Makes sense. Even in a modern kitchen (unless it has a bread maker), it's so much easier to consistently make a decent porridge than it is to bake anything.
@@frank-y8n You're doing better than I did. I looked into simple flatbread recipes, narrowed it down to just a container of yogurt and the same container of flour... and every time after the first somehow was just a steady decline until I gave up. Got really good at pilaf/pilau/plov instead.
if you make up your porridge mix extra thick, you can fry it in a pan and get a thick, chewy oat pancake or flatbread. They are called bannocks in Scotland. Make excellent travel food. You can do it on a flat stone on the edge of a fire too, if you don't have a kitchen
I like boiled whole wheat. It takes a lot longer to cook than brown rice, but for people who were keeping a fire smouldering all night to keep themselves warm, that wouldn't have been a problem.
Those days there was nothing like wheat, and when it was finally cultivated only grew that far north almost thousand years later. Next to that, no fire were kept alive during the night. Way too much firewood, work and zero insulation made it wasted resources! Try living under such real life circumstances... 🥱
Note to self: use parameters to slow it down and and stop the flow to read the texts without interference. So much knowledge and detail succinctly crammed together needs time to absorb. These aren't criticisms: there's practical interest in making the video (appear) short to get more clicks.
This makes such sense! I'm having porridge for breakfast right now because it's cold out and takes very little effort to prepare. Our neolithic ancestors were such busy folk (just like modern farmers) and who has time for all that baking?? Great video.
Don't agree. You can quite easily bake 'pan'cakes or flatbread on a hot flat stone... so they probably did. Another way is spiralling dow around a branch and keep it close to the fire. Any scout knows this. 😮
If one think about it bread is just baked porridge. In areas where crops suitable for bread was able to grow they made and ate bread. In other areas they made porridge. This continued even to more recent history. And in places like Scottland oat porridge is still a very big thing. The highlanders even made dried out porridge for easy transport since they couldnt make bread with the crops they grew.
Is the thing we should take from this is that early farmers did not just give up on the foods they had been gathering seasonally but began to grow crops as a reliable source of callories and possibly a way of storing them over winter?
@@toddberkely6791 Funny you ask, I have been thinking about rewritting Arthur and the Knights of the Round table based on the idea that farming arrived and challenged the old magic that Merlin knew. But farming replaced an old Matriarchal system with a male dominated one
@@toddberkely6791Basically not at all in most of europe. The genetics seem to bear out that the first farmers in most of europe were a distinct group of people from the earlier hunter gatherers. Generally over 90% of the genome was replaced.
Actually its that genetic marker that made me think. If farming was so good and practical why wasnt it adopted by the natives. When I said cultural I meant, farming is what the people did because that was their culture, farming the land and being sedentary had a deep meaning for them. Otherwise why grow wheat at 50º north and eat gruel when they could have been living as nomadic hunters with a much more protein rich diet?
Bread is a lot of work. Simple breads like pitas and tortillas would have been easier., but baked breads require advanced baking techniques. Considering how many people from england to poland eat peas, i would assume peas and pea soup were probably common in ancient times too.
They probably drank milk too and maybe something like wild ducks eggs. I don’t understand why there has to be this meat vs plant war when it comes to ancient people. If I lived back then I’d eat anything that’s safe.
That must be some modern preoccupation superimposed on ancient practices. Haven't humans always been known as omnivores, at least as to anything and everything edible in their particular environment?
There even was this tribe, warriors for about 2000 years ago named Greutungi, see wiki, who ended up to be known around Ukraine and in imperial business, their name is still very understandable in Norwegian and its no posh name, it just means The porridge kids.
@@irinaskuld The daily grind. Shoulder to the grind stone. Nose to the grindstone. Rule of thumb, and probably others that are still in use in English at least.
@dianeteeter6650 They don't have to gather every day. They dried and stored food, very necessary in snowy winters. But since they couldn't get Wi-Fi, you might as well have a look around for some free lunch. People who eat out or take out most of their meals make me feel tired like that. Daily gathering, as it were. I want to get home to my stored goodies and make a meal. Have grains boiling right now!
Actually it's not much of a burden in summer and autumn. When I was a child (in '80) we were spending whole days fooling around and bo one had time to go back home for dinner. Plums, apples, various young shoots, leaves and flowers (pine, linden, grasses) were pretty tasty snacks and usually you had something to chew on just a couple of steps away. And I lived in a big city, I can only imagine it was even easier in rural areas. The grind in ancient times was to gather and preserve enough food to survive winter and spring, I suppose.
I'm very curious how people decide which plants were being cultivated and which were just being foraged. The distinction seems very arbitrary - how would we even know if these people were planting the best hazelnuts in a good location in order to get better hazelnuts in the future? How would we know they weren't deliberately planting these "edible weeds" in amongst their other crops? An "edible weed" is just a vegetable that isn't fashionable right now. Growing vegetables as well as cereals is good farming.
I believe Middle Eastern farmers were already on to beer way before they started moving into Europe. Seems highly unlikely they would have forgotten that particlar, precious skill.
I'm wondering if they may also have made a pemmican type thing for storage for winter. Early North American colonists made "potted meat" which was from Europe (cooked meat sealed with a cap of fat).
Though in truth to this day people in Northern Europe forage for nuts and berries in hedge rows and woods, but does it necessarily mean that when they were a more important foodstuff that Blackberries and Hazel Nuts were not farmed? At least to the extent that hedges and groves were planted with intent to produce a "forage crop", with some protection from stock, wild animals and rival plants. Is it really still "Gathering" if the source is artificially created? A useful by-product of farming and not truly wild.
You don't need to farm plants, that are doing perfectly well on their own, like hazelnut or berries. Cereals are a different story, as they are not native to central or northern Europe and would not be able to outcompete local annuals and grasses. Foraging for berries and mushrooms is also a very popular recreational activity in Poland, Czechia and Eastern Europe. Probably the same in the Baltics and Southern-Eastern Europe.
