Our current idea of the paleodiet is a myth which was caused in part by traces of meat eating being easy to study. Nice long article:
How ancient people fell in love with bread, beer and other carbs
On a clear day, the view from the ruins of Göbekli Tepe stretches across southern Turkey all the way to the Syrian border some 50 kilometres away. At 11,600 years old, this mountaintop archaeological site has been described as the world’s oldest temple — so ancient, in fact, that its T-shaped pillars and circular enclosures pre-date pottery in the Middle East.
The people who built these monumental structures were living just before a major transition in human history: the Neolithic revolution, when humans began farming and domesticating crops and animals. But there are no signs of domesticated grain at Göbekli Tepe, suggesting that its residents hadn’t yet made the leap to farming. The ample animal bones found in the ruins prove that the people living there were accomplished hunters, and there are signs of massive feasts. Archaeologists have suggested that mobile bands of hunter-gatherers from all across the region came together at times for huge barbecues, and that these meaty feasts led them to build the impressive stone structures.
Now that view is changing, thanks to researchers such as Laura Dietrich at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin. Over the past four years, Dietrich has discovered that the people who built these ancient structures were fuelled by vat-fulls of porridge and stew, made from grain that the ancient residents had ground and processed on an almost industrial scale1. The clues from Göbekli Tepe reveal that ancient humans relied on grains much earlier than was previously thought — even before there is evidence that these plants were domesticated. And Dietrich’s work is part of a growing movement to take a closer look at the role that grains and other starches had in the diet of people in the past.
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Genetic data support the idea that people were eating starch. In 2016, for example, geneticists reported5 that humans have more copies of the gene that produces enzymes to digest starch than do any of our primate relatives. “Humans have up to 20 copies, and chimpanzees have 2,” says Cynthia Larbey, an archaeobotanist at the University of Cambridge, UK. That genetic change in the human lineage helped to shape the diet of our ancestors, and now us. “That suggests there’s a selective advantage to higher-starch diets for Homo sapiens.”
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To find supporting evidence in the archaeological record, Larbey turned to cooking hearths at sites in South Africa dating back 120,000 years, picking out chunks of charred plant material — some the size of a peanut. Under the scanning electron microscope, she identified cellular tissue from starchy plants6 — the earliest evidence of ancient people cooking starch. “Right through from 120,000 to 65,000 years ago, they’re cooking roots and tubers,” Larbey says. The evidence is remarkably consistent, she adds, particularly compared with animal remains from the same site. “Over time they change hunting techniques and strategies, but still continue to cook and eat plants.”
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Evidence suggests that plants were popular among Neanderthals, too. In 2011, Amanda Henry, a palaeoanthropologist now at Leiden University in the Netherlands, published her findings from dental plaque picked from the teeth of Neanderthals who were buried in Iran and Belgium between 46,000 and 40,000 years ago. Plant microfossils trapped and preserved in the hardened plaque showed that they were cooking and eating starchy foods including tubers, grains and dates7. “Plants are ubiquitous in our environment,” Henry says, “and it’s no surprise we put them to use.”
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Bread, it seems, goes even further back. Arranz-Otaegui was working at a 14,500-year-old site in Jordan when she found charred bits of ‘probable food’ in the hearths of long-ago hunter-gatherers. When she showed scanning electron microscope images of the stuff to Lara González Carretero, an archaeobotanist at the Museum of London Archaeology who works on evidence of bread baking at a Neolithic site in Turkey called Çatalhöyük, both researchers were shocked. The charred crusts from Jordan had tell-tale bubbles, showing they were burnt pieces of bread10.
Most archaeologists have assumed that bread didn’t appear on the menu until after grain had been domesticated — 5,000 years after the cooking accident in question. So it seems that the early bakers in Jordan used wild wheat.
The evidence provides crucial clues to the origins of the Neolithic revolution, when people began to settle down and domesticate grain and animals, which happened at different times in various parts of the world. Before farming began, a loaf of bread would have been a luxury product that required time-consuming and tedious work gathering the wild grain needed for baking. That hurdle could have helped to spur crucial changes.
Arranz-Otaegui’s research suggests that — at least in the Near East — demand for bread might have been a factor in driving people to attempt to domesticate wheat, as they looked for ways to ensure a steady supply of baked goods. “What we are seeing in Jordan has implications for bigger processes. What drove the transition to agriculture is one of the fundamental questions in archaeology,” Arranz-Otaegui says. “This shows hunter-gatherers were using cereals.”
The next frontier for archaeobotanists is prehistoric salad bars.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01681-w
