Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Science Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio I'm
Speaker 1: More Hit Cham And today in the program, we are
Speaker 1: answering the question what did people eat three thousand years ago?
Speaker 1: Did they eat the same things we do, did they
Speaker 1: have the same taste? And did they consume foods we
Speaker 1: wouldn't want to eat? Today we're going to be talking
Speaker 1: to an archaeologist who's going to step us through how
Speaker 1: we know what was the menu back then, and we'll
Speaker 1: learn about two foods I think you're going to be
Speaker 1: surprised to hear were daily staples. To get ready to
Speaker 1: chow down on the signs of the past as we
Speaker 1: serve up an answer to the question what did people
Speaker 1: eat three thousand years ago? Bone ape tea. Hey, everyone,
Speaker 1: today we're talking about old food, and no I don't
Speaker 1: mean those mysterious leftovers at the back of your fridge.
Speaker 1: I mean what did people eat way in the past.
Speaker 1: We've all heard about the paleo diet, but have you
Speaker 1: ever wondered how we know what was eaten back then?
Speaker 1: To help us answer all these questions, I reached out
Speaker 1: to my friend doctor Smithy Nathan. Doctor Nathan is an
Speaker 1: archaeologist trained at NYU was also a public educator. She's
Speaker 1: also kind of a foodie, so I thought she was
Speaker 1: the perfect person to talk to us about this. Here's
Speaker 1: my conversation with doctor Smithy Nathan. Well, thank you doctor
Speaker 1: Nathan for joining us, Thank you for having me. What
Speaker 1: did you have for breakfast? Oh?
Speaker 2: I had a toast, but I needed a little fancy
Speaker 2: for myself, and I had one side with an egg
Speaker 2: and then one side with banana and peanut butter. They
Speaker 2: got a little at like salty and sweet, and then
Speaker 2: I figured I could use some extra protein, so I
Speaker 2: added some pistachios with that.
Speaker 1: WHOA, that says super healthy. I had a bowl of cereal.
Speaker 2: Sounds delicious too. I think we're out of cereal.
Speaker 1: Well, what did you have for breakfast three years ago?
Speaker 2: What ear would it? I probably would have had something
Speaker 2: on toast I got too, But I guess what her
Speaker 2: scientific answer would be. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I can't even imagine what I ate three I can't.
Speaker 1: It was probably a bowl of cereal. But with cereal,
Speaker 1: that's little hazy my memory.
Speaker 2: That's the question.
Speaker 1: Well, that's a fun segue into talking about our topic,
Speaker 1: do they which is what did people eat three thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, and three thousand years ago seems insanely long
Speaker 1: ago to me. What was happening in the world three
Speaker 1: thousand years ago? Where were we?
Speaker 2: So, I would say generally, in the world three thousand
Speaker 2: years ago, it was a busy place. And of course
Speaker 2: it depends on where in the world you are. But
Speaker 2: if you were in meso America, you might see the
Speaker 2: beginnings of the ol Next society and civilization. If you
Speaker 2: dropped into China, you might see the Shang dynasty winding
Speaker 2: down and the Joe dynasty coming up. If you went
Speaker 2: to the Mediterranean, you might see civilizations and societies there
Speaker 2: recovering from what we call the Bronze Age collapse and
Speaker 2: the emergence of that Iron Age. And this is a
Speaker 2: time where new technologies being made out of iron were
Speaker 2: popping up in different places. But some of the things
Speaker 2: that I think are really cool about three thousand years
Speaker 2: ago is that we see a lot of trade happening,
Speaker 2: and you know, people are farming in a lot of
Speaker 2: places and doing it in a different variety of ways. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: you have a lot going on.
Speaker 1: So let me clarify it. This is still before social media, right,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, okay?
Speaker 2: Or what we know as social media.
Speaker 1: It just seems like we've been on this social media
Speaker 1: hole for too long.
Speaker 2: They did not have social media three thousand years ago
Speaker 2: as we have it, But people were writing in a
Speaker 2: lot of places, and we do have some funny texts
Speaker 2: from various periods in the past.
Speaker 1: Act nobody was tweeting thank god? No, Okay. The first
Speaker 1: question I had about food for doctor Nathan was, how
Speaker 1: can we tell what people ate three thousand years ago?
Speaker 1: I have a hard time figuring out what I ate
Speaker 1: last week. Why is it hard to know what people
Speaker 1: ate three thousand years ago if I wanted to know
Speaker 1: what was in the common diet.
