Drying grains is essential for storage, and they must be dry if grinding them fine enough for flour. Soaking those grains overnight makes it a lot easier to pound or break them up enough to make gruel. A huge savings in labor. If those grains are allowed to sprout for a couple of days the nutrient content is significantly increased, so another plus. From the standpoint of cooking, the time is shortened and a small amount of whatever other foods are available can be added to the gruel or it can be cooked in a broth made from bones. Lots of benefits to gruel over bread.
Ecxellent comment. Let me add something i saw about the 'Huge savings in labor'- At Chaco in the US southwest looks like they used slaves to grind the corn. Nasty little rooms where someone had hours of labor. Also a lifetime of grinding corn shows up as facets on knee area. Literally changes your bones.
Interesting discussion. Growing up in a poor family, I learned first hand how to make the meat go farther, add vegetables and grains to it. Bread is a concentrated mix of just the grain, therefore using up all the grain on hand for a product that may last one meal. For a poorer family, gruel makes more sense.
I think that is you're living in a hut in a place that is cold and wet for much of the year, you'd choose gruel. Less prep, less fuel, more flexibility with ingredients, and maybe the most important reason is being able to fill your belly with a mass of hot food when the weather is cold.
@paperose2250 They called it "Durzslop" - a gritty porridge made from ground-up roots, spoiled grain, and the occasional mystery meat, boiled into a pasty sludge. Favored by the inhabitants for its sheer bulk rather than its taste, it was often served in battered wood bowls and washed down with a swig of sour ale or stagnant water.
Easier meal prep too, a big pot kept on the go (over the fire) that you can just dip your funnel beaker into whenever you feel peckish. Nice and warm in your tummy.
@@paperose2250 Because it’s not the same. Gruel is a type of porridge, which can vary in consistency from porridge-like thickness to something more like _atole_ . Either way it’s neither soup nor stew.
Here in Sweden, both adults and children/babies eat välling (pr. velling) for breakfast. It is essentially gruel. These days you don't have to grind anything, it comes in a packet. You mix it with water/milk and heat it up. It's actually a very comforting food 😊
Your valiant attempts at pronouncing Danish names were certainly entertaining! You did pretty well overall 😀 And food has to be one of the most relatable topics of archaeology. Always interesting.
I like this! Funnel Beaker Culture is 'my era'; those were the people who lived here where I live now (some thousands of years ago). They made those large megalth monuments we call 'hunebedden'. At the Hunebedcentrum we show how people back then lived. I demonstrate how they used plant fibers to make string (and make textile things out of that string). Now I can start showing how they cooked grains, fruits and herbs in a pot (a funnel beaker replica) at the side of the fire ☺ While it's cooking I go on with my other work ...
Look at this from a practical point of view. To make bread, after harvesting and cleaning the grain, to make bread you have to grind it, then combine and bake. To make soup/porridge/gruel you can just toss in the grain and boil. Adding some protein and your set. Why spend the time to make bread, to what end? Dried grain is more stable that bread and is portable.
I wonder if they were grinding acorn. You find grinding depressions in granite boulders all over the western US where acorns were a major food source. Acorn flour makes up nicely as a polenta style side dish and makes tasty griddle cakes. Mixed with fat and nuts/berries, it makes up a high calorie travel ration in the form of pemmican. Also, cattail yields up a decent flour when ground.
From experience, even ground by modern means, durum wheat flour is actually a bit of a pig to work by hand. I would dearly love to see archaeological assumptions tested. Recall what happened when a set of flints were given to a butcher? Turns out the archaeologists were wrong and the butchers produced better results than anyone predicted when left to work out which flint was best for what task. I'm intrigued by the timeline mentioned here. If not within living memory, significant and rapid sea level rise from both the Storegga Slide and the emptying of Lake Agassiz would have loomed large in the mindset, either as cautionary tales or possibly memorialised in song. We *think* we know what caused the loss of the last islands of Doggerland these days, but what with paleo meteorology, astro physics and oceanology being in their infancy back then ......
