Author: Jeremy Cherfas

An astonishing paper has just been published in Science. Under the title Mozambican Grass Seed Consumption During the Middle Stone Age, ¹ Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, informs us that:

A large assemblage of starch granules has been retrieved from the surfaces of Middle Stone Age tools from Mozambique, showing that early Homo sapiens relied on grass seeds starting at least 105,000 years ago, including those of sorghum grasses.

From a broad selection of stone tools, Mercader retrieved 2369 starch granules, 2112 (89%) of which were from a Sorghum species. There were granules from other edible species too, including beans, mallows, and even the African false banana Ensete ventricosum and the African wild potato Hypoxis hemerocallidea. He also found some evidence that granules had been altered in ways suggestive of “culinary-induced modifications” but conclusive proof that the people were cooking the foods they gathered will require a different kind of research.

The standard litany for the diet of early people is that

“[s]eed collecting is conventionally perceived to have been an irrelevant activity among the Pleistocene foragers of southern Africa, on the grounds of both technological difficulty in the processing of grains and the belief that roots, fruits, and nuts, not cereals, were the basis for subsistence for the past 100,000 years and further back in time”.

Mercader concludes from his data

“that early Homo sapiens from southern Africa consumed not just underground plant staples but above-ground resources too”.

I’ll wait to see what people better versed in archaeological methods have to say about the paper. For now, I’m too gobsmacked to think of anything except to wonder whether they were cultivating those grasses as well as harvesting them.