Speaker 2: So there's a lot of reasons why it might be
Speaker 2: difficult to figure out what people were eating. Some of
Speaker 2: them could be more existential questions, like what counts as food?
Speaker 3: What?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 2: So, for example, if you get an animal bone huh
Speaker 2: from excite, does that mean that people were eating the animal?
Speaker 2: Were they using it for other purposes? So just because
Speaker 2: you find evidence of something doesn't automatically mean it's going
Speaker 2: to be used in the way you intended. But I
Speaker 2: would say the biggest thing we have to deal with.
Speaker 1: Is preservation, meaning whatever food they had laying around, probably
Speaker 1: didn't make it through time like it brought animals eat it.
Speaker 1: It just doesn't survive the archaeological record.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Let's say this morning, you go out and buy apple,
Speaker 2: you bring that home, you eat it, and then maybe
Speaker 2: you toss whatever is left over, and the trash can.
Speaker 2: Now if an archaeologist in the future was going to
Speaker 2: dig up your trash, and believe me, that's what mainly
Speaker 2: we are digging up those people's trash.
Speaker 1: Are you saying archaeologists are really just dumpster divers.
Speaker 2: Yes, with PhDs, we're glorified dumpster divers. You know, how
Speaker 2: likely is it that apple core would preserve even like
Speaker 2: three years for now, let alone three thousand?
Speaker 1: Oh? Yes. The first challenge for archaeologists is that food
Speaker 1: is perishable, and even if you do find things that
Speaker 1: could have been eaten, how do you know they were
Speaker 1: actually eaten. You just made me realize something obvious, which
Speaker 1: is that the problem with figure out what people ate
Speaker 1: back then is that whatever they had to eat, they
Speaker 1: ate it. Yeah, I eat it. It's god like. If
Speaker 1: it's something they ate, they probably ate it absolutely.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I guess generally the big question is how do we
Speaker 1: know what people ate, like, what are some strategies.
Speaker 2: So as archaeologists, we're looking at traces of what has
Speaker 2: been left behind. Sometimes those traces are things that we
Speaker 2: can physically see with our eye, So that might be
Speaker 2: ancient seeds, it might be ceramic containers that might have
Speaker 2: been shaped in a certain way or for certain foods.
Speaker 2: Or they could be microscopic remains in which we have
Speaker 2: to go in and do more detailed scientific analyzes. So
Speaker 2: we might be looking at Okay, if we can't find
Speaker 2: an apple, maybe there was a special container for apples.
Speaker 2: Maybe people loved apples so much that they drew pictures
Speaker 2: about it, even pictures of themselves eating with it. So
Speaker 2: we're looking at a number of clues to help us
Speaker 2: figure out what people might have ate.
Speaker 1: It's like your food detectives.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1: Dumpster diving food detectives.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's what I'm going to put on my next
Speaker 2: business card.
Speaker 1: You like those pis that the into people's trash to
Speaker 1: get dirt on them.
Speaker 2: That's very full circle.
Speaker 1: Now, as doctor Nathan says, there is food that survives
Speaker 1: after three thousand years. You just have to know where
Speaker 1: to look for it, because sometimes it shows up in
Speaker 1: unexpected places. But what do you mean by looking at residue, Like,
Speaker 1: can we actually do that, look at molecules and might
Speaker 1: have survived. Yes, absolutely, Like if you find a piece
Speaker 1: of broken pottery, you can actually still see the food
Speaker 1: that was there, that did you used to contain.
Speaker 2: Well, we can't see it with the naked eye. So
Speaker 2: in the case of pottery itself. You know, if you've
Speaker 2: ever taken a ceramic class or potty class, maybe you've
Speaker 2: watched one on YouTube.
Speaker 1: I watched the movie Ghost. Yes, so the.
Speaker 2: Ghost processes in the beginning, they're forming the vessel. Well,
Speaker 2: we actually really like are unglazed pieces of pottery because
Speaker 2: in that sense you will have food that will soak
Speaker 2: into the ceramic, thereby preserving it. And different microscopic elements
Speaker 2: can tell us different things. So lipids can tell us
Speaker 2: about fats and oils, but we can also think about
Speaker 2: starch grains that can tell us about the different starches
Speaker 2: in the past. And this is really crucial for people
Speaker 2: who are interested in grains and perhaps beer or bread
Speaker 2: making things like that.
