Tag: Meat

Utah Locals Continued Eating Beaver Despite Invention of Early Flour

Holly Raymond also worked on the excavation as a master's student. She now works at a private archaeology firm. Almost 10,000 years ago, in Utahs Escalante Valley, a new recipe was added to the prehistoric cookbook: mush cooked from the flour of milled sage brush seeds.In those times,what else would the early chefs put on your plate..err… rock?

Archaeologists from the Brigham Young University are publishing what they’ve learned from five summers of excavations at the ‘North Creek Shelter’. The site,on the northern Colorado Plateau in southern Utah,has been occupied by humans on an off for the past 11,000 years, and is one of the oldest of such archaeological sites in Utah.

In the upcoming issue of the journal Kiva, they describe the stone tools used to grind sage, salt bush and grass seeds into flour. Those seeds are tiny, a single serving would have required quite a bit of seed gathering.

Ten thousand years ago, there was a change in the technology with grinding stones appearing for the first time, anthropologist Joel Janetski said. People started to use these tools to process small seeds into flour.

The invention of rudimentary pastry didn’t mean North Creek Shelter’s carte du jour turned vegetarian only. Prior to the appearance of grinding stones, the menu contained duck, beaver* and turkey. Sheep became common only later on. And deer was a staple at all levels of the dig.

The North Creek Shelter is located at the base of a sheer sandstone cliff on the same property as the Slot Canyon Inn, which now contains an exhibit about the researchers findings.

Besides animal bones and early grinding stones, the researchers also unearthed projectile points, bone beads and fremont figurines while getting to the bottom of the archaeological site.

* Never tried. Googling ‘How does beaver taste’ (probably not the most brilliant search query, I admit)resulted in “beaver should be considered a delicacy”. According to the ‘Northern Cookbook’, the meat is dark red, fine grained, moist and tender and similar in flavour to pork (if you removed the castor and musk glands correctly). You can roast the animal in its own skin, or cook up a broth. Served hot or cold, beaver feet resembling pigs’ feet are at their best boiled. Here are two1960 recipies on Flickr. I’m adding it under ‘squirrel‘ on the ‘not so sure if I ever want to try this’ list.

Oldest Evidence for Stone Tools and Eating Meat Discovered in Ethiopia

The bones discovered by the Dikika research project Thinking of Lucy strolling around the east African landscape in search of food, we can nowpicture her looking for meat with a stone tool in hand.

Bones foundin Ethiopia, push back the earliest known stone tool use and meat consumption by almost one million years and provide the first evidence that these behaviours can be attributed to Lucy’s species.

Aninternational team of researchers has discovered evidence our ancestors were using stone tools and ate the nutricious meat and marrow of large mammals 1 million years earlier than previously documented.

While working in the Afar region of Ethiopia, the Dikika Research Project (DRP) found bones bearing evidence of stone tool use; cut marks made while carving meat off the bone and percussion marks created while breaking the bones open to extract marrow.

The bone fragments – dated to roughly 3.4 millionyearsago- also provide the first record of stone tool use and meat consumption by the Australopithecus afarensis. Until now onlytracesof stone tool use by members of the genus Homo were found.

This discovery dramatically shifts the known timeframe of a game-changing behaviour for our ancestors, says paleoanthropologist Dr Zeresenay Alemseged. Tool use fundamentally altered the way our earliest ancestors interacted with nature, allowing them to eat new types of food and exploit new territories. It also led to tool making – the precursor to such advanced technologies as aeroplanes, MRI machines, and iPhones.

With stone tools in hand to quickly pull off flesh and break open bones; animal carcasses would have become a more attractive source for food. This type of behaviour sent us down a path that later would lead to two of the defining features of our species – carnivory and tool manufacture and use.

Although the butchered bones may not look like particularly noteworthy fossils to the lay person, Alemseged can hardly contain his excitement when he describes them. “This find will definitely force us to revise our text books on human evolution, since it pushes the evidence for tool use and meat eating in our family back by nearly a million years,” he explains. “These developments had a huge impact on the story of humanity.”

The team’s research,reported in the August 12th issue of Nature, shows that the marks were created before the bones fossilized. This means recent damage can be eliminated as cause of the cut-marks.

One cut mark even contained a tiny, embedded piece of rock left behind during the meat cleaving.

