Although it would be a lot of research, I absolutely would love to see more videos like this. Using primal cooking techniques. I always love any of your historical videos, like depression recipes and such. I greatly admire your channel and the information it holds. If there’s anything more like this video you can come up with I think it would be an interesting, educational and hopefully successful for your channel. Thanks so much for the content you work hard to create
There are many UA-camrs who do that and by various eras as well. Dillion does recipes between 1900 and 1975. There are several that do old England, Italy and such.
@@angelika_munkastrap4634 You were definitely limited by location and season. We have access to whatever we want whenever we want it; Neanderthals would have been limited to what was seasonally available to their area.
@@angelika_munkastrap4634 And not having access to salt? One of the first tradable seasoning/condiments, I am sure if they didn't find natural deposits around the area they were at, they were trading with other groups that lived by the coast and were making salt from the oceans. Everyone thinks, incorrectly, that neanderthals were incapable of doing basic things.
@@angelika_munkastrap4634 except there wasn't. Alot of modern fruits and veggies didn't exist back then . Carrots ; tamatos; potatos just to name few . Go try a wild tomato and tell us about the choices 🤣
To find out that Neanderthals had access to wheat berries is interesting because the paleo diet was built under the assumption that Neanderthals did not eat wheat, making that fad even more ridiculous
@lazyhippie the issue with the paleo diet is that it ignores history. Beans were nearly universally soaked in ph altered water to deactivate lectins. Wild wheat is essentially a superfood, and up until recently grains were heirloom grown, soaked and sprouted before being cooked into bread. Tradition is just a solution to a problem we dont know that we have, until we eschew the tradition and find ourselves facing adversity once again.
@@Ichthys42 A perfect example of that is what happened when corn (or, technically, maize) was introduced to Europe without the associated knowledge of nixtamalization.
I feel that they only look at a very select few groups of Neanderthal and say "this is what they ate so it's what I will eat!" It makes no sense. Primitive people ate a very wide variety of foods
Emmy - if you decide to retry this, or another Neanderthal recipe (should you find one), they almost certainly did have salt. Most Denisovan and Neanderthal camps are near salt licks, and the paleo-archaeologists I've talked to don't think that's a coincidence. 😊
Yup, and they lived (not always and everybody) by the sea. Animals need salt so it is not likely they would not be able to get hold of salt in some way (and because exchange trade was at that time, they surely had salt).
They were not as 'primitive' as we were lead to believe in school. They had burial rituals, used herbs as medicine, cared for the sick and lame. They were just a different branch of humans.
It is unknown though if they used it or not. Since it wasn’t found as a component in the food Emmy is trying to replicate, it makes sense for her not to use it.
Did you read the source Emmy linked in the description? The professor that coordinated the excavation of the patties says otherwise. He's directly quoted in the article saying that these Neanderthals did not have access to salt.
@@rollercoaster.mp4 Yes, I read it. Other studies of the Shanidar caves note that the animals-the same ones mentioned in the Guardian article-had access to salt licks. (Where do you think the animals were getting their salt? They weren't crossing the Zagros.) Furthermore, the Great Zab basin was the home to a LOT of the civilizations that made up the earliest civilizations, including Erbil and Nimrud (the river joins the Tigris). Kabukcu is clearly an excellent scientist, but a lot of other scientists have stated that in order for things like vibrant herd animals to exist in the area, they would have had to have sources of salt.
If you were to soak the beans in ocean water, i bet it would give you the salt that it needs. Coastal neanderthals would have used this as well as seaweed and coastal plants to do this as well, but i wonder what, if any, things could be used similarily away from the coastal regions.
Last week I went to see the green comet C/2022 E3 ZTF, which has not been visible since the Neanderthals were around 50,000 years ago. It was so cool to see something so ancient, and this video came out at just the right time!
I think I'm going to try a version of this: with garlic, black pepper, plus a bit of leek, this would be a great baseline patty or veggie meatball! Watching you prepare the mix, I was reminded both of lentil Kofta balls, & chickpea falafel I've made: the soaked beans usually have enough water to hold the blend together. Thank you, this was great!
This video showed up after I was finished with my anthropology project about neanderthals and denisovans, so I found this very interesting and sent it to a few other students - love it! Thanks for making this!
Very interesting. Your rock tools are known in the SW U.S. as a "mano" and "metate" used to grind dry corn and other plant foods into meal or flour before cooking. I wonder what the result would have been if you would have processed all the ingredients and made a flour, rather than pre-soaking some...
Ooh my time to shine! The big stones you used here are slate, and I think the little stone you used (a bit weathered so I'd have to have a closer look) was a granite or something similar (same as your mortar and pestle) :) (source: geologist)
You'd be better served just buying a molcajete. Even if they don't have actively toxic things in them, bits of ground up stone in your food because you picked a stone that was way too soft are neither healthy nor appetizing. Plus, ya know, the molcajete is nicely bowl shaped so you don't accidentally yeet your beans. :P
I wish I’d known about this kind of thing when my kids were little and learning about our ancient hominid brethren. I might just try this for myself! It sounds fascinating. I wonder how flat you can make it and have it still stick together, like a tortilla or flatbread. It might make a great Neanderthal taco, with some sort of game meat or even fish.
This is just wild that we can even have a single tiny clue what neanderthals were eating so many thousands of years ago. Unimaginable, almost. Yet, here we are. Thanks for the cool, science-y, anthropology-y recipe, Emmy!
