Ancient people were vegetarians

The team found a collection of small charcoal samples, which contained traces of the different foods the site’s earliest residents cooked and ate. The samples were created by chance, Florin told Newsweek, as small pieces of food spilled over during cooking. As the bits of food mixed with the burning embers below, they turned into charcoal, which helped preserved chemical traces that point to the original ingredients.

The team used high-powered microscopes to identify the different chemical traces and worked with co-authors and local Mirarr elders May Mango and Djaykuk Djandjomerr to match the traces with different plants commonly found in the area. In all, the samples pointed to 10 different foods, including fruit seeds, nut shells, palm stem fragments, yam fibers and root peels.

They also found traces of a small hard-shelled fruit called pandanus, which has edible nuts inside that are rich in protein and higher in fat than even coconut flesh. These highly prized nutrient sources were labor intensive to process, involving hours of hammering with stone mortar and pestle to break out of their shells.

‘It’s amazing because people put a lot of work into this and the types of plant foods they ate,’ Florin said in an interview with the university’s website. ‘And we can see that not just in these pieces of charcoal but also in the stone tool technology that comes with it. ‘We have grinding stones and we think people were grinding seeds and processing a whole heap of different plants and putting a lot of work into that and that was how they were able to adapt to these new environments.’

Michael Thomsen