Pease Porridge Hot,Pease Porridge Cold, Pease Porridge 32,000 years old

[Ichingcarpenter]

Don’t put down your porridge just yet. Hunter-gatherers ate oats as far back as 32,000 years ago – way before farming took root.

This is the earliest known human consumption of oats, say Marta Mariotti Lippi at the University of Florence in Italy and her colleagues, who made the discovery after analysing starch grains on an ancient stone grinding tool from southern Italy.

The Palaeolithic people ground up the wild oats to form flour, which they may have boiled or baked into a simple flatbread, says Mariotti Lippi.

They also seem to have heated the grains before grinding them, perhaps to dry them out in the colder climate of the time. Mariotti Lippi notes that this would also have made the grain easier to grind and longer-lasting.

This multi-stage process would have been time consuming, but beneficial. The grain is nutritionally valuable, and turning it into flour would have been a good way to transport it, which was important for Palaeolithic nomads, she says.

Cereal fuel.......................... https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28139-stone-age-people-were-making-porridge-32000-years-ago/?utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=SOC&utm_campaign=twitter&cmpid=SOC|NSNS|2015-GLOBAL-twitter

[get the red out]

1. Thanks!

I love this stuff! I love oatmeal too.

[Warpy]

2. I doubt they'd have transported much flour

since the grain keeps a lot better before it's ground. I'm not a bit surprised they were eating it, I keep telling "paleo" diet people that hunter-gatherer people ate everything that wouldn't poison them outright, and some of the things that did. Seeds of grasses like oats, barley, rye, and others would have formed a staple part of their fall diet.

The reason they ground or pounded their oats is because the whole grains take forever to cook, something impractical when you're cooking by tossing a hot rock into a waterproof basket or wooden container full of raw food. Heating freshly harvested wet gains dried them and made them easier to grind.