A study carried out by an international team of researchers - coordinated by Emanuela Cristiani of the Department of Oral and Maxillo-Facial Sciences, head of the ERC StG HIDDEN FOODS project - has revealed that hunter-gatherers in south-eastern Europe made extensive use of plants for food at the beginning of the Holocene period.

"Spontaneous cereals seem to have played an important role in the diet of ancient hunter-gatherers even outside the central areas of domestication in the Near East," says Emanuela Cristiani, first author of the paper. The research, conducted on the tartar of 60 individuals who lived between 11,500 and 8,000 years ago in the central Balkans together with residues and traces of use on unchipped stone tools, was published in the journal eLife. The results obtained contribute substantially to the debate on the intensification of the consumption of wild plants prior to their domestication.

"During the Mesolithic period, the Central Balkan region was inhabited by hunter-gatherer societies for several millennia before the arrival of the first farmers," says Dušan Borić, one of the two corresponding authors together with Emanuela Cristiani and in charge of the excavation of Vlasac, one of the sites investigated by the research. "Until now, this part of Europe has lacked concrete evidence of the use of wild plants and grains for food, which was well documented in Greece around 20,000 years ago."

Plant residues found in the ancient tartar, such as starches and phytoliths, constitute the most incontrovertible direct evidence of dietary consumption of wild herbs by these human groups. "Further evidence of plant consumption," confirms archaeologist Andrea Zupancich and co-author of the paper, "comes from the traces of use and residues present on unchipped stone tools, grindstones, grinders and pestles, which demonstrate the development of an ad hoc technology for processing spontaneous caryopses."

Previous studies conducted by the same group at Sapienza University had already shown that dental tartar, which has always been considered an enemy of oral health, is actually an important tool for studying prehistoric individuals' eating habits, lifestyle and health. It has been possible to reconstruct the evolution of the oral flora of the ancient hunters and gatherers of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods and of the first groups of farmers who arrived from the Near East during the Neolithic period, thus outlining the stages that marked the transition to agriculture in southern Europe.

"Our results suggest that the familiarity of hunter-gatherers in south-eastern Europe with some wild grains – concludes Cristiani - may have facilitated the introduction and consumption of the domesticated species that form the basis of our diet."

References:

Wild cereal grain consumption among Early Holocene foragers of the Balkans predates the arrival of agriculture – Emanuela Cristiani, Anita Radini, Andrea Zupancich, Angelo Gismondi, Alessia D’agostino, Claudio Ottoni, Marialetizia Carra, Snežana Vukojičić, Mihai Constantinescu, Dragana Antonović, T Douglas Price, Dušan Borić – eLife 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72976

Further Information 

Emanuela Cristiani
Department of Oral and Maxillo-Facial Sciences
emanuela.cristiani@uniroma1.it

Dušan Borić 
Department of Environmental Biology
dusan.boric@uniroma1.it

Andrea Zupancich 
Department of Oral and Maxillo-Facial Sciences
andrea.zupancich@uniroma1.it