A Grain of Truth? 32,000 year old flour.

Paleo People Were Making Flour 32,000 Years Ago

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Oatmeal is generally considered a no-no on the modern paleo diet, but the original paleo eaters were definitely grinding oats and other grains for dinner, according to new research (*note link to technical paper abstract).

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That finding comes from new investigations of an ancient stone recovered in a cave called Grotta Paglicci in Puglia, in southern Italy. It was used by the Gravettian culture a paleolithic people who also left behind spectacular cave paintings, evidence of burial and distinctive stone tools.

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The stone, which is "pale brown and not much bigger than my hand, " was clearly used as a combination pestle and grinder, says Marta Mariotti Lippi, a botany professor at the University of Florence in Italy, who led the research team. It dates back some 32,000 years, she says, providing the earliest evidence of food processing in Europe.

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Hunter-gatherers used this stone as a combination pestle and grinder to make flour from oats and other grains, says Marta Mariotti Lippi, a professor of botany at the University of Florence in Italy.

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Hunter-gatherers used this stone as a combination pestle and grinder to make flour from oats and other grains, says Marta Mariotti Lippi, a professor of botany at the University of Florence in Italy.

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"There are many other grinding tools, but this is the oldest," she says.

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The generally accepted date for the beginning of the agricultural revolution, where permanent residence and the planting of crops were involved, is somewhere around 10,000 BCE (IIRC).This type of harvesting in a hunter-gatherer type society would be a reasonable predecessors to the implementation of agriculture, and there is evidence from native American peoples (Iroquois) sewing seeds for wild rice and then returning the next year to harvest their crops, and this could be a similar system.

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She says these hunter-gatherers used the rounded end of the stone to bash seeds against another rock to break them up. The flat surface of the stone shows the kind of wear that would be produced by grinding the broken seeds into flour.

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The researchers sealed the stone in plastic to preserve it for future research. But they left exposed small patches that they washed with a gentle stream of water to loosen debris. In the water were hundreds of starch granules of five main types. The most plentiful, says Mariotti Lippi, were from oat seeds, almost certainly Avena barbata, a wild species still common across much of Europe. The stone also processed other edible plants, including acorns and relatives of millet.

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Most intriguing, many of the starch grains were swollen and partly gelatinized, which is consistent with them being heated before grinding. Because the climate 32,000 years ago was cooler than it is today, seeds gathered in autumn might not have had enough time to dry naturally. Perhaps, Mariotti Lippi speculates, those seeds were first dried over a fire, which would have made them much easier to grind and digest than freshly gathered seeds. And ready-ground flour, she notes, would keep longer and be easier to transport.

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A lot of people might think of hunter-gatherer societies as continually traveling to new places, which would be how new areas were found and inhabited, but there is also an established migratory pattern type of hunter-gathering societies, where they return to different places at different times of the year: again this pattern is well documented by native American peoples.Enjoy

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

Some of the new techniques we have in archaeology are producing fascinating results.One of the most exciting is DNA from fossils back to 50,000 and more years. Good stuff!

What is the modern paleo diet and what do they have against Quakers?

If I understand it correctly it would be a diet modeled on hunter-gatherer foods - ie not agricultural products (and certainly not processed foods).A little nutty imho Just your average christian prosecution thing?Enjoy

so, lots of roots and berries and road kill. Got it.