1840s.
Franklin and 129 of his crew died during the journey across Canada’s forbidding northern sea route after the ships became irretrievably locked in ice near King William Island in 1847.
The world’s oldest block of butter (as oppose to the world’s oldest butter in general) has been discovered at Captain Robert Scott’s Antarctic base.
The frozen spread was found in a sack in a former pony stable nearly a century after the adventurer’s mission to the South Pole.
Captain Scott and his four colleagues died on their way back from the pole after coming second to Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.
Restoration workers also discovered shelves of tinned food, bedding and clothing in the Britons’ Cape Evans hut.
The butter, however, is the only example of fresh foods used by the explorers.
But what has excited the New Zealand discoverers the most is the fact that the spread is a product of their own country, still famous for its dairy products today.
Evidence found on ancient bird bones show that cavemen roasted and ate birds.
First, they found “cutmarks on bones of both the front and hind limb.”
Second, they identified the “presence of burning patterns on the extremities of the bones, areas of the skeleton with less meat.”
Finally, the researchers discovered “human tooth marks on limb bones.”
Although both Neanderthal and modern human remains have been found at the Bolomor Cave complex, the geological level of the roasted duck finds suggests that Homo heidelbergensis is the human species that ate the duck meals.
The cracked rocks got discarded when they were too small. Spicer sent several away for testing. Traces of pronghorn, rabbit, whitefish and trout, wild onion and sunflower were found on the rocks, but not in the soil around them, indicating the residue is likely from a soup.
To find the age of the fire, Spicer turned to fragments of several buffalo ribs and a leg bone that were found nearby at the same depth in the soil. He sent them to a lab for radio carbon dating and got dates back of 2010 and 2030 BP, or before present.
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This is a blog about history. It is edited by me, Sevaan Franks, and features news articles and links to interesting anthropology, archaeology, geology, paleontology and other general history-related items from around the world. If you have a story you would like to see featured on this site, please drop me a line.