Speaker 1: Yes, you could tell if an ancient culture eight pretzels
Speaker 1: with their beer. Another source of food residue and this
Speaker 1: might gross you out a little bit. Are dead teeth.
Speaker 2: So actually, in the area of isotope analysis, people often
Speaker 2: look at the dental calculus. So this is basically ancient plaque.
Speaker 2: What ancient plaque? And you can look at different types
Speaker 2: of isotopes to learn different types of information. In a
Speaker 2: case of steak, we might not be able to say, hey,
Speaker 2: this is steak, but if you look at nitrogen isotopes,
Speaker 2: you can probably tell if there was animal protein present
Speaker 2: or not. So maybe your diet consist of animal protein.
Speaker 2: And then if you look at carbon isotopes, you can
Speaker 2: maybe get an idea of the category of plants that
Speaker 2: person was eating, specifically C three or C four plants.
Speaker 1: Well, we can tell what people ate by looking at
Speaker 1: their basically teeth gunk.
Speaker 2: Yes, like this is often found in burials for example.
Speaker 1: Huh, so ancient people had brushed their teeth, we would
Speaker 1: know a little bit less about them.
Speaker 2: From that line of evidence. Yes, the people did brush
Speaker 2: their teeth or you know, cleaned in different ways. We
Speaker 2: have evidence of a range of different dental hygiene. I
Speaker 2: think that's fair to say.
Speaker 1: Well, don't tell my kids. It might give them an
Speaker 1: excuse not to brush their teeth. Another way that doctor
Speaker 1: Nathan says we can tell what people ate a long
Speaker 1: time ago is to basically get lucky. It might happen
Speaker 1: upon an archaeological site where there was a fire in
Speaker 1: the kitchen or the food preparation area and some seeds,
Speaker 1: for example, got burned and carbonized and that would help
Speaker 1: preserve them thousands of years. Or you might find fragments
Speaker 1: of bones or plants that you can then do DNA
Speaker 1: analysis on to figure out what they are, and that
Speaker 1: can give you the right clue with the whole food
Speaker 1: picture together. The day day is that you're in archaeologist,
Speaker 1: you're digging up aside and you find a bunch of material.
Speaker 1: You want to know what it is. Oh, it turns
Speaker 1: out to be wheat or strawberries, and then you can
Speaker 1: tie that like, hey, maybe they ate wheat or strawberries.
Speaker 2: So that's the other part that makes the detective process
Speaker 2: a little challenging is just because you find something someplace
Speaker 2: like wheat or strawberries, it doesn't automatically mean that people
Speaker 2: were eating it. So this is why it's super important
Speaker 2: to report the larger archaeological contexts when we're excavating, because
Speaker 2: we want to get the bigger story of what's happening,
Speaker 2: and then we can maybe say, Okay, we're pretty confident
Speaker 2: they were eating this because of X, Y and Z.
Speaker 1: All Right, now, we're going to get into two surprising
Speaker 1: foods that archaeologists have recently discovered were part of the
Speaker 1: diet of people three thousand years ago. When we come back,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about the first of these foods, which is cheese.
Speaker 1: It turns out humans have been eating cheese for thousands
Speaker 1: of years, way before refrigerators or cans of cheese whiz
Speaker 1: were invented. But how do we know they actually ate it?
Speaker 1: And what kind of cheese was it? So don't say
Speaker 1: goodabaye will breathe right back. Okay, that was too cheesy. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome back. We're talking about the archaeology of food and
Speaker 1: what people ate three thousand years ago, and so far
Speaker 1: we've talked about why it's so hard to figure out
Speaker 1: what our ancestors had for lunch and dinner. Now we're
Speaker 1: going to focus on what we do know, specifically about
Speaker 1: two very interesting foods nientists have been surprised to learn
Speaker 1: we're part of our diet thousands of years ago. The
Speaker 1: first is cheese. Here's archaeologist doctor's Mitty Nathan. So, one
Speaker 1: food that I was really surprised to learn people were
Speaker 1: eating three thousand years ago was cheese, because I want
Speaker 1: to think of cheese, is you know something that goes
Speaker 1: bad in my fridge after like a week or two
Speaker 1: weeks or something like that. How could we possibly know
Speaker 1: that people ate cheese three thousand years ago?
