Stone Age sorghum found in African cave

[Adsos Letter]

Source: NatureNews
Brendan Borrell

Humans may have been baking bread 105,000 years ago, says a researcher who has discovered evidence of ground seeds from sorghum grass on stone tools in a Mozambique cave.

"Whether they were eating it or not, we cannot be sure, but I cannot see how sorghum gets into the cave unless humans bring it in," says study author Julio Mercader, an archaeologist at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. Today, seeds from domesticated sorghum grass are used as flour for porridge, as a fermentation substrate for beer and as a dye for clothing.

Most researchers think that humans in the Middle Stone Age — which began around 300,000 years ago and ended around 50,000 years ago — depended on foodstuffs such as underground tubers and meat. Grains require a complex preparation process of grinding and charring before they can be digested by humans. Mercader says that sorghum flours could have been used to make culinary preparations such as bread. The first confirmed use of grains in the human diet comes from charred barley and wheat from Israel dating to about 23,000 years ago1, so the latest findings could push that date back another 80,000 years.

Mercader first discovered the Ngalue cave, in the sparsely populated Niassa province of Mozambique, with the help of locals in 2005. After a drive to the end of a road at an old mine site, he and his team then had to hike for 45 minutes to reach the cave's mouth. In 2007, the team made this trip every day as they excavated in a dark chamber 20 metres from the cave entrance, identifying animal bones along with more than 500 quartz artefacts.

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091217/full/news.2009.1147.html

[msongs]

1. umm, wrong info here. grains can be can be prepared merely by boiling/steaming.

whether they are less palatable without having any covering removed first is a different issue.

[tabatha]

2. I think they made sorghum porridge.

Otherwise known as pap, a tradition which survived and was adopted by White settlers.

And it was also brewed to make beer.

[rabs]

3. How cool

The Ngalue Bar and Grill

:beer:

[Warpy]

4. If it's edible, they were eating it

there was plenty of food insecurity back then because the earth was going through periods of warming and cooling. What grew one year would likely not grow the next and game habits were unpredictable.

One thing they know about people back then is that they'd eat any plant that wouldn't poison them and some that would.