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Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are
New research proves that our ancestors cooked starchy rhizome 170 000 years ago. The study also implies that the food was shared as a social act around the fire.
“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are” is an old French saying. Reconstructing the diet of our ancestors and understanding how it changed through time are key goals of all archaeological research”, says Francesco d’Errico. He is professor II at the University of Bergen (UiB) and senior scientist in SapienCE.
INSIGHT TO EARLY BEHAVIOR
d’Errico co-directs the excavation at Border Cave, South Africa, with Lucinda Backwell financed by the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Argentina (CONICET) and Lyn Wadley at the , Johannesburg, South Africa. Their excavations led to the astonishing finding of rhizomes that were cooked, shared and eaten by our ancestors 170,000 years ago. This work was recently published in the prestigious Journal Science.
“This discovery is much older than earlier reports for cooking plants and it provides a fascinating insight into the behavioural practices of early modern humans in southern Africa. It also implies that they shared food and used wooden sticks to extract plants from the ground”, says Professor Lyn Wadley, based at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand.
d’Errico explains that the rhizomes were not eaten raw on the spot, but brought to the cave to be cooked, and presumably shared with other members of the group who may have spent their day in other activities such as hunting. “In other words, eating rhizomes is not important in itself. What is important is the ability of some modern populations to transform food into a social act, to share it according to elaborate cultural rules that allow everybody to get a bit, thus creating more cohesion within the group”, d’Errico explains.
Cooking the rhizomes also makes them easier to digest, maximizing the assimilation of nutrients. It provides carbohydrates that are, apart from the occasional collection of honey and fruits, otherwise quite difficult for a huntergatherer to find and integrate in their diet on a regular basis.
PART OF THE CULTURAL PUZZLE
d’Errico says that this finding is relevant in the context of the work SapienCE is carrying out at other South African sites, such as Klasies River and Blombos Cave.
“Current scenarios regarding the emergence of our species in Africa predict a changing geography, with human population genetically and culturally connected at some times and isolated at others. When disconnected, these populations may have developed original cultural adaptations, and when connected they may have shared innovations. To reach a global understanding of the phenomenon we need to reconstruct and compare coeval cultural adaptations from different regions, and follow their evolution through time. Blombos Cave and Klasies River are, like Border Cave, key pieces of this puzzle”.
Three views of the rhizome identified at Border Cave.
Reconstructing the diet of our ancestors and understanding how it changed through time are key goals of all archaeological research. Photo is showing a modern Hypoxis augustifolia fresh rhizome.
