What did our ancestors eat? - Part 2

Have you ever wondered what did our ancestors ate?, if so I recommend you to read the last post: What did our ancestors eat? - Part 1. In that post I told you I would split what our ancestors ate into two, the first part comprise what they ate from middle to the end of the Paleolithic (1 million to 10000 years before the common era (b.c.e.) and the second part is about what they ate during the Neolithic (10000 to 1700 years b.c.e.).

Time of changes

During the Neolithic, a few changes happened to humans. We went from hunters and gatherers to farmers and we became sedentary. This affected the population in many aspects such as their size, nutrition, workload, health, mobility, lifestyle, behavior and life in society.

There are a few things I'd like to mention about the Neolithic to add context:

At this point we were the only homo specie alive, Neanderthals got extinguished about 20000 years ago.
Since the Neolithic is closer to our time (closer than the Paleolithic), the remains are more abundant, so we have a better understanding of how they lived at that time.

Evidence of what we ate

As I did with the first part, there are different types of evidences, this time there's only leftovers and isotopic analyses.

Leftovers

During this time there's no doubt that they ate animals and plants (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). It's also known that the amount of carbohydrates they ate was bigger than the one eaten during the Paleolithic. In some places they were still eating a lot of meat but not like the almost 100% carnivore diet from the Paleolithic, except for some locations in northern Europe where agriculture came later.

Thanks to the bigger amount of evidence from this time, we can differentiate what they ate during the different seasons. Once again, it's important to remember that these humans ate what they could find near them, so the diet would be different depending on the location of the remaining.

To give you an idea of what the humans in latitudes similar to Spain or Italy ate, I'll summarize an article from the Çatalhöyük settlement in Turkey (5). This settlement is well-known because it's well preserved.

Although this example is from just one settlement, in other articles they mention the same foods (1, 2, 3, 4), so I think they ate more or less the same around the world around these latitudes.

Winter

Since during winter some foods cannot be harvested, what they did was to overproduce during summer and then save it for winter. Some of these foods are the following:

Grains: various types of wheat and barley. Wheat belongs to warm climates while barley can handle cold temperatures.
Pulses
Dehydrated fruits
Nuts
Wine
Dried herbaceous plants
Dried meat

They didn't have fresh produces except for meat from cows, sheep, fish, poultry and eggs.

Spring

Spring always comes with an abundance of produces because it's the time where everything blooms. During these seasons they had fresh vegetables and tubers. Thanks to the bird migration and the mating season of the fish, they had plenty of meat from these animals. What they planted in the winter was ready to be harvested including cereals and legumes such as the following:

Different types of wheat
Barley
Rye
Lentils
Green peas

Summer

During summer they ate the following vegetables:

Swamp plants
Herbaceous plants
Fish
Nutlets
Small pistachio nuts
Acorns
Honey (if they were lucky to find it)

Although humans were sedentary, some of them still hunted wild animals. These were usually eaten for special occasions in feasts. Some of these wild animals are the following:

Bovines
Equines
Asian wild ass
Wild horses
Hares

They occasionally ate some carnivore animals like foxes and badger.

Autumn

With autumn’s arrival they had more fruits available:

Hackberries
Almonds
Wild plums
Figs
Sumac
Berries
Wild apples

And they would have harvested these legumes:

Chickpeas
Peas
Other rarer species

During the hunting season they would have hunted wild boars and deer.

Between summer and autumn, they preserved the meat and other meats to store them for winter. Some of the preservation methods they used are the following:

Sun drying on the roofs (fruits, vegetables, and meat)
Fermented vegetables to make pickles
Roasted seeds and nuts
Smoking
Salting
Extraction of fat from nuts and animals

Celebrations and feasts

There's an article about what the people near Runnymede (London) ate (6). Here they found a lot of animal bone remains, mostly cattle and pigs and some goats. In this article they explain that during celebrations or feasts they killed big animals to feed more people. This is why they ate mostly cattle instead of pigs or sheep. These humans ate the whole animal, including the bone marrow which is a very nutrient part of the animal.

They also found remains of cereals, some legumes and dairy. Although they consumed dairy, it’s believed that they didn’t kept cattle for that purpose, they had them for the meat but took their milk too.

Isotopic analyses

If you don't know what an isotopic analysis is, please read the first part of this post What did our ancestors eat? - Part 1.

The settlement I mentioned before in Turkey also has isotopic analyses (3). The remains of this study are from 8000 to 7000 b.c.e. The carbon 13 isotopic analyses say that these people ate only products of the land. Both humans and animals ate plants that were mostly C3 (warm climate plants). In general, they consumed a lot of meat mostly sheep and cattle, in some cases their nitrogen 15 levels come up to 14‰, which implies they ate more meat than the average.

In another settlement in Cape Town in South Africa (4), they analyzed three different locations of the city. In the coastal area where the humans would have had access to the sea, the carbon 13 levels indicate they ate a lot of sea products. In the area without coast everything they ate was from the land. And in the south, they ate both sea and land products, with C3 and C4 plants. In this study they also talk a lot about the cavities these humans had, I’ll talk about this in another post in the future. It’s known that Neolithic humans ate more carbohydrates which rise the probability of having cavities.