@@sieciobywatel If the plant is in a hedgerow it is being farmed. If a wood is being manged, it is being farmed. If you plant a grove or orchard and protect it from your pigs you get a more abundant supply, so farmers did. Coppice was managed for firewood, fencing, tools, arrows, bows, timber and food, and enclosed by farmers also. I was referring to the claim people were both hunter gatherers and farmers. I was suggesting that the presence of "Hunter Gatherer" type foods was not indication of actual hunter gathering. Farmers modify environments to aid foraging in ways true hunter gatherers will not. I suggest you have confirmed my hypothesis since we agree people do foraging today and are not hunter gatherers". There is a huge difference between blackberry picking for fun, as a supplement, even in time of crisis, and depending upon such to live permanently
@@sieciobywatel Semi nomadic behaviour is cyclical and trees etc don't go away. They are there when you come back . They engaged in collective projects that took over a hundred years to complete, such as the transformation of Stonehenge. Since the people were willing to build permanent stone structures for ritual and burial it would be strange if they did not plan agriculture in the same way. It is also wrong to assume their behaviour did not change to become settled. What they were when arriving as nomads was probably very different than when they passed out of history. They must have produced significant surpluses for them to have such a complex culture; that is not achieved with primitive agriculture or hunter gathering. However I'm trying to justify a theory and certainly don't know.
If they could grow the grain, the outside temperature would not matter as far as preparing goes? It would need to be stored dry enough to not go moldy for either porrige or bread, and they did dehusk it. Please tell me, why do you think outside temperatures would decide how they used their grain?
Wheat requires the most fertile soil and most heat units to grow well, of all the cereal grains; barley is intermediate and oats requires the least. If wheat does not grow well in Scotland but oats does, then farmers will grow oats.
@Goldenhawk583 Bread requires more preparation effort and a lot of fuel for the baking process. The cold, wet climate would make the accumulation of dry timbee difficult. So you'd need to spend a lot of time cutting and drying wood to support baking.
@@baarbacoa there are other things to burn besides wood, and now its a " cold and wet " climate. I was arguing against a "cold" climate.. they are not the same. The scots developed a bread that is very suitable for their climate.. and that would be cold and wet. Here its not wet ( yes it does rain at times), and winter is cold.. Winter, the best time togather firewood for next year. and most people would not bake daily anyway, like you said, it is a bit of work, For flatbreads we would make them in large amounts and store them for months. Other than that, a fire to heat a home, would also be a cooking fire.
@@Goldenhawk583 Tough to proof a loaf of bread below 65F. I toured a historic farmhouse in Sweden and they had one big stone chimney/stove/oven but they didn't bake often because of the amount of fuel it used. The used small fires to heat up the whole "rock" of it.
However, usually the argument for finding the grind stones in burials in the funnel beaker culture is their importance for grinding the main grain to flour. If on this site they are really „only“ used to grind nuts and stuff from foraging, their cultural value seems to decrease and it is harder to argue for their appearance in burials. Do the authors address that?
Pot luck as we call it in the States. Women and kids forage and tend the garden. Men tend the livestock and hunt. Throw what is available in a pot for a porridge or soup. Animal skins for pots early on(yes you can slow boil in a skin)then pottery. When large animals were hunted or domesticated livestock butchered it was a feast day. Some things never change.
A different branch, I believe. Their arrival coincided with the almost complete disappearance of Middle Eastern Farmer genomes, just as the latter almost wiped out the earlier hunter-gatherers except for traces.
Were these chaps part of the Indo-European migration, or were they the other farmers who came before that? In my doubtless overly schematic mind I remember something about hunter gatherers coming in from the Middle East, then being displaced by farmers from Anatolia and then Indo-Europeans popping in last.
What she's talking about here is the Funnelbaker culture which is believed to have ultimately originated from Anatolia. The (presumed) Indo-European Corded Ware culture hadn't spread this far north yet. Your "schematic mind" seems to have a good idea of what happened although displacement may not be the right word. Recent evidence suggests that what happened during both the two big Neolithic culture/population shifts in Northern Europe was that the existing population was decimated by the plague, leaving room for others to move in. The locals who survived merged with the newcomers and weren't displaced as such. This is still just a theory but at the moment it seems to be the most plausible one.
@@tessjuel The Funnel beaker culture seem to have been a late development of the Northern (Danubian) route of neolithisation of Europe. They probably merged with the earlier Ertebølle culture, which had its roots in the Mesolithicum. They were in contact with neighbors, including the Corded ware, the early ‘beaker culture’. It might have been that they were the source of the earliest copper and the wheel. They might already be mixing before the end of the Funnel beaker culture, around 2800 BCE.
Durum is a more native and natural type of wheat. Italians use it in pasta and that is part of the treason why their food is healthier. The theory is that other modern wheat seeds are less natural / more altered and our biology is not adapted to it as much
I think most of the problems with gluten in "modern wheat" is that it is ground much finer and at higher, therefore hotter, speeds. But I could be wrong. The knowledge has been growing fast.
@@kitefan1unbelievable how much fantasies this channel presents? How about studying something called science? Gluten issues is just another scary fantasy, thriving among spoiled Veggies with too much time and too little demands in their privileged western lifestyle!🙄🥱😴
Wheat is a valuable food source, but it wasn't relevant that far back in time, while no one had cultivated any plant to that level! Unbelievable how people are mixing present issues with living conditions thousand years ago! Not even your grandparents generation had any of your privileged living conditions or luxury issues! 👀🤡🤣
I always thought that rye was the most important grain in the north east Europe. To this day rye is the most important grain in Poland. This area has poore postglacial soils. Rye does not need as good soil as wheat and can withstand lower temperatures. Not to mention buckwheat and oats. There are must be something wrang with this research.
@@irinaskuld you said something about oak. Here in the northeast US the first peoples ate flour made from much rinsed, very tannic acorns. Apparently the acorns from the Pacific coast are less tannic and easier to process. And tastier.
"they likely used the grains to make porridge" "LIKELY" So much of this type of historic work is but speculation. If anyone had suggested the Antikythera device before it was discovered, they would have been laughed out of academia. The astronomy, math and precision of the pyramid is still mind-blowing. But of course, they could not bake bread.