Speaker 2: Okay, this is really exciting because we actually have archaeological
Speaker 2: evidence from seven thousand years ago. What so, as we mentioned,
Speaker 2: you know, you're eating cheese, sometimes it goes bad, But
Speaker 2: like what could be left behind as a clue that
Speaker 2: people were eating cheese. Well, Reese's study came out from Kuavia, Poland,
Speaker 2: where archaeologists tested specific ceramics that they thought were cheese strainers.
Speaker 2: So they had these holes in them and they looked
Speaker 2: like things that people had hypothesized could be cheese strainers.
Speaker 1: Quick aside, here in case you didn't know. To make cheese,
Speaker 1: you take milk, eat it up, then add acid like
Speaker 1: lemon juice or vinegar or something called rennet, which can
Speaker 1: come from cow stomachs that makes the milk curdle or
Speaker 1: turn clumpy. Then you have to strain the milk to
Speaker 1: separate the clumps from the whey or liquid. What archaeologists
Speaker 1: found in the late nineteen seventies in a region of
Speaker 1: Poland called Cuavia were ceramic fragments with holes in them
Speaker 1: that could be put together to make a sieve or
Speaker 1: a strainer, and for a long time people hypothesized that
Speaker 1: they could have been used to strain cheese, but they
Speaker 1: weren't sure.
Speaker 2: They hadn't really done residue analysis. They hadn't looked to
Speaker 2: see them, like, okay, are there any cheese residues? So
Speaker 2: they did some residue analysis on this and they found
Speaker 2: milk residues. But just because you have milk residues doesn't
Speaker 2: automatically mean you have cheese. So what the researchers did
Speaker 2: is that they compared the level of milk fats they
Speaker 2: were finding to modern cheese strainers, and they found that
Speaker 2: there was an abundance of these milk fats that were
Speaker 2: pretty similar to the levels you'd find in modern cheese strainers.
Speaker 2: So they felt pretty confident to say that, hey, I
Speaker 2: think people were making are these straining cheese.
Speaker 1: With these vessels seven thousand years ago?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So that was really exciting.
Speaker 1: Wow, So that would be maybe when we can pinpoint
Speaker 1: that humans started eating cheese.
Speaker 2: We have evidence actually a bit slightly earlier from ancient
Speaker 2: Southwest Asia where milk fats have been found. So, as
Speaker 2: a cautious archaeologist slash foga detective, I would say that
Speaker 2: the earliest archaeological evidence we have that points to cheese
Speaker 2: production is from seven thousand years ago, But there's a
Speaker 2: good chance people have been eating cheese for a lot longer.
Speaker 1: Oh, we just don't know.
Speaker 2: We just don't know yet.
Speaker 1: Nobody's found a piece of eight thousand year old greer.
Speaker 2: No, but we actually do find actual pieces of cheese
Speaker 2: in the archaeological record.
Speaker 1: WHOA, what do you mean we've found cheese that was
Speaker 1: thousands of years old? Yes, yes, pricologists have actually found cheese,
Speaker 1: actual cheese, not just molecules of milk fad that is
Speaker 1: thousands of years old. And this is pretty exciting because
Speaker 1: for the first time scientists can actually tell what kind
Speaker 1: of cheese it is.
Speaker 2: So recently there was a fine that so the earliest
Speaker 2: evidence of actual cheese, like an actual piece of cheese
Speaker 2: found in the archaeological record, and that dates to about
Speaker 2: three thousand five hundred years ago, and that's coming from
Speaker 2: a burial in the Taclamccan Desert, which is current day
Speaker 2: western China. Whoa, and these pieces of cheese were found,
Speaker 2: I believe it was three mummies were essentially like wearing
Speaker 2: them as like a necklace.
Speaker 1: What yeah, it was a cheese necklace.
Speaker 2: There were other things too, but cheese was a part
Speaker 2: of it.
Speaker 1: So okay. And like you found a chunk and you
Speaker 1: can tell that it was cheese, so not.
Speaker 2: Initially so they knew it was something. They were like, okay,
Speaker 2: what are these chunks like? They definitely didn't smell like cheese.
Speaker 2: They were quite powdery to the touch. They were very delicate.
Speaker 4: WHOA.
Speaker 2: The study that was released ten years ago was able
Speaker 2: to identify, like, hey, there's lactose here. It's actually kafir,
Speaker 2: which is a common like cheese, like yogurt drink, but
Speaker 2: you can make kaffir cheese. So this was looking like
Speaker 2: kaffir cheese.
