Food

10 FOODS FROM HUMANITY’S DAWN

Photo: by Fay Jamshidi. Honey Gatherer in Nepal.

As we look at the many beautiful aspects of humanity this week, we take a look at foods that have nourished humans from their very beginnings --- beautiful prehistoric and ancient foods that continue to sustain us today.

1. MUSHROOMS

Food historians tell us prehistoric peoples most likely consumed fungi and mushrooms. These foods were easy to forage and incorporate into meals. The Ancient Romans appreciated the taste and grew mushrooms. Modern cultivation commenced around the 16th century.

"The first evidence that mushrooms were used as human food in prehistoric Europe is the recent find of a bowl of field mushrooms in a Bronze Age house near Nola in Italy. Mushrooms were gathered from the wild. Classical Greek authors tend to treat them as famine food, on the level with acorns."

---Food in the Ancient World from A to Z, Andrew Dalby [Routledge:London] 2003 (p. 223)

2. MILLET

"Millet, a general English name for cereals not belonging to the genera of wheat, barley, rye and oats. None of the millets were favourite crops in the classical Mediterranean; the best known in Greece and Rome was broomcorn millet.

This had been domesticated, probably in the region of the Caucasus, before 5000 BC. It spread both westwards to central Europe (it was being cultivated in eastern France before 4000BC) and eastwards to China. It was known in Greece and Italy by the late prehistoric times."

---Food in the Ancient World from A to Z, Andrew Dalby [Routledge:London] 2003 (p. 218)

3. RICE

There have been plenty of debates on the origins of the domesticated rice. Genetic evidence published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) shows that all forms of Asian rice, both indica and japonica, spring from a single domestication that occurred 8,200–13,500 years ago in China of the wild rice Oryza rufipogon.

-- Wikipedia

4. ALMONDS

"Almond, kernel of the fruit of the Prunus dulcis. The fruit resembles a peach, but is inedible. Almonds were being collected from the wild by the inhabitants of Franchthi Cave by 10,000 BC, and in Turkey, Syria and Palestine by that time or soon afterwards. Cultivation was probably under way by the third millenium BC: earliest evidence comes from Jordan.

The almond was among the earliest of the domesticated fruit trees of the eastern Mediterranean, since, unlike some of the others, it can be propagated from seed."

---Food in the Ancient World from A to Z, Andrew Dalby [Routledge:London] 2003 (p. 6)

5. CHERRIES

"Cherries come from any of several trees that belong to the genus Prunus and are part of the rose family...The cherry originated in temperate Europe and Asia, and doubtless wild cherries played a role in the human diet eons before the invention of agriculture and the beginning of recorded history.

Our Neolithic ancestors extracted -and presumably fermented-cherry juice before it was discovered how to make wine from grapes."

---The Cambridge World History of Food, Kenneth F. Kiple & Kriemhild Conee Ornelas [Cambridge University Press:Cambridge] 2000, Volume Two (p. 1751)

"The cherry was first cultivated in the Near East, and the word for it in the Akkadian language of Mesopotamia was karsu. When the fruit reached Greece, it brought its name with it, and the form kerasos, cherry-tree', and in due course this passed into Latin as cerasus."

---An A-Z of Food & Drink, John Ayto [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 2002 (p. 69)

"Wheat...appeared as a crop among the world's first farmers 10,000 years ago. It increased in importance from its initial role as a major food for Mediterranean poples in the Old World to become the world's largest cereal crop.

The switch from gathering food to producing food, dubbed the "Neolithic Revolution"...ultimately and fundamentally altered human development. Both wheat and barley, destined to feed the great civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome, originated in the Near East, the earliest cradle of Western civilization..."

---The Cambridge World History of Food, Kenneth F. Kiple & Kriemhild Conee Orneals [Cambridge University Press:Cambrdige] 2001, Volume One (p. 159 - 174)

6. PISTACHIOS

"Pistachio, Pistacia vera, a small tree native to parts of West Asia and the Levant between Turkey and Afghanistan, bears nuts which have for long been highly prized. The earliest traces of pistachios being eaten in Turkey and the Middle East date back to about 7000 BC.

The species has been cultivated and improved during serveral millenia... Pistachio trees were introduced from Asia to Europe in the 1st century AD, by the Romans."

---The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 1999 (p. 610)

7. DATES

"The date palm is thought to be native to North Africa and Arabia--three quarters of the world's date crop is still produced in th Middle East--and its cultivation stretches back some 7,000 years, beyond even the time of the Sumerians and Babylonians, who made it their sacred tree.

The name is from the Greek daktulos (meaning "finger," from the shape of the fruit). Dates were also known to Mediterranean peoples from early times, and the Spaniards introduced them into the New World.”

---The Cambridge World History of Food, Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Conee Ornelas, Volume Two, [Cambridge University Press: Cambridge] 2000 (p. 1767-8) Early cultivation

8. SPELT

"Spelt...The place of origin of spelt (Triticum spelta), a hardy wheat, is a matter of some debate, with some experts suggesting Iran about 6000 to 5000 B.C.; other arguing for two independent sites, one in Iran and the second in southeastern Europe; and still others who would have spelt emerging only in Europe and at a later date. In any case, spelt was cultivated throughout the Near East, Europe, and the Balkans during the Bronze Age (4000 to 1000 B.C.) and, along with einkorn and emmer, it is another of the ancestors of modern wheat.

Spelt was probably an important cereal of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks and seems to have been a staple of the Romans, in which case the latter people may have facilitated the grain's spread northward to Germany and Switzerland and westward to Spain.”

---The Cambridge World History of Food, Kenneth F. Kiple & Kriemhild Conee Ornelas [Cambridge University Press:Cambrdige] 2000 (p. 1856)

9. HONEY

"The oldest written reference to the use of honey is thought to be Egyptian, of about 5500BC. At that time Lower Egypt was called Bee Land while Upper Egypt was Reed Land. By the 5th dynasty (c.2600BC) apiculture was well established and is shown in several reliefs in the temple of the Sun at Abusir.

The use of honey was taken to India by its Aryan invaders and became associated with religious rites. Honey is also mentioned on ancient Sumerian clay tablets, possibly even older than the Egyptian reference. Later Babylonian tablets give recipes for "electuaries"--medicines based on honey."

---The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 1999 (p. 384)

10. CHICKPEAS

"Chickpea, one of the oldest cultivated pulses in the Near East. Chickpeas were grown in Palestine by 8000 BC. They had been gathered from the wild in the Mediterranean region even before cultivation began locally; in southern France, for example, by 7,000 BC.”

---Food in the Ancient World from A to Z, Andrew Dalby [Routledge:London] 2003 (p. 84)