As food is invariably social, there are social implications for this finding as well. It’s not just plants that appear to be underappreciated in a modern understanding of prehistory.

“The importance of plant collection and processing is definitely related to the very significant role that women performed during Paleolithic,” said Anna Revedin, and archaeologist at the Italian Institute of Prehistory.

Revedin and her colleagues’ findings are published in the October 18 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and describe their microscopic analysis of stones used as primitive mortars and pestles.

Grains on the stones come from starch-laden cattails and ferns plants that had been ground into flour. According to the researchers, these would be rich sources of carbohydrates and energy for stone age people, whose diet is thought to have consisted of meat and more meat, with an occasional snack of berries or fruits.

(Critically, the flour would need to be cooked before its nutrient value could be realized — seemingly sticking a fork, as it were, into the notion that modern Paleolithic diets ought to be raw.)

The flour, likely suitable for making flatbread or cakes, didn’t just give stone age people some dinnertime variety. Because it could be stored in dried form, flour would have given them greater independence from environmental and seasonal circumstance.

Freed from immediate pressures, people could do other things — such as, eventually, leaving the Stone Age behind. And underlying it all, if ethnographic research on remaining stone age tribes is a reliable guide, would be the work of women, gathering and processing plants while men went hunting.

“The paradigm of ‘Man the hunter!’” dies hard, but “our research demonstrates how women’s work was definitely crucial for nomadic Paleolithic groups,” said Revedin.

Image: The 30,000 year-old mortar and pestle, and close-ups of microscopic wear patterns./PNAS.

See Also:

• The First Aid: Iceman May Have Dressed His Own Wounds
• Bonobo Females Handier With Tools Than Males
• Gallery: The Making of a Prehistoric Brew
• Ötzi the Iceman May Have Had Funeral Ceremony

Citation: “Thirty thousand-year-old evidence of plant food processing.” By Anna Revedin, Biancamaria Aranguren, Roberto Becattini, Laura Longo, Emanuele Marconi, Marta Mariotti Lippi, Natalia Skakun, Andrey Sinitsyn, Elena Spiridonova, and Jiri? Svobodai. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107 No. 42, October 19, 2010.

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Authors: Brandon Keim

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