Speaker 1: That's right. People in what is now western China three
Speaker 1: thousand years ago seemed to eat kaffir cheese, or at
Speaker 1: least they valued it enough to be buried with it,
Speaker 1: which means they probably ate it and not only can
Speaker 1: archaelogist tell that this is kafir cheese, they can tell
Speaker 1: what kind of milk it was made from.
Speaker 2: But what's really cool here if you're a cheese nerd,
Speaker 2: that when they started analyzing the different pieces, they noticed
Speaker 2: that thumb pieces were made from a batch that was
Speaker 2: just cow's milk, and other pieces were made from jess
Speaker 2: like goat milk. Whoa, So that's pretty cool that they
Speaker 2: took the time to like, hey, we're not going to
Speaker 2: mix it. We're going to keep these separate for whatever reason,
Speaker 2: and then we're going to put this around our dad.
Speaker 1: It sounds like you're saying they were like foodies, like
Speaker 1: they made different kinds of artisanal cheeses.
Speaker 2: We can say that they were very cognizant of the
Speaker 2: types of cheese that they were making for sure.
Speaker 1: So that's one way to know kind of what foods
Speaker 1: they had, which is that in ancient times three thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, people would get buried with food.
Speaker 2: In certain contexts. We do see that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were buried with the cheese necklace. Who knows
Speaker 1: why they did that.
Speaker 2: We're not sure. Yeah, but I'm really excited for more
Speaker 2: research to come out and for us to get a
Speaker 2: bit more data on what's going on.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, like anything, that they were like a cheese cold.
Speaker 2: You know, for me, for something to be a cheese cold,
Speaker 2: I would want to see way.
Speaker 1: More cheese personally, you want more commitment to the cheese cut.
Speaker 2: Yes, I feel that the cheese was there, but not
Speaker 2: enough where I think this would be like a cheese
Speaker 2: I would need way more cheese for that to happen.
Speaker 1: I see you, I see like giant hats that are
Speaker 1: wedges of cheese exactly. And so they found this kind
Speaker 1: of crumbly remains with the mummies, and then you did,
Speaker 1: like some I guess, molecular analysis or DNA analysis. Now
Speaker 1: I wonder if these three thousand year old cheeses would
Speaker 1: be considered delicacies. Did anyone taste them or.
Speaker 2: Well, usually if we have such little of an archaeological remain,
Speaker 2: we're not going to taste. In this case, based on
Speaker 2: the molecular analyzes, they fell confident that this was a
Speaker 2: Kaffir like cheese, so then it would probably take on
Speaker 2: the properties of what Kaffir tastes like today.
Speaker 1: Okay, so to recap archaeologists think they have evidence of
Speaker 1: cheese making and region in modern day Poland from seven
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. But the oldest actual cheese ever found
Speaker 1: is from three thousand years ago. There was buried with
Speaker 1: some mummies in the desert in your modern day western China.
Speaker 1: I guess they were saving this cheese for cheddar days.
Speaker 1: I know you're probably fed up with these a damn
Speaker 1: cheese buns. They're pretty grating. But luckily we're going to
Speaker 1: move on now to the second food. The scientists have
Speaker 1: been surprised to learn people ate thousands of years ago,
Speaker 1: and it just to warn you it's going to get
Speaker 1: a little spicy. To stay with us, we'll be right back. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome back. We're talking about what people ate three thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, and so far we've talked about how archeologists
Speaker 1: know what was on the menu, using cheese as an example.
Speaker 1: The one thing you might be wondering about is what
Speaker 1: did food taste like back then? If you were to
Speaker 1: time travel thousands of years ago, would if you like
Speaker 1: the food or would you find it not your taste.
Speaker 1: As it turns out, sometimes our chellagists get lucky and
Speaker 1: they can tell what kinds of flavors people were into
Speaker 1: in the past. One example of this is the next
Speaker 1: food we're going to talk about chili peppers. Okay, So
Speaker 1: chili peppers is another food that I was very surprised
Speaker 1: people ate three thousand years ago. Not so much because
Speaker 1: we've been eating them for that long, but kind of
Speaker 1: the origin of it that was very surprising to me. Kay,
Speaker 1: tell us a little bit about when humans first started
Speaker 1: using chili peppers for food.
