A Meal 170,000 Years Old

Once upon a time, way way before the innovation of agriculture, a group of early humans sat down for a meal inside a cave which is located today on the border of South Africa and Swaziland. The main course was cooked over an open fire. Some of the meal, however, was charred and beyond eating. It was lost in the ashes, and it remained there in the same place for nearly 200,000 years. Scientists were able to find out what food this group of early humans cooked.

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Previously it was known that starchy foods made for good eating in Middle Stone Age Africa, based on findings of plant matter at the Klasies River Cave to the southwest. The new paper, published in the journal Science, analyzed finds from Border Cave, as it’s known, and was able to identify that a starchy foodstuff was eaten there as well—underground stems called rhizomes, from the genus Hypoxis, a plant group that includes what is known today as yellow star or African potato. This pushes back the date of the earliest cooked starches by some 50,000 years, to about 170,000 years ago.

Border Cave also holds a large collection of wooden digging sticks, leading researchers to hypothesize that they were used to harvest the meal. “It seems likely that wooden digging sticks were used to dig the rhizomes from the ground,” says Lyn Wadley, an archaeologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and lead author of the new paper. “The plants are gregarious so quite a few could be harvested from a single place.”

More details about this over at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: Lyn Wadley/ Atlas Obscura)

Source: neatorama

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