TOOTH PLAQUES PROVIDE INSIGHT IN TO OUR PREHISTORIC ANCESTORS DIET
A new study may provide evidence that
our prehistoric ancestors understood plant consumption and processing long
before the development of agriculture, according to a study published in the
open-access journal PLOS ONE by Stephen Buckley from
University of York and colleagues.
Evidence
of plant consumption before the adoption of agriculture is difficult to find;
such evidence is meaningful for understanding how much prehistoric people knew
about the ecology and potential therapeutic properties of plants. Scientists in
this study extracted and analyzed chemical compounds and microfossils from
dental calculus (calcified dental plaque) from ancient human teeth at Al
Khiday, a pre-historic site on the White Nile in Central Sudan, Africa. One of
the five sites at Al Khiday is predominantly a burial ground of pre-Mesolithic,
Neolithic, and Later Meroitic age remains. As a multi-period cemetery, it can
provide us with a useful long-term perspective on any materials recovered
there.
The authors chemically analyzed
dental calculus samples from 14 individuals in the three different periods and
found that humans ingested a certain plant, purple nut sedge, for at least
7,000 years, during both pre-agricultural and agricultural periods. As a good
source of carbohydrates with potential medicinal and aromatic qualities, purple
nut sedge - today regarded as a nuisance and considered to be the world's most
costly weed - formed an important part of the prehistoric diet. In addition,
the ability of the plant to inhibit a certain type of Streptococcus may explain
the unexpectedly low level of cavities found in the population. According to
the authors, the research suggests that prehistoric people living in Central
Sudan may have understood both the nutritional and medicinal qualities of
purple nut sedge as well as other plants.
Lead
author Karen Hardy, said: "By extracting material from samples of ancient
dental calculus, we have found that rather than being a nuisance in the past,
the purple nut sedge's value as a food, and possibly its abundant medicinal
qualities, were known." She added, "We also discovered that these
people ate several other plants, and we found traces of smoke, evidence for
cooking, and for chewing plant fibres to prepare raw materials. These small
biographical details add to the growing evidence that prehistoric people had a
detailed understanding of plants long before the development of
agriculture."
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