What you call speculation is an educated theory based on the latest finds and analyses. If that will change over time it's part of the scientifc process. And there is nothing mind-blowing about the pyramids any more, we pretty much know all about their construction now.
@@irinaskuld Really!? Funny you mention knowing about the CONSTRUCTION of the pyramid when I said nothing of the construction. I mentioned the astronomy and math. But let's consider... Aligned true north better than the much smaller Greenwich Observatory done with moderntech. A mortar that works in joints one fiftieth of an inch thick that still has not been reproduced. A 20 ton door that was hinged so perfectly that thousands of years of marauders did not find it. Multi-ton polished casing stones that neither their alignment nor polishing varied by more than 1/100th of an inch +/- Ball and socket corner joint technology to withstand earthquakes King's chamber coffer coffer hollowed out in place with jewel drill bit using 2 tons of force(microscopic analysis), and probably cut in place with bronze saw with sapphire teeth. The curvature of the sides equaling the curvature of the earth Equally bisected quadrants of all earth’s land mass (cardinal position placement lines extended) The exact length of the solar/tropical year (365.2424 days = base circuit & basis for all pyramid measurements is a circle whose circumference is 36524.24 pyramid inches.) The exact length of the anomalistic[perihelion to perihelion] year & orbital year (365.259 days, 19th masonry course & true base plane line) Size and distance of moon and Sun, polar radius of earth and equatorial circumference (in complex math relations of size, as well as granite coffer) Length of general astronomical precession (25770=sum base diagonals & King’s chamber to apex=radius & 50th course of masonry to apex) The exact position of the pyramid on earth with respect to the solar system ecliptic plane(angles of chambers) Positions of Orion, Columba, Pleiades, Alpha Draconis, Ursa Minor(passages pointing to) The relative positions and magnitude of the three main stars of the belt of Orion(size and placement of Giza pyramids) Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn their years, days & volume(King’s Chamber floor stones) Mean ocean level is two times the diameter of a solar circle 365242 below the base line. The mathematical constants of pi, phi, epsilon, and the golden ratio. (reflected in the geometric ratios of pyramid and King’s chamber coffer) Squares the circle (dimensions), and other relationships too complicated to explain without many diagrams. And that does not even count spiritual marvels which I will not even bother sharing here.
@@irinaskuld You said "What you call speculation is an educated theory based on the latest finds and analyses. If that will change over time it's part of the scientifc process." Yes, scientists create theories based on information, often VERY little information (hence speculative), and they do change. You are young. Give yourself another 40 years to watch these theories, some of which were passed off not as theory but as hard facts, get changed, again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again....
Ok, if you could actually say from analysis that cereals "were not ground", rather than "we could not determine if these were used for that", then we need to have a discussion about bran. Because that would be a very unpleasant porridge. It would however be a super beer.
Lime fruits? is that what we would call a lime in English/now? Was it that warm in Denmark then? What about beer? Do we have evidence? (The Egyptians we know consumed more wheat via beer than flower.)
Tilia in North America is called basswood much to my surprise. I have one in my yard. I never dreamed those fruit pods were edible. An experiment for next summer I guess.
@@mikespangler98 The unripe fruit of some species have been made into fake chocolate. It was not commercial because it went off rapidly. Check out the Plants for a Future website for a huge database of plant uses, including quite a few for Tilia species.
@@mikespangler98flowers are delicious both for eating and making a herbal tea. Leaves are perfectly edible as well, young are very delicate and juicy, later in summer they might be a bit more coarse, but still it's quite refreshing to chew on them and spit out the fiber. Mind there are different varieties of linden trees, some have much sweeter leaves than others.
Fun fact ( it is actually a real fact). When we stopped eating almost all meat/animal fat , and started farming, our brains also started shrinking. We have on average 11% less brains now than we did 10 000 to 6000 years ago. And the drop coincides very clearly with when farming began in each region. Diseases that were mostly unheard of also started becoming common, like diabetes and toothrot, due to the high carb ( sugar) intake compared to only having a bit earlier when fruits and berries were in season.
You’re using facts and logic. That’s racist. They may have had big brains but they were dumb because they murdered innocent animals and plus we’re smarter because we’re more diverse. 🤣🤣🤣
Before farming, most humans ate a broad-spectrum diet - not almost all meat/animal fat. Modern hunter gathers usually get more calories from plant sources than animal ones, for example, and this seems to be true in most places and times in prehistory. Better nutrition from a more varied diet is a part of why pre-farming skeletons tend to be taller and healthier than farmers.
🙌🏻 precisely... no tooth-rot was detected in human remains before we started eating grains {out of sheer necessity, cos other foods were temporarily unavailable}
@@davidharrison7072 WTF is a " broadspectrum diet" And please tell me how to get more calories from plants, rather than from fat. Never mind the science showing 80 plus % of meat and fat, and 20% or less of plantmatter, lets go with what you feel instead. But really tell me what the plants are that they picked in the snow.
Gruel is just a step in the process of making beer. I assert that they were beer drinkers. Grain, through the malting process naturally wants to become "beer." Many believe that it was not bread, but beer that kicked off agriculture.Or, at the very least they developed alongside one another. I may add that in their academic name resides a clue: Beaker Culture. Beer drinking was done out of large vessels as indicated from remains and ancient inscriptions and that it still continues today.
The beginning of brain shrinkage, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Who would have thought this major milestone in our development could deliver such hell to our health.
There's a huge difference between homemade porridge and junk food. And these people didn't lack exercise. You can be the healthiest person around and just drop dead.
@@sarahpauline4904 With the passage to agriculture, people became smaller and developed all kinds of pathologies that were extremely unusual in hunter-gatherer groups. But their much more secure food supply meant that many, many more people would generally survive into adulthood, and thus reproduce more abundantly. However, domesticating animals and living in close proximity to them led to all kinds of animal diseases passing on to humans. (Also, there's a theory that hunter-gathering results in a sort of natural birth control, where you only wind up with a child about every 3 years.)