And it wasn’t even that very long ago. The human remains found in the English Channel and North Sea are now believed to have been Neanderthals who lived there before the Doggerland inundation, about 9,000 years ago
Hello Emmy, I don't know if it would interest you but in 2007 Ray Mears a famous British outdoorsman made a short TV series for the BBC accompanied later by a big glossy book about the foods of our ancestors called Ray Mears wild food, of course the contents are mostly UK based, he was accompanied by a Archeo-botanist they tried things like acorns wild grains sea buckthorn ànd all sorts of roots and shrubs fascinating stuff. atb Bill
Sea kale root was possibly the most important one they tried. It was abundant in ancient times and the huge roots would have provided foragers with sufficient starch to keep them going through the winters. Just as turnips and swedes did in mediæval times.
@Clan Improbable another ancient and very healthy item which you can sometimes find in boutique food stores is Sea Buckthorn juice it's thick orange and absolutely packed with vitamins
This recipe sounds pretty good, I bet that with a couple of fixes to the modern taste, it could actually be a nice dish! Pretty inspiring, thanks for sharing it with us!
i loved the video, i loved the analysis. you did an awesome job with silva’s nuances! these were things i always loved about him; he was my favorite bond character! as a side note, your narration just rocks. your cadence just makes everything you say sound profound!
Thank you for always being so experimental and creative with your content! I've followed since i was a little girl, and I always learn something from you
Sounds like a beyond ancient veggie burger! "Neanderthal" is often used as an insult but that's unfair because they were very resourceful. They invented the wheel and discovered fire after all.
Fire was utilized long before Neanderthals and the wheel was invented in the fourth millennium BC in Mesopotamia thousands of years after the Neanderthals went extinct.
I could listen to your lovely voice and watch your expressive hands talking for hours. And, oh yes, the video was simultaneously entertaining and educational too.
It sounds interesting, and seriously, it's a complete meal, if you think about it... The nuts, grains & legumes make a complete protein, also is fiber, carb, and I'd try that.
It looks like the predecessor of a Felafel burger Emmy. I was surprised by your reaction. I thought it would be bland. Also, I figured they got the salt from the dead sea and used the salted water to soak the ingredients but probably collect rainwater. Idk, I just was thinking.
If Iraq had large deserts like it does today, salt lakes would have been nearby. Also the ashes of many halophytic (salt tolerant) plants (which are common in dry areas) could provide an alkaline salinity (KOH and NaOH, once rehydrated). Natives in North America even used the ashes of Mimulus ringens (which is not an obvious halophyte, since it grows in freshwater wetland areas) for salt, though this was supplanted by oceanic salt via trade in most parts of the continent. Salt was probably known.
Emmy, you know those books about ancient Native Americans by Jean M. Auel? There were several other authors who wrote books about ancient Native Americans and how they cook their food over a fire and an animal skin bag and they would add Hot Rocks to keep it boiling. It was really interesting.
She did an immense amount of research into how ancient people really lived, before she began writing, and continued to do her research as she wrote each book in the series. She wanted them to be as historically accurate as possible.
That hot rocks thing was true in Europe, too. We find them all the time at dig sites around the world. At first I thought it was kind of a weird practice bc if you're going to heat the rocks why not just heat the food, but then I realized that they just had a fire going at basically all times so it's easier to just stick some rocks in there to heat up before you need to cook. But yeah, tossing the hot rocks into cold, uncooked food eventually splits them and we find the split rocks in midden piles.
Fascinating! Thank you! I'm mildly allergic to almonds, so I might try this recipe with pine nuts, instead. Showed this to my wife and she's game for trying these, so it looks like we'll be trying Thagburgers (after the late Thag Simmons) in the near future.
Now I have to try this, and make a burger version and make my friends try it. Spring is so near. Time to make a few gallons of ale to sit at the ready in a couple of months; thanks Emmy!
It was probably even more flavourful back then bc those are the domesticated versions of all those grains and nuts. The wild types would have tasted different, and probably better bc meeting the volume needs of modern society means we lose some of the taste (for example, heirloom tomatoes vs just regular store bought ones.). But this was a cool experiment to see. ^_^
@@420funny6but is that in relation to our over stimulated pallets as we have them now ? If they didn’t spend their lives eating restaurant food and such, I’m sure their pallets would taste it differently.
Actually, the selective breeding was done exactly to add flavor. Banana were not edible, potatoes tasted terrible, berries weren't as flavorsome. SOME food choices were more flavorsome, but that blanket statement you made is truly false.
@captainharlock3998 nah, it's not false. Hunter gatherer populations didn't run around eating terrible food all the time. Things that were domesticated were specifically domesticated because populations were already eating them. They didn't look at a food and go "I want to make a better version of this" they went "I like this and I don't want to go so far to get ahold of it" or "i need more of this" (which is part of why the agricultural revolution corresponds with a population boom.). *Cooking* is how the flavours were dealt with. Potatoes specifically, since you mentioned them, actually didn't taste terrible at all and that was kinda the problem bc they were poisonous. However, Peruvian people observed monkeys dipping the Potatoes in clay slip and eating them (it's a specific kind of slip from a specific geographical area.), and they decided to try it. It worked, and later studies show that there are compounds in the slip that neutralize the poison in wild type Potatoes. But they weren't out there like "this tastes terrible so I'll domesticate it and it won't" because they didn't know what domestication was or what the results are, and even if they had known, it takes generations for it to happen.
it wouldn't have served the same function as a veggie burger though, it wouldn't have been seen as an alternative to meat. If you tried to tell a neanderthal to give up meat they'd think you were insane.