“Most of the marks have features that indicate without doubt that they were inflicted by stone tools,” explains Dr. Curtis Marean from the Arizona State University, who performed the mark identifications. “And the range of actions includes cutting and scraping for the removal of flesh, and percussion on the femur for breaking it to access marrow.”

Cutting-edge technology

Until now, the oldest known evidence of butchering animals with stone tools camefrom Bouri, Ethiopia, where several cut-marked bones date to about 2.5 million years ago. The oldest known stone tools, dated to between 2.6 and 2.5 million years ago, were discovered at Gona, Ethiopia and most scientists believe the stone instruments were made and used only by early members of the genus Homo.

The new cut-marked fossil animal bones from Dikika have been dated to approxiamately 3.4 million years ago. They were founda few hundred meters away from where Alemseged’s team previously discovered ‘Selam’, a young A. afarensis girl who lived about 3.3 million years ago.

Two parallel cut marks made by stone tools cutting into tissues on the rib of a cow-sized or larger hoofed animal. – Image copyright the Dikiki Research Project

A cut mark make by a stone tool cutting into flesh on the upper leg bone of goat-sized young bovid. A cut mark made by a stone tool cutting into flesh on the upper leg bone (femur) of goat-sized young bovid. – Image copyright the Dikiki Research Project

The location and age of thebone fragments clearly indicate that members of the Australopithecus afarensis species made the cut marks.

The only hominin species we have in this part of Africa at this time period is A. afarensis, and so we think this species inflicted these cut marks on the bones we discovered, notes Alemseged.

Dating the bones

To determine the age of the bones, project geologist Dr. Jonathan Wynn relied on a very well documented and dated set of tuffs (volcanic deposits).

These same tuffs were previously used to determine Selam’s age and are known from nearby Hadar, where Lucy was found.

The new find site is located in a drainage that contains only deposits older than a tuff securely dated to 3.24 million years ago. Below the find site is a tuff dated to 3.42 million years ago.

Because the cut-marked bones are much closer to the lower tuff, the bones’ age is most likely 3.4 million years old.

Large beasts on the menu

Both of thebones came from large mammals.

“The bones come from 2 animals, one (a femur) the size of a goat and the other (a rib) at least the size of a cow,” notesMarean. “Our closest living relatives, the chimps and bonobos, don’t hunt or scavenge animals this size, so this suggests that the Dikika australopithecines had already begun to engage in hunting or scavenging larger mammals.”

This placed them in risky competition with other carnivores, which would likely have required them to engage in an unprecedented level of teamwork.

The two bone fragments were discovered in the Andedo drainage part of the Dikika project area, Ethiopia. - Image copyright Dikika Research Project

A stone tool industry at Dikika?

While it is clear that the australopithecines at Dikika were using sharp-edged stones to carve meat from bones, it is impossible to tell from the marks alone whether they were making their tools or simply finding and using naturally sharp rocks.

So far, the research team has not found evidence of stone tool manufacture at Dikika from this early time period.

It is possible the Dikika residents were simply opportunistic about finding and using naturally occurring sharp-edged stones. However, there is another potential explanation.

“For the most part, the only stones we see coming from these ancient sediments at Dikika are pebbles too small for making tools,” says Dr. Shannon McPherron, archaeologist with the DRP and research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. “The hominins at this site probably carried their stone tools with them from better raw material sources elsewhere.

The team plans to return to Dikika and see if they can find these locations and evidence that at this early date hominins were actually making, not just using, stone tools.

Evolutionary ideas

While many questions remain about the history of tool use and tool making and about the timing and motivation of dietary changes among human ancestors, this discovery adds a rich new chapter to the story.

“Now, when we imagine Lucy walking around the east African landscape looking for food, we can for the first time imagine her with a stone tool in hand and looking for meat,” says Dr. McPherron.

“With stone tools in hand to quickly pull off flesh and break open bones; animal carcasses would have become a more attractive source for food. This type of behaviour sent us down a path that later would lead to two of the defining features of our species – carnivory and tool manufacture and use.”

Roman Food at the British Museum – Cooking the Apicius Recipes

Nowadays nobody could imagine Italian cuisine without tomatoes, aubergine, potatoes, maize or pasta as we know it today. The ancient Romans had none of those ingredients available to them. Then what did they eat (besides flamingo)? I visited the ‘Feasting’ event at the British Museum to find out.