Lol I love these videos! We definitely need as many vessels & tools tested as possible to increase our understanding of how they were used… we can play at their cook books afterwards 🤭💕
I think that you two guys should do some paleo-cooking and see what comes out of raw foods that were available at the time. It may well be that actually cooking using neolithic foodstuff has not been fully explored, if at all.
Gruel, glorious gruel! Having both hand ground wheat to make bread and other grain to make a kind of porridge (and used the leftovers of that for “slabcakes”) I can confirm that it’s WAY easier to skip the breadmaking and go straight for the slurry. Also, the latter is much more versatile, because you can add pretty well anything to it and get a palatable result. Flatbread made without any raising agent at all is dismal! 😂
Probably how bread was invented. If that glutenous glob was left to sit, it would ferment and not wanting to waste precious food they probably thought thought bugger it we'll cook that and see what happens- viola - sourdough bread!
Call it gruel, but I grew up on Scottish soup; not the Anglicised Scotch Broth. Veg, barley, died peas and lentil varieties. With a bit of cheese and if you've got the bones some meat stock; even better a bit of meat. My ultimate comfort food. Happy to make it for you any time.
That sounds a lot like the stuff i grew up on. Largely lamb shank stew, that consisted of turnips, swedes, carrots, peas and beans (whatever was at hand really) and barley.
Lots of people around the world eat cereals unground..and the only one that resembles gruel is British porridge. All other versions are quite hearty and wholesome
Pedant mode=ON As far as I know Frydenland is pronounced Frudenland (as close as I can get in English). They make a nice beer there as I recall, and they have a castle. Pedant mode=OFF 🙂
From what I recall from other articles I've read it seamed quite common for Neolithic people to grind plant materials as much as cereals, I wonder if this is to do with preservation, as if youu allow your plant stuffs to dry and then grind them they will last longer, sparing you from collecting on a daily basis. Sounds like they also ate pottage? No?
I grew up eating a variety of grains in a variety of types of grewels. Corn meal mushroom for breakfast. Cream of wheat, oats, and rice with butter and a bit of sugar, all were common for breakfast. Cracked oats and especially barley in soups and stews. Wheat berries cracked occasionally. Sometimes rice. All were normal on our table
Not exactly. Beer or an alcoholic fermented drink and making bread with natural yeast can be separately developed. Sour dough bread takes flour and water and allowes it to ferment from natural yeasts. It takes a lot longer than using yeast from beer making but probably was developed alongside fermenting grains and fruits.
From the wikipedia page about gruel: Gruel predates the earliest civilizations, emerging in hunter-gatherer societies as a meal of gathered grains soaked in water. For these societies, the application of water and especially heat to grain improved its digestibility and nutritional content, and sanitized the mixture. This gruel also presented a viable medium for yeast to develop and ferment, serving as an important precursor for both bread and beer.[4] This info is from a book referenced in the footnote.
let's consider the amount of energy it takes to grind grain to flour. maybe the the women who were tasked with feeding hungry families decided cracked grain softens faster in liquid than it takes to make finer flour breads. Women's time and energy is seldom considered in archeology.
Steve Lekson has a presentation about Chaco in the US southwest. Two things I remember him saying- They are pretty sure slaves had to do the gringing there, in horrible conditions. Also get down in that position long enough and there is telltale changes to your leg bones, visible in the osteo-record.
Based on the grinding marks, they already knew these stones were for pounding, not grinding. And that's easier and cheaper than chemical analysis of phytoliths. Technology is developing faster than we can use it everywhere we'd like
The grinding stones could have been used for grindings other stones and making polished stone axes, or for sharpening sticks. Grains were used boiled whole in Eastern and Northern Europe until very recently, and to fatten cattle or to feed horses. Brain was mostly a ceremonial food or a luxury food. I made a pilaf with whole wheat and meat last week, tastes better than rice.