Like they literally built their religion around respecting spirits of animals they hunted. They wouldn't give up meat, but they would be horrified at the way modern meat industry operates. It'd be literally sacrilege to them.
I'm wondering if the way they made it would have been more like a pancake since your directions said the consistency should be like a sludge. I also wonder if they ever used some sort of fat when making them.
The smaller rock isn't a rock, it's a fossil! The larger one looks like what's called a "cement" stone, it's like a mud fossil, sometimes you can find seaweed fossils in there, they show up more when it's wet
The grinding of the grains is a lot easier if you soak the grains in an alkali pH water such as what you get when you leach the lye out of wood ash. When you soak most grains in a high pH solution you get a niximiasis reaction which causes the grain to puff up and break down indigestible starches making them actually digestible to a human digestive system Seed Corn + Lye Water = Hominy. Wet grind hominy then dry and sift and you have masa flour. Coarse grind and dry the hominy and you have grits. Soaked then wet ground wheet or barley is called malted meal. Take the malted meal and dry and you have farina ("Cream of Wheat" in the U.S.) Both grits and farina are shelf stable portable trail foods from yesteryear than only require hydrating in boiling water to have a meal. Malted barley boiled with some wild onion for seasoning is qhite tasty and is a breakfast you can share with your horse. Watch out with where you put the water you soaked the grain. You might get some wild yeast starting to grow in the water where grians were soaked, especially malted grains. You don't want to get in trouble for home brewing beer or ale.
Looks good. I make something similar, minus the white wheat and mustard, but with soaked and ground pinto beans, black beans, sprouted lentils, red wheat, millet, flax and a few other things. They're really good for those days where meat just seems too much for my stomach.
It's amazing how modern scientists can find a random bit of food or a vessel that once held food or beverages and determine what they may have consisted of centuries, or even millennia later.
DNA is a wonderful thing, and can let you figure out what anything made from living organisms was made out of, so long as it's from fairly recent times (within the last hundred thousand years or so with large enough samples to be able to derive the DNA from the fragments). Older than that, you can actually use the proteins - many of which fossilize or leave specific fossilized residues. This is how we've been able to figure out what color dinosaurs came in, with scientists analyzing the compounds found in fossilized dinosaur skin and backtracking from those to pigments found in modern animals. All that kind of science is absolutely fascinating, and I once heard it equated to "trying to figure out what an elephant looks like by staring at it through a straw from 6 inches away".
"wild mustard" and "mustard seed" arent really very close at all, "wild mustard" USUALLY refers to the actual plant part, AKA the flowers and/or the "greens" of the plant, as in what we would call today "mustard greens" or "mustard flowers", both of which have a WILDLY different flavor, when compared to the almost horseraddish qualities that the seeds give you.
@@Diebulfrog79 i had never heard of that plant before, now i know it not only LOOKS like wild mustard, but also tastes a bit like it too! thanks for that man, that's another bit in the back of the brain for when everything goes to the waste bucket. also hiking trips. lol
Definitely should've made it a sludge. It would've cooked more evenly throughout being thinner. Yes it would've been harder to flip but you probably wouldn't have even needed to. I could be wrong though. Definitely want to try this out
Although I doubt they knew the nutritional value of this, I would suppose it was just something to have with their meat, or in times when they had a bad hunt, this would be something that would definitely fill them up. I wonder if they knew to dry their beans and grains etc for the winter. Or did they move with the animals?? 🤔
I would add oil, s and p, onions, some green herbs and carrots. You could make a veggie burger, bun, condimenst and all the trimmings. I'd like to hear what that tastes like.
I have been watching you for years, Emmy, and you are always such a delight. Do you do collaborations with other YTers? If so, check out Tasting History with Max Miller. This type of recipe is right up his alley.
Really liked this video! I am trying to eat more and more basic although also being a vegetarian. Loved to hear about this pattie. So down to earth just grains beans and nuts. Love to see more of this !!! ❤
Very cool and very interesting! Looks like you are using a kind of sandstone or limestone and while it shouldn't be toxic or anything, using soft stones to grind with will eventually get grit in your teeth and wear them down prematurely. This was very common in native American tribes who used Metates to grind corn with. A hard granite stone or basalt is the ticket for grinding and cooking and won't transfer grit nearly as much into the food. Look up "earliest known recipes" and check out some of the old Sumerian dishes. I'd love to see one of those too!
One problem with animal fat is that you'd need to have the technology to process the fat into lard or it would spoil very quickly. But who knows, maybe during a particular time of plenty you might make a little feast
@@Graphictruth There's zero justification to say they added salt into their dishes... They would have gotten enough in them from fish and other sources.
Wonder what kind of condiments they used. If they were culinary advanced enough to be making these patties then I imagine they paired them with sauces or spreads.
I believe the prevailing theory is mustard being the first condiment...it's definitely possible they ground up extra mustard seeds and made a paste to add some flavor!