Speaker 2: Whoh Okay, So when it comes to when humans probably
Speaker 2: first started using chili peppers for food, that's a little
Speaker 2: tricky to say, but I would say most of the
Speaker 2: scholarship is thinking that this happened around ten thousand years ago.
Speaker 2: You might come across an article that looks at actually
Speaker 2: a number of sites from the Bahamas to Peru, and
Speaker 2: they did what's called starch grain analysis, So they looked
Speaker 2: at different starch microfossils of capsicum anom so. Capsicum anim
Speaker 2: is basically the chili pepper, the one you probably might
Speaker 2: think of. So these are your bell peppers, your halipenos,
Speaker 2: your serranos, things like that. So they found these starch
Speaker 2: microfossils at a number of different sites, but from one
Speaker 2: side in particular, coming from Ecuador, they were able to
Speaker 2: date some of these remains which were found on what's
Speaker 2: called grinding stones, literally the things that people used to
Speaker 2: grind stuff, that dated to about six thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: Okay, so this is pretty interesting. Basically, all plants store
Speaker 1: their starch or carbs in tiny little packets called starch granules.
Speaker 1: Till plants essentially store energy, and these tiny granules, which
Speaker 1: are smaller than the width of a human hair, are
Speaker 1: unique to each plant that makes them. For example, you
Speaker 1: can tell a starch granule is for a wheat plant
Speaker 1: because it looks like a tiny round ball, or that
Speaker 1: came from a rice plant because it looks like a
Speaker 1: tiny jagged rock. Now, chili peppers also make starch granules,
Speaker 1: and they look like flann disk with the middle sunk in,
Speaker 1: kind of like if you took a blob of play
Speaker 1: though and pressed down in it with your thumb. And
Speaker 1: these granules can survive for thousands of years as microfossils.
Speaker 1: What doctor Nathan is saying is that archaeologists have found
Speaker 1: these chili pepper granules in basically kitchenware that we can
Speaker 1: date to six thousand years ago in the Bahamas all
Speaker 1: the way down to modern Peru. So it seems people
Speaker 1: like to spice things up and they're cooking since even
Speaker 1: before the Bronze Age. I mean, talk about a hot
Speaker 1: discovery in archaeology. But not all chili peppers are spicy.
Speaker 1: And this brings us to an instance where we can
Speaker 1: see a preference in taste in a culture thousands of
Speaker 1: years ago.
Speaker 2: And there was one chili pepper in particular where something
Speaker 2: really cool happened to it about three thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: Ooh, what happened?
Speaker 2: So in the highlands of Peru, this one chili pepper
Speaker 2: around three thousand years ago emerged amongst the rest of
Speaker 2: the chili peppers. You know, people were eating different chili peppers.
Speaker 2: But then around three thousand years ago, this chili pepper
Speaker 2: Capsicum bacottam, seemed to have been a chili pepper that
Speaker 2: was favored by the people there. And that's what basically
Speaker 2: archaeologists have been finding as they're analyzing various archaeological sites
Speaker 2: and deposits and contacts. And in this instance, this is
Speaker 2: like the dried seed of it, and like people were
Speaker 2: essentially hoarding these because you know, we found such an
Speaker 2: abundance of them.
Speaker 1: So archaeologists have found that in the and this region
Speaker 1: of Peru, this one particular chili pepper, Capsicum bacottam, was
Speaker 1: all the rage, and as it happens, doctor Nathan is
Speaker 1: a friend of one of the scientists that published this finding,
Speaker 1: doctor ca thring Cho, a professor at the University of Alabama.
Speaker 2: Well, if you don't mind, I'm going to play a
Speaker 2: clip from one of my archaeology friends who actually helped
Speaker 2: make part of that discovery.
Speaker 3: Around three thousand years ago. We see them almost exclusively
Speaker 3: eating one pepper, and the scientific name of that is
Speaker 3: Capsicum bacottam. It's a yellow chili pepper that's known in
Speaker 3: Spanish as ahi ya mario. All the dishes in this
Speaker 3: area seem to utilize this one chili. Today we see it.
Speaker 4: In such iconic Peruvian dishes like Papua la one gaina,
Speaker 4: which is boiled potatoes covered in a creamy, spicy sauce
Speaker 4: made from this pepper. We have ahidri gaina, which is
Speaker 4: a creamy chicken dish also using this particular pepper, Causa limena,
Speaker 4: which is a layered cold potato casserole dish that definitely
Speaker 4: leans on these spice offered by this particular pepper.
