What Did People Eat 10,000 Years Ago?

December 13, 2021·23 min·2 clips

An archaeologist drills into ancient pottery to read the grease stains and discover what people ate 10,000 years ago.

The episode opens with the Every Little Thing helpline and a call from listener Taylor, who admits she ate maple syrup that expired in 2013. She wonders what archaeologists would find in her cupboard if the building collapsed and no one returned for a hundred years. Flora and Taylor riff on Taylor's father, a confident expired-food eater who believes anything acidic will not grow bacteria. Taylor recounts how her father's reheated lion's head meatballs, a Chinese family dish, once triggered what the hosts call a double dragoning and a ride on the Porcelain Express. Flora then pivots to archaeologist Julie Dunne, who studies ancient diet and subsistence. Dunne explains that 10,000 years ago the Sahara was green and wet and supported elephants, giraffes and semi-sedentary human communities. She describes how researchers start at prehistoric rubbish dumps, where they find discarded animal bones and even 10,000-year-old seeds from a Libyan site that still look fresh enough to boil. Dunne then turns to decorated pottery, her signature, describing ceramic pot shards decorated with a rocker stamp tool carved from bird bone. She explains that pottery let humans widen their diet by allowing long boiling over fire. To read ancient meals, Dunne takes 2-3 centimetre samples and grinds them into powder for chemical extraction. The technique pulls out fatty acids and distinguishes between cud-chewing animals like cattle, sheep and goats, and non-ruminants like pigs, and shows when people were processing milk into butter, cheese or yogurt. She mentions evidence of fish and lakeside plants like sedges. The back half of the show shifts to ancient faeces, called coprolites, as another source of dietary information. Dunne describes the largest known human coprolite, unearthed in York, which is eight inches long and two inches wide and came from a Viking. Analysis showed the person ate largely meat and bird and hosted hundreds of parasite eggs. The hosts joke about how to introduce coprolite research at parties. The episode closes by teasing next week's story about the oldest thing ever found in a soup bowl and invites listener questions via 833-RING-YELTY.

As heard by us

A maple syrup mishap opens into a grounded look at how pottery can reveal what was cooked in it.

It starts with a bottle of maple syrup tucked at the back of a cupboard, then quietly turns into a story about what old pottery can still tell us.

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Why you'd press play

Start with syrup, end with ancient dinnerware.

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