I love this. I'm sure the grindstone would also add a bit of flavor and a tiny bit of salt if you were lucky in your stone choice. Imagine this fried in some leftover game fat 👌
That's such a funny and interesting idea👌🏼 in Germany (with class) we once went to an ancient "farm" And baked bread similar to yours That was a really cool experience, thanks for the reminder🧡👍🏼
Yum. By the way, wild mustard is a leafy plant which was enjoyed like kale or spinach. I did not read the article/recipe, but the mustard leaves are quite tasty and would probably have been used rather than mustard seeds (or along with them).
Various species of mustards have different parts you can eat. Some are compleatly edible. The article specifically states mustard seeds. Either they used other parts of the mustard for something else or could only use the seeds of that variety they had access to. We do know that this used seeds.
At around the 1:36 mark you called those ancient people Neanderthals, with a soft th, like thought. But this is a German word, so it should be pronounced like NeanderTALL. In German Thal, (pronounced TALL), means Valley. The first skeleton was found in the valley of the Neander River. So, NeanderTALL.
Modern wheat has a lot of gluten in it, which probably helped the patty with stickiness and maintaining shape. It probably would have been more accurate to use an ancient grain. I'm curious to see how well this would do with spelt, which is a precursor to wheat and has a lot less gluten. I happen to have some spelt and lentils, so I might try this out. Also, I love the fact that this recipe is vegan. Very cool video, as always, Emmy! Thank you.
Fascinating. I knew Neanderthals had fire and that they cooked food, but I didn’t realize they mixed foods together and seasoned them. Thanks for this, Emmymade.
Although it would be a lot of research, I absolutely would love to see more videos like this. Using primal cooking techniques. I always love any of your historical videos, like depression recipes and such. I greatly admire your channel and the information it holds. If there’s anything more like this video you can come up with I think it would be an interesting, educational and hopefully successful for your channel. Thanks so much for the content you work hard to create
@@GushOnline yes!!
There are many UA-camrs who do that and by various eras as well. Dillion does recipes between 1900 and 1975. There are several that do old England, Italy and such.
I’d love to see Max Miller do this recipe and give a history lesson with it.
Check out Tasting History with Max Miller! A great historical food channel
My uncle was a neanderthal! This was his favorite recipe, thanks Emmy 😊
Lol
😂😂👍🏼👊🏼🦖🍺
😆
😂I'm rollin'.
Did he speak the language? Did he teach u the bad words?
I bet if I had limited food choices as a Neanderthal I would’ve probably been really excited to eat this, it sounds kinda good
Have a little deer or bird meat and one of these bad boys? Forget about it!
There’s not limited food choices - there’s the same food sources now as then
Vegetables grains and meats
@@angelika_munkastrap4634 You were definitely limited by location and season. We have access to whatever we want whenever we want it; Neanderthals would have been limited to what was seasonally available to their area.
@@angelika_munkastrap4634 And not having access to salt? One of the first tradable seasoning/condiments, I am sure if they didn't find natural deposits around the area they were at, they were trading with other groups that lived by the coast and were making salt from the oceans. Everyone thinks, incorrectly, that neanderthals were incapable of doing basic things.
@@angelika_munkastrap4634 except there wasn't. Alot of modern fruits and veggies didn't exist back then . Carrots ; tamatos; potatos just to name few . Go try a wild tomato and tell us about the choices 🤣
To find out that Neanderthals had access to wheat berries is interesting because the paleo diet was built under the assumption that Neanderthals did not eat wheat, making that fad even more ridiculous
Paleo also excludes beans. I always thought that the reasoning behind the diet was sus. I think it can be healthy, but the research is flawed.
They probably had something closer to Spelt than modern wheat.
@lazyhippie the issue with the paleo diet is that it ignores history. Beans were nearly universally soaked in ph altered water to deactivate lectins. Wild wheat is essentially a superfood, and up until recently grains were heirloom grown, soaked and sprouted before being cooked into bread. Tradition is just a solution to a problem we dont know that we have, until we eschew the tradition and find ourselves facing adversity once again.
@@Ichthys42 A perfect example of that is what happened when corn (or, technically, maize) was introduced to Europe without the associated knowledge of nixtamalization.
I feel that they only look at a very select few groups of Neanderthal and say "this is what they ate so it's what I will eat!" It makes no sense. Primitive people ate a very wide variety of foods
Emmy - if you decide to retry this, or another Neanderthal recipe (should you find one), they almost certainly did have salt. Most Denisovan and Neanderthal camps are near salt licks, and the paleo-archaeologists I've talked to don't think that's a coincidence. 😊
Yup, and they lived (not always and everybody) by the sea. Animals need salt so it is not likely they would not be able to get hold of salt in some way (and because exchange trade was at that time, they surely had salt).
They were not as 'primitive' as we were lead to believe in school. They had burial rituals, used herbs as medicine, cared for the sick and lame. They were just a different branch of humans.
It is unknown though if they used it or not. Since it wasn’t found as a component in the food Emmy is trying to replicate, it makes sense for her not to use it.
Did you read the source Emmy linked in the description? The professor that coordinated the excavation of the patties says otherwise. He's directly quoted in the article saying that these Neanderthals did not have access to salt.
