100,000 years and counting–for eating grains, that is
Caption: These are Middle Stone Age food processing tools recovered from the Ngalue cave site, Mozambique.
Credit: Grady Semmens, University of Calgary
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It used to be the story that farming and grain eating came along together 10,000 years or so ago.
Then evidence of grass seed use in Israel and of granaries dating way before that threw doubt on that assumption. Good thing too because it seems highly improbable that you would grow grasses until you had a processing technology in hand.
And now there’s a story that’s going to appear in Science tomorrow about evidence for eating grass seeds 100,000 years ago in Mozambique. Can’t wait to read the details. Pity Science is gated.
And would I love to have a go at some seeds with those tools?
Thanks to Jeremy for the pointer.
I don’t think that story is gated, but it is hard to tell from my institution.
Surely people have known that nomadic groups of people have processed wild collected grain?
The Australian aboriginals processed a wide range of items, including grass seeds and native millet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_bread