The alternative was famine, don't believe what media tries to sell you. They had cancer tausands of year before, but they died younger. They did not had diabetes and hearth diseases because they worked all day. All these problems are caused by our sedentary lifestyle
@@cathjj840how on earth do you proof any of that irrational stuff? Why should better living conditions make people suffer from your suggested issues? It's the complete opposite happening...
I think this video is specifically discussing the plants they ate, it's not saying they didn't eat meat. (Yes, at the beginning she says it's a study of plant use).
@@smoath 0:24 It said hunting was continued to SUPPLEMENT diets, when it was in fact the other way around. As a carnivore, I am aware that we live in an anti meat society these days.
"Plant food would probably constitute more than half of the caloric intake, possibly much higher, with animals on the second place and fish representing only a minor caloric contribution." -Modeling middle Neolithic funnel beaker diet on Falbygden, Sweden Karl-Göran Sjögren
@@yellads Has nothing to do with contemporary anti-meatness. Meat has always been a very onerous food (in time, effort and resources). Hunting quickly decimates the wild animals when preyed upon by large, sedentary populations. You have grow them yourselves, at the cost of food you might be able to eat yourself, and they give you diseases while their quality decreases (wild animals furnish vit. D, domesticated ones do not, or very little).
I am totally sceptical that meat was ever preferred over plants. I suspect meat was eaten when plants were not available. If you can get x amount of nutrition from plants which would require less effort and much lower risk you would do that. In colder climates plants are more seasonal - so you might be forced to hunt meat to survive and just accept the risks and inefficiencies. It is I think most likely meat came from scavenged carcasses which is also risky but less so than hunting. While out foraging you might find a dead or dying animal and wait for it to expire before consuming it. Even if you can bring down a substantial prey animal, you then have to defend it from all the scavengers trying to steal it - which is a problem even for lions and other apex predators. Much of the carnivore myth that persists in the minds of those trying to justify a taste for meat is based on little or no evidence. The health improvements from a plant based diet that are evidenced today indicate that we evolved eating plants primarily and small amounts of meat crept into our diets after farming/herding became the most viable.
I think I have read that human ancestors developed shorter guts and bigger brains due to the consumption of meat, especially cooked meat. If you compare the human gut compared to horses and cows, we are omnivores.
I think the basic issue here is the really silly idea that these were primitive people. It was only 4-6000 years ago. But the fact remains: "essential fatty acids" and "essential amino acids" are found most densely and abundantly in animal products. For human digestion to extract adequate amounts of either of these from just plants is difficult and inefficient, not to mention of questionable sustainability in a northern climate. And I bet the cereals were fermented to create a safe and storable hydration source. These people would also have been aware of, and used, animal husbandry in some way. Hunting and fishing for protein and fat would have been necessary to thrive in a cold climate.
The only myths in this context are you veggie fanatics, out of touch with proven(!) reality. There's found thousands of cubic meter seashells with bones from fish, whale, seal, birds and deer. Of course animals were eaten along with plants. One food source doesn't exclude the other.
@@irinaskuld I ment that if you don't find grain starch patterns on a 5500 yeah old grinding stone, it is not strange, they could have dissapeared. And it is the first arcaeologic finding that has been analysed. I saw the new story a few days ago on a danish website.
@@olelarsen7688a burried stone with different remains would mean that the stone’s residues didn’t leave with time. Ie, scientists may be wrong and/or you don’t have all data to conclude what you did
Makes sense. Even in a modern kitchen (unless it has a bread maker), it's so much easier to consistently make a decent porridge than it is to bake anything.
Absolutely! 💖
True. I've been eating self baked bread now for a dozen years and it is still not really consistent.
@@frank-y8n You're doing better than I did. I looked into simple flatbread recipes, narrowed it down to just a container of yogurt and the same container of flour... and every time after the first somehow was just a steady decline until I gave up. Got really good at pilaf/pilau/plov instead.
Oats porridge or cake for me all week long 😂
if you make up your porridge mix extra thick, you can fry it in a pan and get a thick, chewy oat pancake or flatbread. They are called bannocks in Scotland. Make excellent travel food. You can do it on a flat stone on the edge of a fire too, if you don't have a kitchen
I like boiled whole wheat. It takes a lot longer to cook than brown rice, but for people who were keeping a fire smouldering all night to keep themselves warm, that wouldn't have been a problem.
Those days there was nothing like wheat, and when it was finally cultivated only grew that far north almost thousand years later.
Next to that, no fire were kept alive during the night. Way too much firewood, work and zero insulation made it wasted resources!
Try living under such real life circumstances... 🥱
Great video. Most educational videos I find are twice the length with half the information, and those are the good ones.
Awesome, thank you! Will make some more :D
Note to self: use parameters to slow it down and and stop the flow to read the texts without interference. So much knowledge and detail succinctly crammed together needs time to absorb. These aren't criticisms: there's practical interest in making the video (appear) short to get more clicks.
This makes such sense! I'm having porridge for breakfast right now because it's cold out and takes very little effort to prepare. Our neolithic ancestors were such busy folk (just like modern farmers) and who has time for all that baking?? Great video.
Ancient wisdom 😇
That's why there's no more than one baker and one miller in a village. Plenty such remain in Europe
@irinaskuld In Denmark a honeymoon is called Wheatbread days(Hvedebrødsdage) ie. Something out of the ordinary.
Don't agree. You can quite easily bake 'pan'cakes or flatbread on a hot flat stone... so they probably did. Another way is spiralling dow around a branch and keep it close to the fire. Any scout knows this. 😮
@@andriesscheper2022 That's not really baking, though, which is done in an oven. A much more elaborate and onerous process than your "quickbreads".
If one think about it bread is just baked porridge. In areas where crops suitable for bread was able to grow they made and ate bread. In other areas they made porridge.
This continued even to more recent history. And in places like Scottland oat porridge is still a very big thing.
The highlanders even made dried out porridge for easy transport since they couldnt make bread with the crops they grew.
Many in 🇩🇰 still have oat porridge for breakfast.