@@rollercoaster.mp4 Yes, I read it. Other studies of the Shanidar caves note that the animals-the same ones mentioned in the Guardian article-had access to salt licks. (Where do you think the animals were getting their salt? They weren't crossing the Zagros.) Furthermore, the Great Zab basin was the home to a LOT of the civilizations that made up the earliest civilizations, including Erbil and Nimrud (the river joins the Tigris). Kabukcu is clearly an excellent scientist, but a lot of other scientists have stated that in order for things like vibrant herd animals to exist in the area, they would have had to have sources of salt.
If you were to soak the beans in ocean water, i bet it would give you the salt that it needs. Coastal neanderthals would have used this as well as seaweed and coastal plants to do this as well, but i wonder what, if any, things could be used similarily away from the coastal regions.
Last week I went to see the green comet C/2022 E3 ZTF, which has not been visible since the Neanderthals were around 50,000 years ago. It was so cool to see something so ancient, and this video came out at just the right time!
Ooo that’s so cool! What a great experience!
man I'm jealous!
In Antiquity thru the Renaissance people would soak their nuts as well as grains, makes them so much easier to grind in a mortar and pestle.
I have to check the expiration date but I think there's some cottage cheese in the back of my frig that's roughly 70,000 years old.
I think I'm going to try a version of this: with garlic, black pepper, plus a bit of leek, this would be a great baseline patty or veggie meatball! Watching you prepare the mix, I was reminded both of lentil Kofta balls, & chickpea falafel I've made: the soaked beans usually have enough water to hold the blend together. Thank you, this was great!
I kind of feel like I am watching Tasting History with Max Miller! Love this!
They should collab! Id love to see that
Oh that would be cool if they colladed!
He would have made two so he could bang them together.
Though Max usually goes back to the original recipes, an Neanderthals didn’t write cookbooks.
Max has worked with no recipe before he has made Egyptian recipes before. You just have to research what was available at that time.
This video showed up after I was finished with my anthropology project about neanderthals and denisovans, so I found this very interesting and sent it to a few other students - love it! Thanks for making this!
More of these historical vids Emmy!! You do them so well & they are a lot of fun
Yes! Though in this case, it’s pre-historical 😂
Very interesting. Your rock tools are known in the SW U.S. as a "mano" and "metate" used to grind dry corn and other plant foods into meal or flour before cooking. I wonder what the result would have been if you would have processed all the ingredients and made a flour, rather than pre-soaking some...
Ooh my time to shine! The big stones you used here are slate, and I think the little stone you used (a bit weathered so I'd have to have a closer look) was a granite or something similar (same as your mortar and pestle) :)
(source: geologist)
Could they contain lead or something else dangerous, or are they safe to use with food?
You'd be better served just buying a molcajete. Even if they don't have actively toxic things in them, bits of ground up stone in your food because you picked a stone that was way too soft are neither healthy nor appetizing. Plus, ya know, the molcajete is nicely bowl shaped so you don't accidentally yeet your beans. :P
@@se6369 unlikely. Perhaps trace amounts of heavy metals but so does everything else we cook with. Both these rocks are mostly silica.
@@helena4652thank you! I was curious as soon as she asked☺️🙂☺️🙂
I was thinking granite too.
Take that same recipe and roll into thin sticks or thin flat disks, sprinkle a lil salt and bake it. Should make some incredible snack sticks or chips
Your commitment to testing these out is impressive! Finding two rocks to bring those ingredients!
I bet these patties when dried out would make a great soup puck when travelling.
I would love to see more of these historic/ancient recipes. Fun!
I wish I’d known about this kind of thing when my kids were little and learning about our ancient hominid brethren. I might just try this for myself! It sounds fascinating. I wonder how flat you can make it and have it still stick together, like a tortilla or flatbread. It might make a great Neanderthal taco, with some sort of game meat or even fish.
I hope this will be a series! You could cook and taste different foods from different countries from ancient times!
I love that you cite your sources, Emmy. I love it so much.
This is just wild that we can even have a single tiny clue what neanderthals were eating so many thousands of years ago. Unimaginable, almost. Yet, here we are. Thanks for the cool, science-y, anthropology-y recipe, Emmy!
And it wasn’t even that very long ago. The human remains found in the English Channel and North Sea are now believed to have been Neanderthals who lived there before the Doggerland inundation, about 9,000 years ago
Hello Emmy, I don't know if it would interest you but in 2007 Ray Mears a famous British outdoorsman made a short TV series for the BBC accompanied later by a big glossy book about the foods of our ancestors called Ray Mears wild food, of course the contents are mostly UK based, he was accompanied by a Archeo-botanist they tried things like acorns wild grains sea buckthorn ànd all sorts of roots and shrubs fascinating stuff. atb Bill
Sea kale root was possibly the most important one they tried. It was abundant in ancient times and the huge roots would have provided foragers with sufficient starch to keep them going through the winters. Just as turnips and swedes did in mediæval times.
I must look for this!
@Clan Improbable another ancient and very healthy item which you can sometimes find in boutique food stores is Sea Buckthorn juice it's thick orange and absolutely packed with vitamins
It's really an incredible series
This recipe sounds pretty good, I bet that with a couple of fixes to the modern taste, it could actually be a nice dish!
Pretty inspiring, thanks for sharing it with us!
it brings me joy how excited you get when describing something new you discovered! it’s honestly what makes your videos so enjoyable to watch. 🖤
The original veggie burger! I love that you kept the methods as Neanderthal as possible. So cool!
i loved the video, i loved the analysis. you did an awesome job with silva’s nuances! these were things i always loved about him; he was my favorite bond character! as a side note, your narration just rocks. your cadence just makes everything you say sound profound!