"Gruel" might be a misleading term here, I'm brought to mind of a medieval-style pottage. Grains form the base, and then you can toss in anything you have at that moment - peas, nuts, nettles and other greens, bit of meat if you have it, maybe marrow. You'd have to crack the bones to extract the marrow. Some sort of pounding may be required? 🙂
There is a dish which i tasted in Georgia (country in Europe) ... It consists of grinded walnuts ... It tastes so great. I believe it to be a really ancient dish. Could this what they were grinding on the first grinders? When the weather grew colder towards the viking age ... Then i suppose the walnut trees were on the decline ... because they need warmer weather. So then they focused on other staples of food ... like grains eyc
My thought upon watching your show was that the pounding (rather than grinding) goes back to the beginning of getting "good stuff" out of "hard" or "stalky" stuff using a mortar and pestle or a rock on a hard surface probably went thru a long process. Monkeys do it now. Break out the good stuff and toss it in a pot-wala a meal
The important thing in durum wheat is, it's hard to make bread of it. It lacks the gluten necessary to "tie" the dough together. There's a word for it in my language, but I don't know it in English. So if durum wheat was all they had, it would make sense to just crack the grain a bit and then boil it, not bothering with grinding it.
This is way off topic, but the first thing that struck me about the site plan was the shape, outlined by what I presume were stones. It looks an awful lot like a boat with a bluff bow and a transom stern. If I had seen it without any explanation my first thought would have been, "It's the remains of a small naval vessel from the Napoleonic era." That, of course is ridiculous, but still, the boat shape might be worth exploring further.
What about grinding beetles and rocks and non-food plants to make dyes? (a note to Americans: in England flapjack is more like granola bars than pancakes)
speaking of rabbit holes (i wonder if Lewis Carroll ever imagined that phrase would come to mean what it has), at the mention of pottery, i started to wonder what impetus brought on turning clay into containers? humans have been playing in the dirt for...how long? always?, and shaping the dirt they played in, into things representative of other things, and it would be inevitable that at one point, probably numerous times in numerous places, some bright spark thought, "i like the shape of this so much i want to keep it." and left it about only to notice it became hard once it dried out. but. what happened to make someone think this playing in the dirt thing could be used to make an excellent bowl? an inspiration arguably more important than any wheel...i think.
Peas Porridge hot, peas porridge cold. Peas porridge in the pot nine days old. We know they made bread of different kinds, we have the evidence. These encompassing statements are based on a very minimal amount of evidence. Querns, with their distinctive shape were used to grind grains. You can be sure that gruel's and porridge was also eaten
In Danemark! That would explain the fact that those women where not that thinner than their men and not that reduced to slavery than in the rest of humanity. They where not destroying their articulations grinding flour on a stupid stone! Thank you guys, really interesting.
Scandinavian bread was usually coarse and whole grain and still is. Ash cakes (flapjacks), moreover, go back way back. In short, refined flour may not have held much appeal to the people. Gruel, potage, and pancakes can also be made from the spent grains after beer brewing.
They had bad teeth. They probably often ground up various foods just to make them easier to eat. We have modern dentistry and would not usually consider this.
I have a problem with these so called grinding stones they found. They're flat and if you're pounding on grain or nuts You would not want a flat surface, what you're pounding on would go flying all over the place. You would want something more like a mortar and pestle. A rock with a natural hollow in it would do much better. And why didn't they test one of the pounding rocks? And even if you're just pounding grain you're going to have some powder, that could have been used as a thickener in the soup. And if you spill any of it on a hot rock you're going to end up with a whole grain bread basically cooking on the hot rocks around the fire. I'm not saying what they found is invalid but I think they need to think it through a little more.
When looking at stable isotope studies from Neolithic farming settlements with grain agriculture, it does not show up as contributing significantly to the diet, so it was probably mostly fed to animals which were then consumed 😉🤫
Bread baking requires a low but even heat as you would get from building a fire and letting it die back to coals. You're not melting metal for tools here. In medieval times often the bread oven was fired with dry grass and twigs as a big fire wasn't needed.