I remember gathering wild fruits in my youth in the 'fifties. People are still gathering mushrooms.
nature calling us to the roots, I love picking blackberries
Is the thing we should take from this is that early farmers did not just give up on the foods they had been gathering seasonally but began to grow crops as a reliable source of callories and possibly a way of storing them over winter?
Yes, sort of.
i wonder how much of early farming adoption was cultural in nature.
@@toddberkely6791 Funny you ask, I have been thinking about rewritting Arthur and the Knights of the Round table based on the idea that farming arrived and challenged the old magic that Merlin knew. But farming replaced an old Matriarchal system with a male dominated one
@@toddberkely6791Basically not at all in most of europe. The genetics seem to bear out that the first farmers in most of europe were a distinct group of people from the earlier hunter gatherers. Generally over 90% of the genome was replaced.
Actually its that genetic marker that made me think. If farming was so good and practical why wasnt it adopted by the natives. When I said cultural I meant, farming is what the people did because that was their culture, farming the land and being sedentary had a deep meaning for them. Otherwise why grow wheat at 50º north and eat gruel when they could have been living as nomadic hunters with a much more protein rich diet?
interesting video, dont forget fishing and hunting was a large part here in the nordics, other cultures called people from north "fish eaters" :)
Super interesting, thank you!
Very glad to hear that, was a bit reluctant about discussing it at the beginning :D
This brings human migration alive!! Love it!!!! Food is so basic. 🍜
❤
Fascinating stuff.
Really glad about the positive feedback!
Thanks for the informative video
Glad it was helpful!
Bread is a lot of work. Simple breads like pitas and tortillas would have been easier., but baked breads require advanced baking techniques. Considering how many people from england to poland eat peas, i would assume peas and pea soup were probably common in ancient times too.
They probably drank milk too and maybe something like wild ducks eggs. I don’t understand why there has to be this meat vs plant war when it comes to ancient people. If I lived back then I’d eat anything that’s safe.
That must be some modern preoccupation superimposed on ancient practices. Haven't humans always been known as omnivores, at least as to anything and everything edible in their particular environment?
Funnelbeaker culture was rather located in Central Europe than Northern, with main technology centers in today's Germany, Silesia and Poland.
There even was this tribe, warriors for about 2000 years ago named Greutungi, see wiki, who ended up to be known around Ukraine and in imperial business, their name is still very understandable in Norwegian and its no posh name, it just means The porridge kids.
I can't imagine having to gather food every day. Thank you for the insight
and spending hours grinding it 😢
@@irinaskuld The daily grind. Shoulder to the grind stone. Nose to the grindstone. Rule of thumb, and probably others that are still in use in English at least.
@dianeteeter6650 They don't have to gather every day. They dried and stored food, very necessary in snowy winters. But since they couldn't get Wi-Fi, you might as well have a look around for some free lunch.
People who eat out or take out most of their meals make me feel tired like that. Daily gathering, as it were. I want to get home to my stored goodies and make a meal. Have grains boiling right now!
dont you go to a job more than every day?
Actually it's not much of a burden in summer and autumn. When I was a child (in '80) we were spending whole days fooling around and bo one had time to go back home for dinner. Plums, apples, various young shoots, leaves and flowers (pine, linden, grasses) were pretty tasty snacks and usually you had something to chew on just a couple of steps away. And I lived in a big city, I can only imagine it was even easier in rural areas.
The grind in ancient times was to gather and preserve enough food to survive winter and spring, I suppose.
I'm very curious how people decide which plants were being cultivated and which were just being foraged. The distinction seems very arbitrary - how would we even know if these people were planting the best hazelnuts in a good location in order to get better hazelnuts in the future? How would we know they weren't deliberately planting these "edible weeds" in amongst their other crops? An "edible weed" is just a vegetable that isn't fashionable right now. Growing vegetables as well as cereals is good farming.
How do you know they weren’t cultivating chenopodum album? Sorrel is also good eating - lots of vitamin C.
Lots of oxalates. Can poison you
You don't need to cultivate those, they are extremely common and grow on their own in almost every meadow.
Didn't she mention that as "fat-hen"?
Sounds like they made beer.
I believe Middle Eastern farmers were already on to beer way before they started moving into Europe. Seems highly unlikely they would have forgotten that particlar, precious skill.
I'm wondering if they may also have made a pemmican type thing for storage for winter. Early North American colonists made "potted meat" which was from Europe (cooked meat sealed with a cap of fat).
Though in truth to this day people in Northern Europe forage for nuts and berries in hedge rows and woods, but does it necessarily mean that when they were a more important foodstuff that Blackberries and Hazel Nuts were not farmed? At least to the extent that hedges and groves were planted with intent to produce a "forage crop", with some protection from stock, wild animals and rival plants. Is it really still "Gathering" if the source is artificially created? A useful by-product of farming and not truly wild.
I like self growing fences especily if they bring a dessert as a bonus
You don't need to farm plants, that are doing perfectly well on their own, like hazelnut or berries.
Cereals are a different story, as they are not native to central or northern Europe and would not be able to outcompete local annuals and grasses.
Foraging for berries and mushrooms is also a very popular recreational activity in Poland, Czechia and Eastern Europe. Probably the same in the Baltics and Southern-Eastern Europe.
@@sieciobywatel If the plant is in a hedgerow it is being farmed. If a wood is being manged, it is being farmed. If you plant a grove or orchard and protect it from your pigs you get a more abundant supply, so farmers did. Coppice was managed for firewood, fencing, tools, arrows, bows, timber and food, and enclosed by farmers also. I was referring to the claim people were both hunter gatherers and farmers. I was suggesting that the presence of "Hunter Gatherer" type foods was not indication of actual hunter gathering. Farmers modify environments to aid foraging in ways true hunter gatherers will not. I suggest you have confirmed my hypothesis since we agree people do foraging today and are not hunter gatherers". There is a huge difference between blackberry picking for fun, as a supplement, even in time of crisis, and depending upon such to live permanently
@@fibber2u you do realize, that establishing a hedgerow or orchard takes many years, and people we are talking about were moving every few years?
