Topic Prehistoric Food:
TAKE a trip, if you will, down memory lane. As you go, try to recall the foods, the meals, the various animal remains that were cheerfully pushed down your throat by parents and loved ones in the name of good nutrition. Now consider these dishes: fish soup made from an entire fish, including the head and tail; grilled ox tails; slott (made from cod roe and flour); boiled samphire (a marsh plant); laverbread (bread made from seaweed); and boiled marrow bones. Feel any differently about your earliest food experiences?
As frightening and unappealing as these dishes may sound, for our early ancestors they constituted everyday meals. According to Prehistoric Cookery, a new book published by English Heritage, such meals were eaten with gusto by early man. In her book, author Jane Renfrew argues that these recipes are not only more palatable than we might assume, but that they provide historians with a valuable insight into what nutrition was like hundreds of years ago. Through explaining the origins of our diet, its sources and how and what went into everyday meals, Renfrew seeks to disprove the widely held belief that our forebears’ diet was unremittingly dull, tedious and tasteless.
It is worth noting that not all recipes and foodstuffs in the book date from pre-history. In fact, most would have been devised by those living in Bronze Age Britain, after the introduction of agriculture. Renfrew acknowledges this and points to the difficulty in obtaining ingredients used in the palaeolithic period (800,000 to 10,000BC), such as rhino joints or mammoth steaks. There is also a dearth of archaeological evidence.
Moreover, prehistoric humans are understood to have been huntergatherers; in otherwords they ate what they found or hunted, with little deviation or culinary fuss.
So what, if anything, can we extract from examining early man’s diet? Is it anything more than just interesting reading for the historically minded? The hunter-gatherers’ diet is sometimes held up as a lost idea; one theory even has it that people of certain blood types suffer by not following such a diet. Is there anything our ancestors’ diet can teach us?
Renfrew believes so. For a start, the diet clearly demonstrates the development of humans’ relationships with food, tastes and cooking. It also teaches us that early humans in the remotest parts of Scotland and England wasted nothing. Regardless of the animal on the chopping block, everything was used – udders, tripe, brains, head, feet, tails, blood and even gristle were made into dishes in the absence of any alternatives.
Replicating such an approach to cooking may be unnecessary today because of the wealth of alternatives, but it stands as a reminder that however repulsive eating a dog, rat or hamster appears to us in western Europe, since the earliest recordings of our dietary habits, people have eaten all manner of things to survive and satisfy their appetite.
The simplicity of meals is another characteristic Renfrew draws to the reader’s attention. Rather than cooking with elaborate sauces, spices or liquids, meat and fish was roasted with little interference on an open fire or spit. As dissatisfaction with fussy, highly processed and often unhealthy western meals grows, many, including Renfrew, hark back wistfully to this natural, rustic style of cooking.
However, Brian Ratcliffe, professor of nutrition at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, believes we ought to be wary of over- romanticising our ancestors’ diet. He maintains that hunter- gatherers – for instance palaeolithic man – had a nutrient- deficient diet compared to 21st-century man. The clearest evidence of this, he says, is that humans did not live for very long.
“It is important to realise that whatever you are discussing about prehistoric nutrition and diet is speculative because of a shortage of written evidence, ” he says. “The most of what we can speculate about early man is that his diet would have been very restrictive. We are not talking about settled people; these early peoples would have lived nomadic lives. They would have had to follow the animals that they hunted for food. They were also restricted to the seasons; [people living in Britain] would have moved north in the summer to find food, fruits and berries, while in the winter they would have moved south.
“Most of what we know was that they had to live hand to mouth. At that time they did not grow old – people were only living for a few decades, long enough to reproduce the next generation. I think there’s a lot of nonsense about modern man’s diet being so bad and looking to early man for lessons. Early man’s diet, particularly later when pastoralisation began, was full of nutritional deprivation, full of nutritional inadequacies. In order to eat, they had to follow the food supply and that was very changeable.”
With the introduction of agriculture from 800BC onwards, people moved from being hunter-gatherers to farmers, taking on husbandry of animals so they could control the supply of food. Professor Ratcliffe, who also works for the Nutrition Society, says that while the food supply was more controlled than before, it was far from ideal. “As humans move into the agricultural period, they moved to using a staple food, ” he explains. “This staple was a cropbased food which provided most of the energy and protein needs. But what we see here is that there was a trade-off taking place. Growing crops provided some constancy in food supply, but the problem was that people had to stay in one area and so they were derived of the benefits of gleaning foods, like fruits and so on, from other areas as their hunter-gatherer ancestors would have done. The upshot of this was that they became very reliant on these staple foods.
“The other problem with this reliance on one staple is it tended to be focused on one or two grains. They did not have the multiplicity of crops that we have now, and their yields would have been much lower. People would have had to expend a lot of energy for relatively low-yielding crops.”
Professor Ratcliffe maintains the most important lesson to be learned from our ancestors is that a restricted diet is not desirable. “The main lesson is that as humans we need a huge variety of food from a range of different sources and food groups, ” he says. “We can see from early man’s experience that it is not good enough to rely upon single sources and single groups of foods because they did not give them the nutrients they needed. [In the Iron Age] the diet was largely meat and cereal-based and would have been nutritionally deficient in vitamin C, and they would certainly have had problems with calcium and vitamin D. There would still have been deprivations, crops failures and famines resulting from those failures, and disease within animals. In other words, [farming man] had an existence that was full of supply problems, like his predecessors.”
Dr Kerri McPherson, lecturer in evolutionary psychology at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, argues that from an evolutionary perspective eating behaviours in mankind have not changed that significantly. “Humans have developed different foods to eat, ” she says. “We have moved away from natural food to a more processed diet, a process which started with the introduction of agriculture about 100,000 years ago. But we have not physiologically evolved to cope with the change. Basically our environmental evolution has moved too quickly for the human species. The psychological mechanisms involved with food and eating behaviours have not caught up with the change in foods that we eat. We have been designed to cope with feast or famine, but the problem is that we don’t live in those times any more. The psychology that drives us to eat is still preparing us for the famine, encouraging us to overeat.”
Professor Ratcliffe adds: “For our generation the threats to life and quality of life depend on eating too much salt or fat. Early [Iron Age] man was not concerned about such matters because he did not live long enough to be so. When man started using salt to preserve food, he was not worrying about the effects of eating too much of it. Today our concerns are very different; we are focused on eradicating diseases like cancer and how different food could help that as well as reducing a person’s risk of getting it.”
Prehistoric Cookery, Recipes and History, by Jane Renfrew, English Heritage, GBP7.99.
Original article:
Source: Herald, The; Glasgow (UK)
Eleanor Cowie
July,2006