Is there a gruel starter being used as in fermented bread? The fermentation can take place in chunky, very little surface area gruel compared to coarse flour but takes much longer for the same healthful biotics to appear, increasing the chance of deadly contamination in the meantime. If you are sprouting the grains anyway, dry the sprouted grains (labor free), and grinding into a coarse flour is easier. Add the benefits of years of fermented locally adapted sourdough starters and lower interior temp of bread (160f-190f) versus gruel's (212f), leaving more of those more safely made biotics in the finished product alive and available and you can see why bread outweighed gruel as our knowledge grew, in my opinion.
Drying grains is essential for storage, and they must be dry if grinding them fine enough for flour. Soaking those grains overnight makes it a lot easier to pound or break them up enough to make gruel. A huge savings in labor. If those grains are allowed to sprout for a couple of days the nutrient content is significantly increased, so another plus. From the standpoint of cooking, the time is shortened and a small amount of whatever other foods are available can be added to the gruel or it can be cooked in a broth made from bones. Lots of benefits to gruel over bread.
The Roman "puls" that their soldiers subsisted on is just that.
Ecxellent comment.
Let me add something i saw about the 'Huge savings in labor'-
At Chaco in the US southwest looks like they used slaves to grind the corn. Nasty little rooms where someone had hours of labor.
Also a lifetime of grinding corn shows up as facets on knee area. Literally changes your bones.
It seems they did both
bready broth and soupy sourdough
Interesting discussion. Growing up in a poor family, I learned first hand how to make the meat go farther, add vegetables and grains to it. Bread is a concentrated mix of just the grain, therefore using up all the grain on hand for a product that may last one meal. For a poorer family, gruel makes more sense.
I think that is you're living in a hut in a place that is cold and wet for much of the year, you'd choose gruel. Less prep, less fuel, more flexibility with ingredients, and maybe the most important reason is being able to fill your belly with a mass of hot food when the weather is cold.
why call it gruel.... what is wrong with soup??????stew???? a rich soup of boiled bones, grains, sprouted grains, and edible wild greens!!!
@paperose2250 They called it "Durzslop" - a gritty porridge made from ground-up roots, spoiled grain, and the occasional mystery meat, boiled into a pasty sludge. Favored by the inhabitants for its sheer bulk rather than its taste, it was often served in battered wood bowls and washed down with a swig of sour ale or stagnant water.
Easier meal prep too, a big pot kept on the go (over the fire) that you can just dip your funnel beaker into whenever you feel peckish. Nice and warm in your tummy.
@@paperose2250 Because it’s not the same. Gruel is a type of porridge, which can vary in consistency from porridge-like thickness to something more like _atole_ . Either way it’s neither soup nor stew.
Here in Sweden, both adults and children/babies eat välling (pr. velling) for breakfast. It is essentially gruel. These days you don't have to grind anything, it comes in a packet. You mix it with water/milk and heat it up. It's actually a very comforting food 😊
Australian Aboriginals along the Murray River used to make wild grain biscuit/cake type things.
Makes sense, as that is a hot, dry area, and grinding the grains would be a reasonable way to treat the grain.
Your valiant attempts at pronouncing Danish names were certainly entertaining! You did pretty well overall 😀
And food has to be one of the most relatable topics of archaeology. Always interesting.
I like this! Funnel Beaker Culture is 'my era'; those were the people who lived here where I live now (some thousands of years ago). They made those large megalth monuments we call 'hunebedden'. At the Hunebedcentrum we show how people back then lived. I demonstrate how they used plant fibers to make string (and make textile things out of that string). Now I can start showing how they cooked grains, fruits and herbs in a pot (a funnel beaker replica) at the side of the fire ☺ While it's cooking I go on with my other work ...