It was discovered that in the Gibraltar settlement they also ate mussels and fish
And in Spain just plants/mushrooms/seeds etc
This is one of my favorite kinds of videos you do. It's so interesting and unique. I think I want to try these, with a little salt added.
Thank you for always being so experimental and creative with your content! I've followed since i was a little girl, and I always learn something from you
Sounds like a beyond ancient veggie burger!
"Neanderthal" is often used as an insult but that's unfair because they were very resourceful. They invented the wheel and discovered fire after all.
Fire was utilized long before Neanderthals and the wheel was invented in the fourth millennium BC in Mesopotamia thousands of years after the Neanderthals went extinct.
Actually fire was invented by homo erectus/homo ergaster and the wheel was invented by homo sapiens (our species)
Emmy makes the best videos! Thanks for being so stinkin' cool, Emmy!
I could listen to your lovely voice and watch your expressive hands talking for hours. And, oh yes, the video was simultaneously entertaining and educational too.
It sounds interesting, and seriously, it's a complete meal, if you think about it... The nuts, grains & legumes make a complete protein, also is fiber, carb, and I'd try that.
Omg I used to watch you growing up and I randomly thought of you and found you! You’re still so sweet and always so happy 🤍
It looks like the predecessor of a Felafel burger Emmy.
I was surprised by your reaction. I thought it would be bland.
Also,
I figured they got the salt from the dead sea and used the salted water to soak the ingredients but probably collect rainwater. Idk, I just was thinking.
It is falafel's most distant ancestor indeed
There are other salt lakes nearer, one only 67 miles (108km) away from Shanidar cave.
Yeah, it would have been perfectly historically accurate to use salt or soak them in salt water.
Also natural salt lucks are often where these camps are found so there's that
If Iraq had large deserts like it does today, salt lakes would have been nearby. Also the ashes of many halophytic (salt tolerant) plants (which are common in dry areas) could provide an alkaline salinity (KOH and NaOH, once rehydrated). Natives in North America even used the ashes of Mimulus ringens (which is not an obvious halophyte, since it grows in freshwater wetland areas) for salt, though this was supplanted by oceanic salt via trade in most parts of the continent. Salt was probably known.
I feel like I just read about their diet like a week ago in some science article. This is so cool. Well done!
Emmy, you know those books about ancient Native Americans by Jean M. Auel? There were several other authors who wrote books about ancient Native Americans and how they cook their food over a fire and an animal skin bag and they would add Hot Rocks to keep it boiling. It was really interesting.
Those books were set in Northern Europe
She did an immense amount of research into how ancient people really lived, before she began writing, and continued to do her research as she wrote each book in the series. She wanted them to be as historically accurate as possible.
That hot rocks thing was true in Europe, too. We find them all the time at dig sites around the world. At first I thought it was kind of a weird practice bc if you're going to heat the rocks why not just heat the food, but then I realized that they just had a fire going at basically all times so it's easier to just stick some rocks in there to heat up before you need to cook. But yeah, tossing the hot rocks into cold, uncooked food eventually splits them and we find the split rocks in midden piles.
Wow, Emmy! This was so awesome! I’d love to see more along this line. Thank You!
Fascinating! Thank you! I'm mildly allergic to almonds, so I might try this recipe with pine nuts, instead. Showed this to my wife and she's game for trying these, so it looks like we'll be trying Thagburgers (after the late Thag Simmons) in the near future.
Now I have to try this, and make a burger version and make my friends try it. Spring is so near. Time to make a few gallons of ale to sit at the ready in a couple of months; thanks Emmy!
Another recent article showed that the ones in Spain were eating crab.
Neanderthals in Gibraltar spent extended periods of time eating vegetarian too.
This is one of my favorite videos of yours for the history you share, and the history offered in the comments. Thank you Emmy and all!
It was probably even more flavourful back then bc those are the domesticated versions of all those grains and nuts. The wild types would have tasted different, and probably better bc meeting the volume needs of modern society means we lose some of the taste (for example, heirloom tomatoes vs just regular store bought ones.). But this was a cool experiment to see. ^_^
Eat a wild sweet potato and you'll use every word but flavorful
@@420funny6but is that in relation to our over stimulated pallets as we have them now ?
If they didn’t spend their lives eating restaurant food and such, I’m sure their pallets would taste it differently.
interesting!
Actually, the selective breeding was done exactly to add flavor. Banana were not edible, potatoes tasted terrible, berries weren't as flavorsome. SOME food choices were more flavorsome, but that blanket statement you made is truly false.
@captainharlock3998 nah, it's not false. Hunter gatherer populations didn't run around eating terrible food all the time. Things that were domesticated were specifically domesticated because populations were already eating them. They didn't look at a food and go "I want to make a better version of this" they went "I like this and I don't want to go so far to get ahold of it" or "i need more of this" (which is part of why the agricultural revolution corresponds with a population boom.). *Cooking* is how the flavours were dealt with. Potatoes specifically, since you mentioned them, actually didn't taste terrible at all and that was kinda the problem bc they were poisonous. However, Peruvian people observed monkeys dipping the Potatoes in clay slip and eating them (it's a specific kind of slip from a specific geographical area.), and they decided to try it. It worked, and later studies show that there are compounds in the slip that neutralize the poison in wild type Potatoes. But they weren't out there like "this tastes terrible so I'll domesticate it and it won't" because they didn't know what domestication was or what the results are, and even if they had known, it takes generations for it to happen.
