2023-10-17 17:00:27
Seaweed, common in Eastern cuisine, has begun to be introduced into Western diets due to its good reputation. It is said that they provide vitamins, calcium, iron, fiber, healthy fats… These nutritional benefits, their sustainability and the work of chefs like Ángel León, Chef del Mar, have helped popularize them, but they continue to be an exotic ingredient in our daily menus. This was not the case for our European ancestors, who consumed these ‘aquatic vegetables’ for thousands of years from the Stone Age to the Early Middle Ages.
An international team of researchers, including the Autonomous University of Barcelona, has found evidence that seaweed and other freshwater plants were part of the human diet about 8,000 years ago, during the Mesolithic, the transition period from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, and only became marginal more recently.
Until now there was much archaeological evidence of the exploitation of aquatic resources, such as fish or shellfish, since prehistoric times, but rarely of seaweed. It was believed that these were not consumed, but rather used as fuel, food wrappers or fertilizers.
Traces on teeth
Archaeologists examined biomarkers extracted from dental calculus of 74 individuals from 28 archaeological sites across Europe, from northern Scotland to southern Spain, which revealed “direct evidence of widespread consumption of seaweed, fish and freshwater plants.” . Specifically, traces of red, green or brown algae, freshwater aquatic plants, were found, and a sample from the Orkney Islands, an archipelago located in the north of Scotland, also contained traces of a Brassica, most likely kale.
Furthermore, these ancient Europeans may have anticipated the Easterners. “The biomolecular evidence in this study is more than 3,000 years older than the historical evidence in the Far East,” emphasizes Stephen Buckley, from the Department of Archeology at the British University of York and co-author of the study published this Tuesday. ‘Nature Communications’.
“This new evidence not only shows that seaweed was consumed in Europe during the Mesolithic period when marine resources were known to be exploited,” says Buckley, “but that it continued into the Neolithic, when it is generally assumed that the introduction of agriculture led to the abandonment of marine dietary resources.
For the author, “this strongly suggests that these ancient populations sufficiently understood the nutritional benefits of seaweed to maintain their dietary link with the sea.”
Historical accounts report laws regarding seaweed harvesting in Iceland, Brittany and Ireland dating back to the 10th century, while Pliny mentions sea kale as a seafaring remedy for scurvy. However, by the 18th century, seaweed was considered a famine food, and although it remained economically important in some parts of Asia, both nutritionally and medicinally, its consumption declined in Europe.
Alternative food
There are approximately 10,000 different species of seaweed in the world, however only 145 species are eaten today, mainly in Asia. The researchers hope their study will highlight the potential of including more seaweed in our current diet, helping Europeans become healthier and more sustainable.
“Our study highlights the potential for the rediscovery of alternative, local and sustainable food resources that can contribute to addressing the negative health and environmental effects of over-reliance on a small number of mass-produced agricultural products, which is a dominant feature of much of the current Western diet and, indeed, the global long-distance food supply in general,” says Karen Hardy, professor of Prehistoric Archeology at the University of Glasgow in the UK and principal investigator of the project. ‘Powerful Plants’, which investigates the use of vegetables as food and medicine before agriculture.
“It is very exciting to be able to definitively demonstrate that algae and other local freshwater plants were consumed over a long period of our European past,” he adds.
#Europeans #ate #seaweed #Stone #Age #years #East