Paleo people were making flour 32,000 years ago.

[jeaniebueller]

LOL

www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/09/14/440292003/paleo-people-were-making-flour-32-000-years-ago?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150914

Oatmeal is generally considered a no-no on the modern paleo diet, but the original paleo eaters were definitely grinding oats and other grains for dinner, according to new research.

That finding comes from new investigations of an ancient stone recovered in a cave called Grotta Paglicci in Puglia, in southern Italy. It was used by the Gravettian culture — a paleolithic people who also left behind spectacular cave paintings, evidence of burial and distinctive stone tools.

The stone, which is "pale brown and not much bigger than my hand, " was clearly used as a combination pestle and grinder, says Marta Mariotti Lippi, a botany professor at the University of Florence in Italy, who led the research team. It dates back some 32,000 years, she says, providing the earliest evidence of food processing in Europe.


Hunter-gatherers used this stone as a combination pestle and grinder to make flour from oats and other grains, says Marta Mariotti Lippi, a professor of botany at the University of Florence in Italy.


Hunter-gatherers used this stone as a combination pestle and grinder to make flour from oats and other grains, says Marta Mariotti Lippi, a professor of botany at the University of Florence in Italy.

Courtesy of Stefano Ricci

"There are many other grinding tools, but this is the oldest," she says.

She says these hunter-gatherers used the rounded end of the stone to bash seeds against another rock to break them up. The flat surface of the stone shows the kind of wear that would be produced by grinding the broken seeds into flour.

The stone came to light in June 1989, and although well enough studied at the time, two years ago a new team started a fresh study of material from the cave with the latest modern methods.

The researchers sealed the stone in plastic to preserve it for future research. But they left exposed small patches that they washed with a gentle stream of water to loosen debris. In the water were hundreds of starch granules of five main types. The most plentiful, says Mariotti Lippi, were from oat seeds, almost certainly Avena barbata, a wild species still common across much of Europe. The stone also processed other edible plants, including acorns and relatives of millet.

Most intriguing, many of the starch grains were swollen and partly gelatinized, which is consistent with them being heated before grinding. Because the climate 32,000 years ago was cooler than it is today, seeds gathered in autumn might not have had enough time to dry naturally. Perhaps, Mariotti Lippi speculates, those seeds were first dried over a fire, which would have made them much easier to grind and digest than freshly gathered seeds. And ready-ground flour, she notes, would keep longer and be easier to transport.


A field of unharvested wheat is seen in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, England, in 2012. Wheat wasn't cultivated in Britain until some 6,000 years ago, but DNA evidence suggests early Britons were eating the grain at least 8,000 years ago.

The Salt

Stone Age Britons Were Eating Wheat 2,000 Years Before They Farmed It

There are other possible explanations for why the grains show signs of heating, notes John Speth, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the research.

For instance, he says the stone might have been used as a pestle and grinder at one point, and later used as a type of hot coal, with grain residues still attached. He points to evidence that other paleolithic people boiled water by first heating rocks in a fire, then throwing the stones in the liquid.

But he agrees that the grains were heated as part of processing for consumption, and that this marks a key step in the evolution of human foodways in Europe.

And just how did Paglicci people eat the ground grain? "Presumably they mixed the flour with water and cooked [it]," says Mariotti Lippi.

But she's unwilling to speculate whether the outcome was a kind of flat oatcake or a gruel or porridge. She's also extremely cautious about drawing any more general conclusions about the diets of the Paglicci cave people, who lived in the middle of the paleolithic era.

"When we study grinding tools, we know that we do not find the most common plants, but the last ones processed," she notes.

As for modern ideas about the paleo diet, she says, "We have too few data to speak about diet, really, but surely they used grains."

The research appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


Paleolithic


paleo diet

[FloFTW]

I love this.

[FloFTW]

Gorgeous.

[tacosforlife]

OF COURSE THEY WERE!

I think the label "paleo" has always annoyed me more than the actual diet/lifestyle itself. Because ancient man was using coconut oil, regardless of where he lived, but wasn't boiling grains or smashing them between rocks?

[mlt]

Legit LOL. I cannot wait to mention this the next time I'm having lunch with my paleo coworker. She loves to talk about cavemen eating eggs and fish.

[twohearted]

Sept 15, 2015 8:39:09 GMT -5 tacosforlife said:

OF COURSE THEY WERE!

I think the label "paleo" has always annoyed me more than the actual diet/lifestyle itself. Because ancient man was using coconut oil, regardless of where he lived, but wasn't boiling grains or smashing them between rocks?

