What Did People Eat 3000 Years Ago?

Hey, welcome to Science Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio I'm More Hit Cham And today in the program, we are answering the question what did people eat three thousand years ago? Did they eat the same things we do, did they have the same taste? And did they consume foods we wouldn't want to eat? Today we're going to be talking to an archaeologist who's going to step us through how we know what was the menu back then, and we'll learn about two foods I think you're going to be

I had a toast, but I needed a little fancy for myself, and I had one side with an egg and then one side with banana and peanut butter. They got a little at like salty and sweet, and then I figured I could use some extra protein, so I added some pistachios with that.

WHOA, that says super healthy. I had a bowl of cereal.

Sounds delicious too. I think we're out of cereal.

Well, what did you have for breakfast three years ago?

What ear would it? I probably would have had something on toast I got too, But I guess what her scientific answer would be. I don't know.

I can't even imagine what I ate three I can't. It was probably a bowl of cereal. But with cereal, that's little hazy my memory.

That's the question.

Well, that's a fun segue into talking about our topic, do they which is what did people eat three thousand years ago, and three thousand years ago seems insanely long ago to me. What was happening in the world three thousand years ago? Where were we?

So, I would say generally, in the world three thousand years ago, it was a busy place. And of course it depends on where in the world you are. But if you were in meso America, you might see the beginnings of the ol Next society and civilization. If you dropped into China, you might see the Shang dynasty winding down and the Joe dynasty coming up. If you went to the Mediterranean, you might see civilizations and societies there recovering from what we call the Bronze Age collapse and

So let me clarify it. This is still before social media, right, Oh yeah, okay?

Or what we know as social media.

It just seems like we've been on this social media hole for too long.

They did not have social media three thousand years ago as we have it, But people were writing in a lot of places, and we do have some funny texts from various periods in the past.

Act nobody was tweeting thank god? No, Okay. The first question I had about food for doctor Nathan was, how can we tell what people ate three thousand years ago? I have a hard time figuring out what I ate last week. Why is it hard to know what people ate three thousand years ago if I wanted to know what was in the common diet.

So there's a lot of reasons why it might be difficult to figure out what people were eating. Some of them could be more existential questions, like what counts as food?

What?

Yes?

So, for example, if you get an animal bone huh from excite, does that mean that people were eating the animal? Were they using it for other purposes? So just because you find evidence of something doesn't automatically mean it's going to be used in the way you intended. But I would say the biggest thing we have to deal with.

Is preservation, meaning whatever food they had laying around, probably didn't make it through time like it brought animals eat it. It just doesn't survive the archaeological record.

Absolutely.

You know.

Let's say this morning, you go out and buy apple, you bring that home, you eat it, and then maybe you toss whatever is left over, and the trash can. Now if an archaeologist in the future was going to dig up your trash, and believe me, that's what mainly we are digging up those people's trash.

Are you saying archaeologists are really just dumpster divers.

Yes, with PhDs, we're glorified dumpster divers. You know, how likely is it that apple core would preserve even like three years for now, let alone three thousand?

Oh? Yes. The first challenge for archaeologists is that food is perishable, and even if you do find things that could have been eaten, how do you know they were actually eaten. You just made me realize something obvious, which is that the problem with figure out what people ate back then is that whatever they had to eat, they ate it. Yeah, I eat it. It's god like. If it's something they ate, they probably ate it absolutely.

Yeah.

I guess generally the big question is how do we know what people ate, like, what are some strategies.

So as archaeologists, we're looking at traces of what has been left behind. Sometimes those traces are things that we can physically see with our eye, So that might be ancient seeds, it might be ceramic containers that might have been shaped in a certain way or for certain foods. Or they could be microscopic remains in which we have to go in and do more detailed scientific analyzes. So we might be looking at Okay, if we can't find an apple, maybe there was a special container for apples.

It's like your food detectives.

Yes, yes, absolutely.

Dumpster diving food detectives.

Yes, that's what I'm going to put on my next business card.

You like those pis that the into people's trash to get dirt on them.

That's very full circle.

Now, as doctor Nathan says, there is food that survives after three thousand years. You just have to know where to look for it, because sometimes it shows up in unexpected places. But what do you mean by looking at residue, Like, can we actually do that, look at molecules and might have survived. Yes, absolutely, Like if you find a piece of broken pottery, you can actually still see the food that was there, that did you used to contain.

Well, we can't see it with the naked eye. So in the case of pottery itself. You know, if you've ever taken a ceramic class or potty class, maybe you've watched one on YouTube.

I watched the movie Ghost. Yes, so the.

Ghost processes in the beginning, they're forming the vessel. Well, we actually really like are unglazed pieces of pottery because in that sense you will have food that will soak into the ceramic, thereby preserving it. And different microscopic elements can tell us different things. So lipids can tell us about fats and oils, but we can also think about starch grains that can tell us about the different starches

Yes, you could tell if an ancient culture eight pretzels with their beer. Another source of food residue and this might gross you out a little bit. Are dead teeth.