I loved this! It's so interesting to learn about what ancient people ate!
Hot sauce! 🔥 Who knew that the neanderthals made the first veggie burger! Thanks Emmy ❣️
Wouldn't that mean that veggie burgers are older than burgers? Unless they would grind meat using stone into patties too...
it wouldn't have served the same function as a veggie burger though, it wouldn't have been seen as an alternative to meat. If you tried to tell a neanderthal to give up meat they'd think you were insane.
@@vashsunglasses Neanderthals also only got meat from sustainable sustenance hunting, far cry from mass exploitation of factory farming.
@@vashsunglasses I would feel the same way.
Like they literally built their religion around respecting spirits of animals they hunted. They wouldn't give up meat, but they would be horrified at the way modern meat industry operates. It'd be literally sacrilege to them.
I'm wondering if the way they made it would have been more like a pancake since your directions said the consistency should be like a sludge. I also wonder if they ever used some sort of fat when making them.
The smaller rock isn't a rock, it's a fossil!
The larger one looks like what's called a "cement" stone, it's like a mud fossil, sometimes you can find seaweed fossils in there, they show up more when it's wet
how can you tell?
@@Aylali experience! I also happen to have some 😅
The grinding of the grains is a lot easier if you soak the grains in an alkali pH water such as what you get when you leach the lye out of wood ash.
When you soak most grains in a high pH solution you get a niximiasis reaction which causes the grain to puff up and break down indigestible starches making them actually digestible to a human digestive system
Seed Corn + Lye Water = Hominy. Wet grind hominy then dry and sift and you have masa flour. Coarse grind and dry the hominy and you have grits.
Soaked then wet ground wheet or barley is called malted meal. Take the malted meal and dry and you have farina ("Cream of Wheat" in the U.S.)
Both grits and farina are shelf stable portable trail foods from yesteryear than only require hydrating in boiling water to have a meal. Malted barley boiled with some wild onion for seasoning is qhite tasty and is a breakfast you can share with your horse.
Watch out with where you put the water you soaked the grain. You might get some wild yeast starting to grow in the water where grians were soaked, especially malted grains. You don't want to get in trouble for home brewing beer or ale.
Emmy! This was a very fun and excellent video idea!! Please do more, if you can!
Looks good. I make something similar, minus the white wheat and mustard, but with soaked and ground pinto beans, black beans, sprouted lentils, red wheat, millet, flax and a few other things. They're really good for those days where meat just seems too much for my stomach.
Odd stuff like this is why I love this channel ✨
Oh wow! Good video a lot of good info!
Did you see the video where a chef recreates the bread they found still in an oven in Pompeii? 🍞
Sounds like it'd be pretty well toasted! 🌋
Max is awsome!🙂👍
I trust grains and beans as it is and this confirms my trust. Glad it turned out well, gonna try it myself.
It's amazing how modern scientists can find a random bit of food or a vessel that once held food or beverages and determine what they may have consisted of centuries, or even millennia later.
DNA is a wonderful thing, and can let you figure out what anything made from living organisms was made out of, so long as it's from fairly recent times (within the last hundred thousand years or so with large enough samples to be able to derive the DNA from the fragments). Older than that, you can actually use the proteins - many of which fossilize or leave specific fossilized residues. This is how we've been able to figure out what color dinosaurs came in, with scientists analyzing the compounds found in fossilized dinosaur skin and backtracking from those to pigments found in modern animals.
All that kind of science is absolutely fascinating, and I once heard it equated to "trying to figure out what an elephant looks like by staring at it through a straw from 6 inches away".
I’m saving this to my food playlist. I want to make this.
Thanks Emmy! This looks like a fun project with friends and their kids. Have a bbq and include these as a "historical eating journey".
Has a nice crunch, thanks for sharing this 😊
Before I find out, it almost sounds like falafel 😳😃 That would mean ppl have been eating falafel for tens of thousands of YEARS 🤯
Well, it IS a basic mix of foods found naturally in the Middle East, so yeah, for sure
This is so flippin fascinating. I would so love to learn more about ancient cultures and how they consumed food. Thanks Emmy!
The way Emmy manages to be so positive and accepting of even caveman food is astounding.
I love your videos, it's never predictable and always interesting! My kids love watching you as well. Thank you for the content 💖
"wild mustard" and "mustard seed" arent really very close at all, "wild mustard" USUALLY refers to the actual plant part, AKA the flowers and/or the "greens" of the plant, as in what we would call today "mustard greens" or "mustard flowers", both of which have a WILDLY different flavor, when compared to the almost horseraddish qualities that the seeds give you.
yellow rocket
Agreed
@@Diebulfrog79 i had never heard of that plant before, now i know it not only LOOKS like wild mustard, but also tastes a bit like it too! thanks for that man, that's another bit in the back of the brain for when everything goes to the waste bucket. also hiking trips. lol
Apparently the article says mustard seeds
@misterscottintheway the one i saw said "wild mustard", either way its still cool.
Definitely should've made it a sludge. It would've cooked more evenly throughout being thinner. Yes it would've been harder to flip but you probably wouldn't have even needed to. I could be wrong though. Definitely want to try this out
I love this. I'd love to see even more if they exist.