In the early years of the ancient kingdom of Rome, dining habits were quite alike for all Romans, rich or poor: breakfast (or ientaculum) in the morning, a small lunch at noon and the main meal of the day, the cena, in the evening. Barely any food was roasted; instead the food was either boiled or fried in olive oil.

Then at least for the rich Greek culture started to influence the dishes as well as dining etiquette, and by the time the Roman Empire was set in stone Roman cooks had access to a wealth of exotic ingredients and recipes.

Some of these recipes were preserved as the ‘Apicius’, a collection thought to have been assembled around the 5th century AD. Additional information comes from Cato’s tips on preparing farm products, Petronius gave satirical descriptions of a Roman feast and various other historical sources mentioning Roman food, such as the Vindolanda tablets. Less conventional sources are mosaics that once adorned the villas of the wealthy (there’s a lovely one with fish dishes in the British Museum) and food remains found at excavations, notably thethermopolia (Roman snack bars) at Pompeii.

Ancient Roman Recipies

The recipes found in the Apicius are aimed at the wealthiest classes with exotic ingredients (even for an empire as vast as the Roman) and manydifferentsauces (such as the famous, garum, made from fermented fish intestines yikes). The Romans loved sweets andoften used large amountsof honey.(Honey might evenhave been used as a ‘biological weapon’ against a Roman army led by Pompey the Great.)

More photographs of the event (and food) are available in this Flickr set.

Pork was the most popular meat, with beef only mentioned occasionally in recipes. Seafood oysters were bred on a grand scale was popular as well. Poultry was often stuffed (consult the Apicius on how to handle ‘smelly’ poultry) and on special occasions birds like peacocks, swans and even flamingos were eaten. The Romans already figured out how to force-fed geese, making fois-gras as much of a delicacy as it is today.

There was a large choice of vegetables asparagus, cardoon (a sort of artichoke), leek, radish, cabbage, cucumbers,lettuce, endives, parsnip, lentils, pees and chick-peas. Fruits were also on offer, as were nuts.

Roman Influence on the British Diet – Definitely an Improvement

What did this mean for British cooking? When the Romans came to Britain in 43AD they brought with them garlic, leek, peas, onions and many other vegetables and herbs. Meat-lovers nor hunters should ever ask ‘what did the Romans do for us?’ – they introduced many new breeds of animals: chickens, rabbits, pheasants, guinea fowl, the brown hare and possibly even rabbits. Even the poor Britons gained with an upgrade of bread and the import of more productive grains. And let us not forget the most important Roman export product of all: they brought us wine!

Roman Feasting at the British Museum

A health and safety license is needed to feed the public, so no tasting of the Roman food was allowed at the ‘Feasting’. Sadly, as the cooking by ladies from the Vicus re-enactment society looked delicious, and I wouldn’t have minded taking a bit out of some of the cookies, or trying the ancient bread.

Health and safety regulations care nothing of feeding the (already) dead, so MacMummy bravely took a dive into the ‘patina de piris’ (or patina of pears), which he seemed to enjoy immensely. Strange to me, as the recipe did seem a bit odd: Core and boil the pears, pound them with pepper, cumin, honey, passum, liquamen, and a little oil. Add eggs to make a patina, sprinkle with pepper and serve. This does mean combining pears with eggs and salty fish sauce. Not quite sure about that!

I plan to try out one of the more conventional Apicius recipes this weekend: Fresh mushrooms are stewed in reduced wine with a bunch of green coriander, which must be removed before serving. I know I chose one of the easiest ones. Even on Heritage Key (normally not that culinary oriented) we have more ‘advanced’ Prehistoric and Roman recipes available.But compared to the friendly Vicus re-enactment ladies I’m just a novice ‘ancient Roman’ cook. Surely nothing can go wrong with this one, and food poisoning won’t be on the menu. Right?

The ‘Roman Feast’ at the British Museum was part ofthe event ‘AHistory of the World in 100 Objects Evening: Feasting’. Other activities included the screening of sci-fi classic Soylent Green (surely, for good appetite), object handling and storytelling sessions. Next up on my ancient events calendar is – hopefully – a trip to the ‘Danube’ exhibition at Oxford’s Ashmolean this bank holiday weekend.