So actually, in the area of isotope analysis, people often look at the dental calculus. So this is basically ancient plaque. What ancient plaque? And you can look at different types of isotopes to learn different types of information. In a case of steak, we might not be able to say, hey, this is steak, but if you look at nitrogen isotopes, you can probably tell if there was animal protein present or not. So maybe your diet consist of animal protein.

Well, we can tell what people ate by looking at their basically teeth gunk.

Yes, like this is often found in burials for example.

Huh, so ancient people had brushed their teeth, we would know a little bit less about them.

From that line of evidence. Yes, the people did brush their teeth or you know, cleaned in different ways. We have evidence of a range of different dental hygiene. I think that's fair to say.

Well, don't tell my kids. It might give them an excuse not to brush their teeth. Another way that doctor Nathan says we can tell what people ate a long time ago is to basically get lucky. It might happen upon an archaeological site where there was a fire in the kitchen or the food preparation area and some seeds, for example, got burned and carbonized and that would help

So that's the other part that makes the detective process a little challenging is just because you find something someplace like wheat or strawberries, it doesn't automatically mean that people were eating it. So this is why it's super important to report the larger archaeological contexts when we're excavating, because we want to get the bigger story of what's happening, and then we can maybe say, Okay, we're pretty confident they were eating this because of X, Y and Z.

All Right, now, we're going to get into two surprising foods that archaeologists have recently discovered were part of the diet of people three thousand years ago. When we come back, we'll talk about the first of these foods, which is cheese. It turns out humans have been eating cheese for thousands of years, way before refrigerators or cans of cheese whiz were invented. But how do we know they actually ate it? And what kind of cheese was it? So don't say

Okay, this is really exciting because we actually have archaeological evidence from seven thousand years ago. What so, as we mentioned, you know, you're eating cheese, sometimes it goes bad, But like what could be left behind as a clue that people were eating cheese. Well, Reese's study came out from Kuavia, Poland, where archaeologists tested specific ceramics that they thought were cheese strainers.

Quick aside, here in case you didn't know. To make cheese, you take milk, eat it up, then add acid like lemon juice or vinegar or something called rennet, which can come from cow stomachs that makes the milk curdle or turn clumpy. Then you have to strain the milk to

They hadn't really done residue analysis. They hadn't looked to see them, like, okay, are there any cheese residues? So they did some residue analysis on this and they found milk residues. But just because you have milk residues doesn't

With these vessels seven thousand years ago?

Yeah, So that was really exciting.

Wow, So that would be maybe when we can pinpoint that humans started eating cheese.

We have evidence actually a bit slightly earlier from ancient Southwest Asia where milk fats have been found. So, as a cautious archaeologist slash foga detective, I would say that the earliest archaeological evidence we have that points to cheese production is from seven thousand years ago, But there's a good chance people have been eating cheese for a lot longer.

Oh, we just don't know.

We just don't know yet.

Nobody's found a piece of eight thousand year old greer.

No, but we actually do find actual pieces of cheese in the archaeological record.

WHOA, what do you mean we've found cheese that was thousands of years old? Yes, yes, pricologists have actually found cheese, actual cheese, not just molecules of milk fad that is thousands of years old. And this is pretty exciting because for the first time scientists can actually tell what kind of cheese it is.

So recently there was a fine that so the earliest evidence of actual cheese, like an actual piece of cheese found in the archaeological record, and that dates to about three thousand five hundred years ago, and that's coming from a burial in the Taclamccan Desert, which is current day western China. Whoa, and these pieces of cheese were found, I believe it was three mummies were essentially like wearing them as like a necklace.

What yeah, it was a cheese necklace.

There were other things too, but cheese was a part of it.

So okay. And like you found a chunk and you can tell that it was cheese, so not.

Initially so they knew it was something. They were like, okay, what are these chunks like? They definitely didn't smell like cheese. They were quite powdery to the touch. They were very delicate.

WHOA.

The study that was released ten years ago was able to identify, like, hey, there's lactose here. It's actually kafir, which is a common like cheese, like yogurt drink, but you can make kaffir cheese. So this was looking like kaffir cheese.

That's right. People in what is now western China three thousand years ago seemed to eat kaffir cheese, or at least they valued it enough to be buried with it, which means they probably ate it and not only can archaelogist tell that this is kafir cheese, they can tell what kind of milk it was made from.

But what's really cool here if you're a cheese nerd, that when they started analyzing the different pieces, they noticed that thumb pieces were made from a batch that was just cow's milk, and other pieces were made from jess like goat milk. Whoa, So that's pretty cool that they took the time to like, hey, we're not going to mix it. We're going to keep these separate for whatever reason, and then we're going to put this around our dad.

It sounds like you're saying they were like foodies, like they made different kinds of artisanal cheeses.

We can say that they were very cognizant of the types of cheese that they were making for sure.

So that's one way to know kind of what foods they had, which is that in ancient times three thousand years ago, people would get buried with food.

In certain contexts. We do see that.