Aww Emmy you just melt my heart. Such a sweetheart! 😊
Although I doubt they knew the nutritional value of this, I would suppose it was just something to have with their meat, or in times when they had a bad hunt, this would be something that would definitely fill them up. I wonder if they knew to dry their beans and grains etc for the winter. Or did they move with the animals?? 🤔
I would add oil, s and p, onions, some green herbs and carrots. You could make a veggie burger, bun, condimenst and all the trimmings. I'd like to hear what that tastes like.
I have been watching you for years, Emmy, and you are always such a delight. Do you do collaborations with other YTers? If so, check out Tasting History with Max Miller. This type of recipe is right up his alley.
Really liked this video! I am trying to eat more and more basic although also being a vegetarian. Loved to hear about this pattie. So down to earth just grains beans and nuts. Love to see more of this !!! ❤
This is like a classic 70's vegetarian "nut loaf."
🤣
Very cool and very interesting! Looks like you are using a kind of sandstone or limestone and while it shouldn't be toxic or anything, using soft stones to grind with will eventually get grit in your teeth and wear them down prematurely. This was very common in native American tribes who used Metates to grind corn with. A hard granite stone or basalt is the ticket for grinding and cooking and won't transfer grit nearly as much into the food. Look up "earliest known recipes" and check out some of the old Sumerian dishes. I'd love to see one of those too!
I imagine berries, animal fat and herbs would have been added for extra flavour. Also I would have assumed mustard to mean mustard greens?
Native Americans used things like this, so why not?
One problem with animal fat is that you'd need to have the technology to process the fat into lard or it would spoil very quickly. But who knows, maybe during a particular time of plenty you might make a little feast
Mustard seeds make a decent binder. They would have had salt, either a local mineral salt or sea salt.
@@Graphictruth There's zero justification to say they added salt into their dishes... They would have gotten enough in them from fish and other sources.
The article literally says yellow mustard seeds.
Great job and great concept emmy.
Did the rest of your family get to try these? If so what was their reaction?
I love your videos, please keep it up!
I've always wondered if using stone for grinding out have added some minerals to food, maybe even some seasoning.
💛...they were doing paleo before paleo was cool... also, salt predates this by years...
They are what the paleo diet idiots are trying to replicate
Barbara Mandrell said she was county, when country wasn't cool. 😁 But, Paleo came before Barbara. 😁😁
Neanderthals 70,000 years ago were eating better than I am in the 21st century lol
Honestly most hunter gatherers ate/eat better than we do.
I love the bright sweater today, Emmy is a beautiful ray of sunshine 🌈☀️
I was eating a bean burger while watching this and they looked so similar
Love your vids, Emmy deserves an Emmy in my opinion. Lol. Such a sweetheart
If you're having trouble with food sticking to your cooking stone, it may be best to find yourself a non-stick stone... :P
Wonder what kind of condiments they used. If they were culinary advanced enough to be making these patties then I imagine they paired them with sauces or spreads.
I believe the prevailing theory is mustard being the first condiment...it's definitely possible they ground up extra mustard seeds and made a paste to add some flavor!
The speed at which I clicked this notification. This is exactly my niche 😆
This is so awesome! I want to try this soaking the legumes in salt water, I bet they could get salt water
Your channel is so perfect, you always have ideas I would never think of.
Emmy you come up with the most fabulous things.
Be careful when heating stones to cook in, some have enough water inside that'll make them explode due to steam pressure and can injure you.
Also toxic substances may be present. Know your stones.
I love this. I'm sure the grindstone would also add a bit of flavor and a tiny bit of salt if you were lucky in your stone choice. Imagine this fried in some leftover game fat 👌
Looks like Swedish Tunnbröd 🤔
That's such a funny and interesting idea👌🏼
in Germany (with class) we once went to an ancient "farm"
And baked bread similar to yours
That was a really cool experience, thanks for the reminder🧡👍🏼
Where can I find a recipe book written by Neanderthal chef Nug .
I appreciate how you add information and history
Yum. By the way, wild mustard is a leafy plant which was enjoyed like kale or spinach. I did not read the article/recipe, but the mustard leaves are quite tasty and would probably have been used rather than mustard seeds (or along with them).
Various species of mustards have different parts you can eat. Some are compleatly edible. The article specifically states mustard seeds. Either they used other parts of the mustard for something else or could only use the seeds of that variety they had access to. We do know that this used seeds.
At around the 1:36 mark you called those ancient people Neanderthals, with a soft th, like thought. But this is a German word, so it should be pronounced like NeanderTALL. In German Thal, (pronounced TALL), means Valley. The first skeleton was found in the valley of the Neander River. So, NeanderTALL.
Modern wheat has a lot of gluten in it, which probably helped the patty with stickiness and maintaining shape. It probably would have been more accurate to use an ancient grain. I'm curious to see how well this would do with spelt, which is a precursor to wheat and has a lot less gluten. I happen to have some spelt and lentils, so I might try this out. Also, I love the fact that this recipe is vegan. Very cool video, as always, Emmy! Thank you.
Did you try it out yet and if so, how did it go with using spelt?
Fascinating. I knew Neanderthals had fire and that they cooked food, but I didn’t realize they mixed foods together and seasoned them. Thanks for this, Emmymade.
The first vegan patty