@@sieciobywatel Semi nomadic behaviour is cyclical and trees etc don't go away. They are there when you come back . They engaged in collective projects that took over a hundred years to complete, such as the transformation of Stonehenge. Since the people were willing to build permanent stone structures for ritual and burial it would be strange if they did not plan agriculture in the same way. It is also wrong to assume their behaviour did not change to become settled. What they were when arriving as nomads was probably very different than when they passed out of history. They must have produced significant surpluses for them to have such a complex culture; that is not achieved with primitive agriculture or hunter gathering. However I'm trying to justify a theory and certainly don't know.
Beer? Any evidence to support cereal use for brewing?
The Roman legions lived mostly on porridge...
In the cold north, maybe bread is much more difficult to prepare than porridge.
If they could grow the grain, the outside temperature would not matter as far as preparing goes? It would need to be stored dry enough to not go moldy for either porrige or bread, and they did dehusk it.
Please tell me, why do you think outside temperatures would decide how they used their grain?
Wheat requires the most fertile soil and most heat units to grow well, of all the cereal grains; barley is intermediate and oats requires the least. If wheat does not grow well in Scotland but oats does, then farmers will grow oats.
@Goldenhawk583 Bread requires more preparation effort and a lot of fuel for the baking process. The cold, wet climate would make the accumulation of dry timbee difficult. So you'd need to spend a lot of time cutting and drying wood to support baking.
@@baarbacoa there are other things to burn besides wood, and now its a " cold and wet " climate. I was arguing against a "cold" climate.. they are not the same.
The scots developed a bread that is very suitable for their climate.. and that would be cold and wet.
Here its not wet ( yes it does rain at times), and winter is cold.. Winter, the best time togather firewood for next year.
and most people would not bake daily anyway, like you said, it is a bit of work, For flatbreads we would make them in large amounts and store them for months.
Other than that, a fire to heat a home, would also be a cooking fire.
@@Goldenhawk583 Tough to proof a loaf of bread below 65F. I toured a historic farmhouse in Sweden and they had one big stone chimney/stove/oven but they didn't bake often because of the amount of fuel it used. The used small fires to heat up the whole "rock" of it.
However, usually the argument for finding the grind stones in burials in the funnel beaker culture is their importance for grinding the main grain to flour. If on this site they are really „only“ used to grind nuts and stuff from foraging, their cultural value seems to decrease and it is harder to argue for their appearance in burials. Do the authors address that?
Given that they are called "funnel beaker culture" of course they made beer.
Pot luck as we call it in the States. Women and kids forage and tend the garden. Men tend the livestock and hunt. Throw what is available in a pot for a porridge or soup. Animal skins for pots early on(yes you can slow boil in a skin)then pottery. When large animals were hunted or domesticated livestock butchered it was a feast day. Some things never change.
The "g" in "prolonged" is a hard "g" as in "belonged".
But even with the wrong sort of grain it would be possible to make some pancake / flatbread
I thought beaker people had been found in UK southern England too.
A different branch, I believe. Their arrival coincided with the almost complete disappearance of Middle Eastern Farmer genomes, just as the latter almost wiped out the earlier hunter-gatherers except for traces.
First agricultures at least in Finland grew water caltrop, at least based on current evidence.
Were these chaps part of the Indo-European migration, or were they the other farmers who came before that? In my doubtless overly schematic mind I remember something about hunter gatherers coming in from the Middle East, then being displaced by farmers from Anatolia and then Indo-Europeans popping in last.
What she's talking about here is the Funnelbaker culture which is believed to have ultimately originated from Anatolia. The (presumed) Indo-European Corded Ware culture hadn't spread this far north yet.
Your "schematic mind" seems to have a good idea of what happened although displacement may not be the right word. Recent evidence suggests that what happened during both the two big Neolithic culture/population shifts in Northern Europe was that the existing population was decimated by the plague, leaving room for others to move in. The locals who survived merged with the newcomers and weren't displaced as such. This is still just a theory but at the moment it seems to be the most plausible one.
@@tessjuel
The Funnel beaker culture seem to have been a late development of the Northern (Danubian) route of neolithisation of Europe. They probably merged with the earlier Ertebølle culture, which had its roots in the Mesolithicum. They were in contact with neighbors, including the Corded ware, the early ‘beaker culture’. It might have been that they were the source of the earliest copper and the wheel. They might already be mixing before the end of the Funnel beaker culture, around 2800 BCE.
Didn't know wheat and barley grew so far North?
Oh yeah, barley was found in Iceland too.
@@irinaskuld But does that mean it was grown there or imported?
Barley, oats, and rye are the winter-hardiest grains of all. You can't grow much else in the Subarctic
Durum is a more native and natural type of wheat. Italians use it in pasta and that is part of the treason why their food is healthier. The theory is that other modern wheat seeds are less natural / more altered and our biology is not adapted to it as much
I think most of the problems with gluten in "modern wheat" is that it is ground much finer and at higher, therefore hotter, speeds. But I could be wrong. The knowledge has been growing fast.
@@kitefan1unbelievable how much fantasies this channel presents? How about studying something called science?
Gluten issues is just another scary fantasy, thriving among spoiled Veggies with too much time and too little demands in their privileged western lifestyle!🙄🥱😴
Wheat is a valuable food source, but it wasn't relevant that far back in time, while no one had cultivated any plant to that level!
Unbelievable how people are mixing present issues with living conditions thousand years ago!
Not even your grandparents generation had any of your privileged living conditions or luxury issues! 👀🤡🤣
Possibly the grains were used primarily as animal feed?
I always thought that rye was the most important grain in the north east Europe. To this day rye is the most important grain in Poland. This area has poore postglacial soils. Rye does not need as good soil as wheat and can withstand lower temperatures. Not to mention buckwheat and oats. There are must be something wrang with this research.
No mushrooms?
Not discussed at least.
@ I’ve read that in Sweden people did not eat much mushrooms before the 19 century. Is that a custom with long histroic roots?
Was there any evidence of acorn porridge ?
not that I know of but I'll dig up deeper
@@irinaskuld you said something about oak. Here in the northeast US the first peoples ate flour made from much rinsed, very tannic acorns. Apparently the acorns from the Pacific coast are less tannic and easier to process. And tastier.