Speaker 1: Oh Man like cana. You just made me kind of hungry.
Speaker 1: It's impervia. It sounds amazing right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the one I would say. Up and downside
Speaker 2: of studying food, you get really humphy.
Speaker 1: You're like, huh, I could go for some two thousand
Speaker 1: year old cheese right now, or at least less than
Speaker 1: a week old cheese. Maybe.
Speaker 2: The interesting part of this story is that three thousand
Speaker 2: years ago people made an intentional choice to just really
Speaker 2: focus on this particular type of chili pepper in the
Speaker 2: Highlands of Dandies. They had access to a lot of
Speaker 2: different chilies, but they really liked this specific chili. And
Speaker 2: from archaeological contexts, we see a bunch of these dried
Speaker 2: chili seeds showing up across different sites in different contacts,
Speaker 2: which to us signaled that, like, hey, people must have
Speaker 2: really liked this chili pepper, and they seem to have
Speaker 2: exclusively liked this chili pepper more than others. And so
Speaker 2: what we're thinking of here is that people maybe really
Speaker 2: liked its flavor, might have had other properties, but people
Speaker 2: made a choice three thousand years ago to be like, hey,
Speaker 2: this is our chili pepper.
Speaker 1: Meaning like, it's not just evidence of what they ate.
Speaker 1: You know, they ate fish, they ate grains, they ate this.
Speaker 1: But it's really kind of evidence about their cuisine, you know,
Speaker 1: like their food preparation, what flavors they like to eat.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And I think this is the exciting part of
Speaker 2: looking at things that you know, still feel ancient, like
Speaker 2: three thousand years ago, but are like close enough where
Speaker 2: we can have pretty decent preservation. Instead of thinking of
Speaker 2: things in terms of like, well, they ate this and
Speaker 2: that and this was their diet, we can think of
Speaker 2: things in terms like, okay, well they have this broader
Speaker 2: cuisine where they were making these choices, and they really
Speaker 2: liked this chili pepper flavor, and maybe they cooked it
Speaker 2: alongside these other foods that we're seeing in the archaeological record.
Speaker 2: Maybe they really liked this with potatoes as they do
Speaker 2: today and other things. So I think what's really cool
Speaker 2: is that we can come up with more interesting stories
Speaker 2: to tell about what was happening that aren't necessarily direct facts. Yes,
Speaker 2: there is uncertainty, but it adds to a richer story
Speaker 2: about what was happening in the past.
Speaker 1: I see incredible that's so hot.
Speaker 2: Or mildly hot, you prefer.
Speaker 1: Okay, last question, doctor Nathan. Imagine you're an archaeologist three
Speaker 1: thousand years in the future. What do you think you're
Speaker 1: going to find about what we're eating today?
Speaker 2: So if I was an archaeologist and I was looking
Speaker 2: at this specific time period, I might think we are
Speaker 2: a cult of corn, really the children of the corn
Speaker 2: horror movie Fllovers. And that's because we do tend to
Speaker 2: use a lot of corn remnants and corn products in
Speaker 2: our foods. So even if we think of like rice
Speaker 2: crispies treats something that I love, and you know, I
Speaker 2: love a little too much. Like if we were to
Speaker 2: do residue analysis, yes, maybe we'd find like the rice
Speaker 2: the marshmallow, but we'd also find probably corn syrup that
Speaker 2: was used to sweeten it. And if we think of
Speaker 2: how widespread corn syrup is used and just talking about
Speaker 2: its prevalance, I would think, oh man, these people really
Speaker 2: liked corn.
Speaker 1: Well, I feel like I'm doing my part because I,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, I had corn flakes for breakquids.
Speaker 2: You're helping my theory.
Speaker 1: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you so much for having me happy to
Speaker 2: talk about food in the past or present. Anytime.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, I don't know about you, but I'm
Speaker 1: pretty hungry now. I think I'll go eat some corn
Speaker 1: for tea chips with some h cheese and some chili sauce. Hey,
Speaker 1: if you want to learn more about doctor Smithy Nathan's work,
Speaker 1: check out her podcast on the science of Archaeology, Curiosity
Speaker 1: Meets the Past. Wherever you get your podcasts, you've been
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