Hunter gatherers in the Neolithic

Some people kept being hunters and gatherers during the Neolithic, I guess those who lived at higher latitudes where agriculture is difficult. There are a few articles that study the people from Sweden and Lithuania, where the isotopic analyses indicate they were still pretty carnivore.

One of these articles studies the people from the south of Sweden (7) dated in the Mesolithic (between the end of the Paleolithic and the Neolithic) and the Neolithic. As the Cape Town study in South Africa (4) they can see thanks to the carbon 13 analyses that these humans, depending on where they lived they ate more sea products (carbon 13 less negative) or more land products (carbon 13 more negative). On the other hand, regarding how much high in the food chain they were, they were very high, as you can see the – and + are ruminants and omnivores, but these humans were much higher than these groups, near the dogs, seals and dolphins. Dolphins are near the top of the food chain even today. Here you have the chart with nitrogen 15 and carbon 13, where all the weird Scandinavian names are the humans from the study.

There's another article (8) carried out in a place called Västerbjers which is in the Gotland island (Sweden) where they conclude that the people who lived there during the Neolithic ate mainly seals, similar to what Innuits ate not long ago.

In another study in northern Lithuania (9) it can be seen how their diet changed through time since the samples are from different periods of time from the Mesolithic and beginning, middle and end of the Neolithic. The carbon analyses tell us that around the beginning of the Neolithic they ate a lot of freshwater fish, but at the end of the Neolithic they didn’t ate that anymore. Regarding on how high in the food chain they were, they were high. Again, as it happens with the Swedish remains, the nitrogen 15 analyses put these humans near seals, otters, and pike, which are pretty carnivore.

Cooking techniques

Compared to the Paleolithic, in the Neolithic cooking was more usual. Those humans were the first chefs in the human history, thanks to the cooking tools found in the settlements (10) we know they used different cooking techniques like boiling, stewing, baking, toasting, smoking, salting and fermenting (5).

Rise in diseases

While I was documenting myself to write this post, I noticed that some papers (4, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15) talked about some diseases that humans had in the Neolithic that were not common in the Paleolithic. Agriculture is blamed for these diseases and not only for the diet changes but for the huge lifestyle changes.

They discuss a lot the cavities issue, which I mentioned when I explained the Cape Town’s study. Although cavities are the most studied feature, they also mention anemia, atherosclerosis among others.

Since this topic is more complex than just collecting information, I’ll write a separate post about it in the future. I’m not going to lie, I think this topic is fascinating, but there’s so much information out there and obviously it’s contradictory so I couldn’t tell you my opinion about that right now.

Summary

To summarize, Neolithic humans ate what they could find around them. In higher latitudes (northern Europe) they were still being hunters and gatherers, since few crops can handle those freezing temperatures agriculture came later there. In warmer places foods changed through seasons and they had a variety of foods: grains, seeds, nuts, fruits, vegetables and meat. The kind of meat they ate depended on where they lived, near the sea or not and if they knew how to fish or not. Although they had domesticated animals to eat them, they also kept hunting wild animals.

Besides eating what nature gave them, they were smart enough and developed a few techniques to preserve their food and eat it months later. This was a key factor to their subsistence.

Last words

I personally believe that the development of agriculture is what made us evolve to what we are now. Agriculture requires workforce, which made us live in society, this is what pushed us to be civilized since society creates rules to live together peacefully.

On the other hand, I believe that agriculture is not sustainable nowadays, for a few reasons. The most important point is that we are too many humans, and this creates a huge demand for food. A non-stopping production generates soil impoverished from nutrients and hence products nutritionally poor. The solution is to rotate the crops (one year plant wheat, the next tomatoes, the next grapes, etc.), but this is not realistic because this produces less benefits and farmers would have to switch their sector and they are not going to do that. Moreover, the arable land is not enough, so they must cut down trees to prepare the fields, erasing some animal’s habitats. The idea of a world where everything is 100% organic is nice, but it’s a utopia because you can’t feed all the people with these techniques. Lastly, plants are poor in quality nutrients, 100 g of lentils have 9 grams of protein, 100 g of beef have 27 g of protein, and the type of iron in meat which is heme iron is much more absorbable than the one in lentils (non-heme iron). So, as you can see to equal the amount of meat regarding nutrients you should eat more lentils (or any other crop) and as I said before, lentil production has a few environmental problems.

Independently of how bad or good is agriculture, I think we should return to the good practices of the Neolithic humans, like taking advantage of everything that nature gives us during the different seasons. Nowadays a lot of countries have lost the habit to consume fermented foods or eat the whole animal from nose to tail. Neolithic and paleolithic humans had in common the ability to eat what they could and not what they wanted, this kept the equilibrium, that’s why you would never find fat people at that time.

Present humans eat what we want, and the worst part is that the food industry knows what we want and sells it at great scale and cheap. To improve the industry’s benefits, they have twisted what we eat, turning it into an ultra-processed thing full of preservatives and additives that creates a cookie with a shelf life of years. I can understand that cookies can be more palatable than pate or sauerkraut, but cookies can cause diabetes while pate and sauerkraut don’t. If you care about your health, try to be like the Paleolithic and Neolithic humans, they ate fresh products from nature and not processed packed food with a shelf life of years.

References

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