"they likely used the grains to make porridge" "LIKELY" So much of this type of historic work is but speculation. If anyone had suggested the Antikythera device before it was discovered, they would have been laughed out of academia. The astronomy, math and precision of the pyramid is still mind-blowing. But of course, they could not bake bread.
What you call speculation is an educated theory based on the latest finds and analyses. If that will change over time it's part of the scientifc process. And there is nothing mind-blowing about the pyramids any more, we pretty much know all about their construction now.
@@irinaskuld Really!? Funny you mention knowing about the CONSTRUCTION of the pyramid when I said nothing of the construction. I mentioned the astronomy and math. But let's consider...
Aligned true north better than the much smaller Greenwich Observatory done with moderntech.
A mortar that works in joints one fiftieth of an inch thick that still has not been reproduced.
A 20 ton door that was hinged so perfectly that thousands of years of marauders did not find it.
Multi-ton polished casing stones that neither their alignment nor polishing varied by more than 1/100th of an inch +/-
Ball and socket corner joint technology to withstand earthquakes
King's chamber coffer coffer hollowed out in place with jewel drill bit using 2 tons of force(microscopic analysis), and probably cut in place with bronze saw with sapphire teeth.
The curvature of the sides equaling the curvature of the earth
Equally bisected quadrants of all earth’s land mass (cardinal position placement lines extended)
The exact length of the solar/tropical year (365.2424 days = base circuit & basis for all pyramid measurements is a circle whose circumference is 36524.24 pyramid inches.)
The exact length of the anomalistic[perihelion to perihelion] year & orbital year (365.259 days, 19th masonry course & true base plane line)
Size and distance of moon and Sun, polar radius of earth and equatorial circumference (in complex math relations of size, as well as granite coffer)
Length of general astronomical precession (25770=sum base diagonals & King’s chamber to apex=radius & 50th course of masonry to apex)
The exact position of the pyramid on earth with respect to the solar system ecliptic plane(angles of chambers)
Positions of Orion, Columba, Pleiades, Alpha Draconis, Ursa Minor(passages pointing to)
The relative positions and magnitude of the three main stars of the belt of Orion(size and placement of Giza pyramids)
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn their years, days & volume(King’s Chamber floor stones)
Mean ocean level is two times the diameter of a solar circle 365242 below the base line.
The mathematical constants of pi, phi, epsilon, and the golden ratio. (reflected in the geometric ratios of pyramid and King’s chamber coffer)
Squares the circle (dimensions), and other relationships too complicated to explain without many diagrams.
And that does not even count spiritual marvels which I will not even bother sharing here.
@@irinaskuld You said "What you call speculation is an educated theory based on the latest finds and analyses. If that will change over time it's part of the scientifc process." Yes, scientists create theories based on information, often VERY little information (hence speculative), and they do change. You are young. Give yourself another 40 years to watch these theories, some of which were passed off not as theory but as hard facts, get changed, again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again....
Denmark is actually not northern countries. Denmark is/was most good farmland after younger dryads ended. And do not foget Dogerland.
Ok, if you could actually say from analysis that cereals "were not ground", rather than "we could not determine if these were used for that", then we need to have a discussion about bran. Because that would be a very unpleasant porridge. It would however be a super beer.
Lime fruits? is that what we would call a lime in English/now? Was it that warm in Denmark then?
What about beer? Do we have evidence? (The Egyptians we know consumed more wheat via beer than flower.)
Linden - Tilia, native and common across northern Europe. Not the citrus.
Yup. Beer rather limited in comparison to Egypt and the Near East.
Tilia in North America is called basswood much to my surprise. I have one in my yard. I never dreamed those fruit pods were edible. An experiment for next summer I guess.
@@mikespangler98 The unripe fruit of some species have been made into fake chocolate. It was not commercial because it went off rapidly. Check out the Plants for a Future website for a huge database of plant uses, including quite a few for Tilia species.
@@mikespangler98flowers are delicious both for eating and making a herbal tea.
Leaves are perfectly edible as well, young are very delicate and juicy, later in summer they might be a bit more coarse, but still it's quite refreshing to chew on them and spit out the fiber.
Mind there are different varieties of linden trees, some have much sweeter leaves than others.
Fun fact ( it is actually a real fact). When we stopped eating almost all meat/animal fat , and started farming, our brains also started shrinking. We have on average 11% less brains now than we did 10 000 to 6000 years ago. And the drop coincides very clearly with when farming began in each region.
Diseases that were mostly unheard of also started becoming common, like diabetes and toothrot, due to the high carb ( sugar) intake compared to only having a bit earlier when fruits and berries were in season.
You’re using facts and logic. That’s racist. They may have had big brains but they were dumb because they murdered innocent animals and plus we’re smarter because we’re more diverse. 🤣🤣🤣
Before farming, most humans ate a broad-spectrum diet - not almost all meat/animal fat. Modern hunter gathers usually get more calories from plant sources than animal ones, for example, and this seems to be true in most places and times in prehistory.
Better nutrition from a more varied diet is a part of why pre-farming skeletons tend to be taller and healthier than farmers.
🙌🏻 precisely... no tooth-rot was detected in human remains before we started eating grains {out of sheer necessity, cos other foods were temporarily unavailable}
@@davidharrison7072 WTF is a " broadspectrum diet" And please tell me how to get more calories from plants, rather than from fat.
Never mind the science showing 80 plus % of meat and fat, and 20% or less of plantmatter, lets go with what you feel instead. But really tell me what the plants are that they picked in the snow.
There never was a time when humans ate almost exclusively animal meat/fat. That's some kind of pretty misguided propaganda.
Maybe they were making beer, beats gruel.
One would think so but within this culture not that often.
@@irinaskuld Is this conclusion based upon samples of residues collected from grave-goods?
Gruel is just a step in the process of making beer. I assert that they were beer drinkers. Grain, through the malting process naturally wants to become "beer." Many believe that it was not bread, but beer that kicked off agriculture.Or, at the very least they developed alongside one another. I may add that in their academic name resides a clue: Beaker Culture. Beer drinking was done out of large vessels as indicated from remains and ancient inscriptions and that it still continues today.