Yeah, they were buried with the cheese necklace. Who knows why they did that.

We're not sure. Yeah, but I'm really excited for more research to come out and for us to get a bit more data on what's going on.

I'm thinking, like anything, that they were like a cheese cold.

You know, for me, for something to be a cheese cold, I would want to see way.

More cheese personally, you want more commitment to the cheese cut.

Yes, I feel that the cheese was there, but not enough where I think this would be like a cheese I would need way more cheese for that to happen.

I see you, I see like giant hats that are wedges of cheese exactly. And so they found this kind of crumbly remains with the mummies, and then you did, like some I guess, molecular analysis or DNA analysis. Now I wonder if these three thousand year old cheeses would be considered delicacies. Did anyone taste them or.

Well, usually if we have such little of an archaeological remain, we're not going to taste. In this case, based on the molecular analyzes, they fell confident that this was a Kaffir like cheese, so then it would probably take on the properties of what Kaffir tastes like today.

Okay, so to recap archaeologists think they have evidence of cheese making and region in modern day Poland from seven thousand years ago. But the oldest actual cheese ever found is from three thousand years ago. There was buried with some mummies in the desert in your modern day western China. I guess they were saving this cheese for cheddar days. I know you're probably fed up with these a damn cheese buns. They're pretty grating. But luckily we're going to

Whoh Okay, So when it comes to when humans probably first started using chili peppers for food, that's a little tricky to say, but I would say most of the scholarship is thinking that this happened around ten thousand years ago. You might come across an article that looks at actually a number of sites from the Bahamas to Peru, and they did what's called starch grain analysis, So they looked

Okay, so this is pretty interesting. Basically, all plants store their starch or carbs in tiny little packets called starch granules. Till plants essentially store energy, and these tiny granules, which are smaller than the width of a human hair, are unique to each plant that makes them. For example, you can tell a starch granule is for a wheat plant because it looks like a tiny round ball, or that came from a rice plant because it looks like a

And there was one chili pepper in particular where something really cool happened to it about three thousand years ago.

Ooh, what happened?

So in the highlands of Peru, this one chili pepper around three thousand years ago emerged amongst the rest of the chili peppers. You know, people were eating different chili peppers. But then around three thousand years ago, this chili pepper Capsicum bacottam, seemed to have been a chili pepper that was favored by the people there. And that's what basically archaeologists have been finding as they're analyzing various archaeological sites

So archaeologists have found that in the and this region of Peru, this one particular chili pepper, Capsicum bacottam, was all the rage, and as it happens, doctor Nathan is a friend of one of the scientists that published this finding, doctor ca thring Cho, a professor at the University of Alabama.

Well, if you don't mind, I'm going to play a clip from one of my archaeology friends who actually helped make part of that discovery.

Around three thousand years ago. We see them almost exclusively eating one pepper, and the scientific name of that is Capsicum bacottam. It's a yellow chili pepper that's known in Spanish as ahi ya mario. All the dishes in this area seem to utilize this one chili. Today we see it.

In such iconic Peruvian dishes like Papua la one gaina, which is boiled potatoes covered in a creamy, spicy sauce made from this pepper. We have ahidri gaina, which is a creamy chicken dish also using this particular pepper, Causa limena, which is a layered cold potato casserole dish that definitely leans on these spice offered by this particular pepper.

Oh Man like cana. You just made me kind of hungry. It's impervia. It sounds amazing right now.

Yeah, that's the one I would say. Up and downside of studying food, you get really humphy.

You're like, huh, I could go for some two thousand year old cheese right now, or at least less than a week old cheese. Maybe.

The interesting part of this story is that three thousand years ago people made an intentional choice to just really focus on this particular type of chili pepper in the Highlands of Dandies. They had access to a lot of

Meaning like, it's not just evidence of what they ate. You know, they ate fish, they ate grains, they ate this. But it's really kind of evidence about their cuisine, you know, like their food preparation, what flavors they like to eat.

Absolutely, And I think this is the exciting part of looking at things that you know, still feel ancient, like three thousand years ago, but are like close enough where

I see incredible that's so hot.

Or mildly hot, you prefer.

Okay, last question, doctor Nathan. Imagine you're an archaeologist three thousand years in the future. What do you think you're going to find about what we're eating today?

So if I was an archaeologist and I was looking at this specific time period, I might think we are a cult of corn, really the children of the corn horror movie Fllovers. And that's because we do tend to use a lot of corn remnants and corn products in our foods. So even if we think of like rice crispies treats something that I love, and you know, I

Well, I feel like I'm doing my part because I, as it turns out, I had corn flakes for breakquids.

You're helping my theory.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining us.

Oh, thank you so much for having me happy to talk about food in the past or present. Anytime.

All right, Well, I don't know about you, but I'm pretty hungry now. I think I'll go eat some corn for tea chips with some h cheese and some chili sauce. Hey, if you want to learn more about doctor Smithy Nathan's work, check out her podcast on the science of Archaeology, Curiosity