Yes! Also to me it also seems like adaption to available food sources would be extremely beneficial and spread rapidly through a population. Like lactose tolerance for example. I don't know why we are so hung up on matching our diet to what we think people consumed in such very different circumstances.

[jeaniebueller]

Sept 15, 2015 8:43:22 GMT -5 mlt said:

Legit LOL. I cannot wait to mention this the next time I'm having lunch with my paleo coworker. She loves to talk about cavemen eating eggs and fish.

SHUT UP SHE DOES NOT!!

[mlt]

Sept 15, 2015 9:00:52 GMT -5 jeaniebueller said:

Sept 15, 2015 8:43:22 GMT -5 mlt said:

Legit LOL. I cannot wait to mention this the next time I'm having lunch with my paleo coworker. She loves to talk about cavemen eating eggs and fish.

SHUT UP SHE DOES NOT!!

Oh yes. To be fair I brought it on myself by asking her about why she eats Paleo. But she was seriously straight faced, while eating some salmon and egg salad concoction, that cave people ate "like this" and didn't get cancer or IBS. I was like

[tacosforlife]

Sept 15, 2015 9:39:32 GMT -5 mlt said:

Sept 15, 2015 9:00:52 GMT -5 jeaniebueller said:

SHUT UP SHE DOES NOT!!

Oh yes. To be fair I brought it on myself by asking her about why she eats Paleo. But she was seriously straight faced, while eating some salmon and egg salad concoction, that cave people ate "like this" and didn't get cancer or IBS. I was like

Fucking hell do I hate this argument. Yeah, when you got killed by a saber-toothed tiger at 19, OF COURSE YOU DIDN'T GET CANCER!!!

Also, how the fuck do we know that cavemen didn't get cancer? Does she have a Delorean and a supply or plutonium that allows her to take a bunch of diagnostic equipment back to cave times?

[laurack]

not a lot of chance for cancers to develop with a life expectancy of 30. I'm sure they DID get cancer too, but many instances of cancer develop later in life so by not lasting past 30 you'd drastically reduce your chances of getting cancer or other degenerative diseases.

[laurack]

The way most people follow the "paleo" diet makes no sense at all anyway, it's nothing like a true paleolithic eating experience would have been. That's why they should just call it "I try to eat healthy most of the time"

while I'm sure paleo man was thrilled to kill an animal for food, he wasn't feasting on copious amounts of meat four times a day either lol. Don't see a lot of paleo people simulating the hard times too, by grinding up acorns and bugs and eating that for days while waiting for the hunt to yield some fresh meat.

[laurack]

Sept 15, 2015 9:55:26 GMT -5 @littlemoxie said:

Sept 15, 2015 9:52:56 GMT -5 laurack said:

not a lot of chance for cancers to develop with a life expectancy of 30. I'm sure they DID get cancer too, but many instances of cancer develop later in life so by not lasting past 30 you'd drastically reduce your chances of getting cancer or other degenerative diseases.

Not to mention, eating such high fat/high protein may not have been good for heart or colon health, but we wouldn't know since they died so early.

yes I mean I support a higher protein diet than the average carb heavy diet, but most paleo people I've met eat vast amounts of meat and little vegetables. I think it would have been completely the opposite, a lot of berries and plants and such and meat in smaller amounts, or large amounts but infrequent.

[debatethis]

Sept 15, 2015 9:59:41 GMT -5 Lucy Honeychurch said:

I don't have a problem with the diet in and of itself; I just hate the inaccuracy of its original basis. CALL IT SOMETHING ELSE!

A skunk by any other name still stinks.

[laurack]

Sept 15, 2015 9:59:41 GMT -5 Lucy Honeychurch said:

I don't have a problem with the diet in and of itself; I just hate the inaccuracy of its original basis. CALL IT SOMETHING ELSE!

yes in general I feel it's a good diet to base your eating around loosely: fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, nuts, little processed food and mostly home cooked meals. Sounds great! I don't agree with the no grains and potatoes madness but overall it's a solid diet.

but, it's just a healthy diet, it's not a paleo diet.

[laurack]

I've heard people say they are 80 or 90% paleo

So .. you only eat 20% of your diet from grains and potatoes? I must be paleo too then. lol

[secretlyevil]

Sept 15, 2015 9:39:32 GMT -5 mlt said:

Sept 15, 2015 9:00:52 GMT -5 jeaniebueller said:

SHUT UP SHE DOES NOT!!

Oh yes. To be fair I brought it on myself by asking her about why she eats Paleo. But she was seriously straight faced, while eating some salmon and egg salad concoction, that cave people ate "like this" and didn't get cancer or IBS. I was like

[meshaliuknits]

I'm still laughing at sabertooth tiger.