Sounds like Beer started as a way to preserve gruel
simply more sugar and carbs are not sustainable - grows population but not necessarily smarter population...
The beginning of brain shrinkage, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Who would have thought this major milestone in our development could deliver such hell to our health.
There's a huge difference between homemade porridge and junk food.
And these people didn't lack exercise.
You can be the healthiest person around and just drop dead.
huh?
@@sarahpauline4904 With the passage to agriculture, people became smaller and developed all kinds of pathologies that were extremely unusual in hunter-gatherer groups. But their much more secure food supply meant that many, many more people would generally survive into adulthood, and thus reproduce more abundantly. However, domesticating animals and living in close proximity to them led to all kinds of animal diseases passing on to humans. (Also, there's a theory that hunter-gathering results in a sort of natural birth control, where you only wind up with a child about every 3 years.)
The alternative was famine, don't believe what media tries to sell you. They had cancer tausands of year before, but they died younger. They did not had diabetes and hearth diseases because they worked all day. All these problems are caused by our sedentary lifestyle
@@cathjj840how on earth do you proof any of that irrational stuff?
Why should better living conditions make people suffer from your suggested issues?
It's the complete opposite happening...
Is that an Austrian British English accent that I hear?
European English aka all over the place :))))
I disagree. Eating meat was always the desired default and plants or grains were the backup.
I think this video is specifically discussing the plants they ate, it's not saying they didn't eat meat. (Yes, at the beginning she says it's a study of plant use).
@@smoath 0:24 It said hunting was continued to SUPPLEMENT diets, when it was in fact the other way around.
As a carnivore, I am aware that we live in an anti meat society these days.
"Plant food would probably constitute more than half of the caloric intake, possibly much higher, with animals on the second place and fish representing only a minor caloric contribution." -Modeling middle Neolithic funnel beaker diet on Falbygden, Sweden
Karl-Göran Sjögren
@@yellads Has nothing to do with contemporary anti-meatness. Meat has always been a very onerous food (in time, effort and resources). Hunting quickly decimates the wild animals when preyed upon by large, sedentary populations. You have grow them yourselves, at the cost of food you might be able to eat yourself, and they give you diseases while their quality decreases (wild animals furnish vit. D, domesticated ones do not, or very little).
@@yelladschill a bit lionman, what arr you piranha?😂
Je vergeet rogge (n).
Funny how the reconstructed individuals are brown xd ... in Denmark!
That's the colour we had then, in Denmark. (DNA evidence).
Whiteness was an adaptive trait acquired over time.
@@irinaskuld Dude these are browner than Anatolians (their ancestors). Makes 0 sense.
@@mistersir3020 What colour were Anatolians back then?
@@kevmicjen There's no reason to believe they wouldn't've been as light-colored as their modern-day descendants in the same location.
I get all my history news from bleach blondes, they are smarts!
:)))
Why the hell wouldn't they feed animals these plants and eat the animals, for better nutrition all around? Some religious nonsense, maybe?
because that wouldn't be an efficient use of resources.
Why feed animals if you could hunt as much as needed?
@lisette2060 you've clearly never hunted. Quiet.
@@sarahpauline4904 that is a ridiculous argument.
@ It's a simple fact. You could educate yourself.
I am totally sceptical that meat was ever preferred over plants. I suspect meat was eaten when plants were not available. If you can get x amount of nutrition from plants which would require less effort and much lower risk you would do that. In colder climates plants are more seasonal - so you might be forced to hunt meat to survive and just accept the risks and inefficiencies. It is I think most likely meat came from scavenged carcasses which is also risky but less so than hunting. While out foraging you might find a dead or dying animal and wait for it to expire before consuming it. Even if you can bring down a substantial prey animal, you then have to defend it from all the scavengers trying to steal it - which is a problem even for lions and other apex predators.
Much of the carnivore myth that persists in the minds of those trying to justify a taste for meat is based on little or no evidence.
The health improvements from a plant based diet that are evidenced today indicate that we evolved eating plants primarily and small amounts of meat crept into our diets after farming/herding became the most viable.
I think I have read that human ancestors developed shorter guts and bigger brains due to the consumption of meat, especially cooked meat. If you compare the human gut compared to horses and cows, we are omnivores.
I think the basic issue here is the really silly idea that these were primitive people. It was only 4-6000 years ago. But the fact remains: "essential fatty acids" and "essential amino acids" are found most densely and abundantly in animal products. For human digestion to extract adequate amounts of either of these from just plants is difficult and inefficient, not to mention of questionable sustainability in a northern climate. And I bet the cereals were fermented to create a safe and storable hydration source. These people would also have been aware of, and used, animal husbandry in some way. Hunting and fishing for protein and fat would have been necessary to thrive in a cold climate.
The only myths in this context are you veggie fanatics, out of touch with proven(!) reality.
There's found thousands of cubic meter seashells with bones from fish, whale, seal, birds and deer.
Of course animals were eaten along with plants. One food source doesn't exclude the other.
Maybe the modern scientists methods are not as fantastic as they claim.
Analysing starch patterns or so is not smth we had access to 50 yrs ago so yes, there has been a lot of progress. Or did you mean smth else?
@@irinaskuld I ment that if you don't find grain starch patterns on a 5500 yeah old grinding stone, it is not strange, they could have dissapeared. And it is the first arcaeologic finding that has been analysed. I saw the new story a few days ago on a danish website.
@@olelarsen7688a burried stone with different remains would mean that the stone’s residues didn’t leave with time. Ie, scientists may be wrong and/or you don’t have all data to conclude what you did
@@irinaskuld smth is something?
Lime fruit in Denmark ?
Might be true, but I doubt it.
I think they are referring to linden fruit.
That would make so much more sense, but then why say lime ?
But thanks.
@@MrSuperJensen I have no idea, but I have heard it referred as such.
I used the term from the paper.
@@MrSuperJensen The trees are called lime trees in English literature. I always wondered why, but figured they probably were Not citrus lime trees.