Look at this from a practical point of view. To make bread, after harvesting and cleaning the grain, to make bread you have to grind it, then combine and bake. To make soup/porridge/gruel you can just toss in the grain and boil. Adding some protein and your set. Why spend the time to make bread, to what end? Dried grain is more stable that bread and is portable.
Grains and plants contain enough protein.
Yes bread seems laborious in comparison, doesn't it?
the reason they grow oats in denmark and wheat in germany is the same reason they grow oats in scotland and wheat in england. climate,
Some fibres also require pounding to process for cloth.
I wonder if they were grinding acorn. You find grinding depressions in granite boulders all over the western US where acorns were a major food source. Acorn flour makes up nicely as a polenta style side dish and makes tasty griddle cakes. Mixed with fat and nuts/berries, it makes up a high calorie travel ration in the form of pemmican. Also, cattail yields up a decent flour when ground.
From experience, even ground by modern means, durum wheat flour is actually a bit of a pig to work by hand. I would dearly love to see archaeological assumptions tested. Recall what happened when a set of flints were given to a butcher? Turns out the archaeologists were wrong and the butchers produced better results than anyone predicted when left to work out which flint was best for what task.
I'm intrigued by the timeline mentioned here. If not within living memory, significant and rapid sea level rise from both the Storegga Slide and the emptying of Lake Agassiz would have loomed large in the mindset, either as cautionary tales or possibly memorialised in song. We *think* we know what caused the loss of the last islands of Doggerland these days, but what with paleo meteorology, astro physics and oceanology being in their infancy back then ......
Crack some grain and boil it up in your nettle soup?
Lol I love these videos! We definitely need as many vessels & tools tested as possible to increase our understanding of how they were used… we can play at their cook books afterwards 🤭💕
I think that you two guys should do some paleo-cooking and see what comes out of raw foods that were available at the time. It may well be that actually cooking using neolithic foodstuff has not been fully explored, if at all.
Other than teeth, grinding stones are the original food processors.
Gruel, glorious gruel!
Having both hand ground wheat to make bread and other grain to make a kind of porridge (and used the leftovers of that for “slabcakes”) I can confirm that it’s WAY easier to skip the breadmaking and go straight for the slurry. Also, the latter is much more versatile, because you can add pretty well anything to it and get a palatable result. Flatbread made without any raising agent at all is dismal! 😂
Probably how bread was invented. If that glutenous glob was left to sit, it would ferment and not wanting to waste precious food they probably thought thought bugger it we'll cook that and see what happens- viola - sourdough bread!
Call it gruel, but I grew up on Scottish soup; not the Anglicised Scotch Broth. Veg, barley, died peas and lentil varieties. With a bit of cheese and if you've got the bones some meat stock; even better a bit of meat. My ultimate comfort food. Happy to make it for you any time.
That sounds a lot like the stuff i grew up on. Largely lamb shank stew, that consisted of turnips, swedes, carrots, peas and beans (whatever was at hand really) and barley.
Sounds like grinding stones were the go to gadget or food processors of the early Neolithic!
Lots of people around the world eat cereals unground..and the only one that resembles gruel is British porridge. All other versions are quite hearty and wholesome
Gruel might be preferred because in world be warm food in a cold climate.
Pedant mode=ON
As far as I know Frydenland is pronounced Frudenland (as close as I can get in English). They make a nice beer there as I recall, and they have a castle.
Pedant mode=OFF
🙂
From what I recall from other articles I've read it seamed quite common for Neolithic people to grind plant materials as much as cereals, I wonder if this is to do with preservation, as if youu allow your plant stuffs to dry and then grind them they will last longer, sparing you from collecting on a daily basis. Sounds like they also ate pottage? No?
fantastic subject. more time needed. Food for Thought ;)
I grew up eating a variety of grains in a variety of types of grewels. Corn meal mushroom for breakfast. Cream of wheat, oats, and rice with butter and a bit of sugar, all were common for breakfast. Cracked oats and especially barley in soups and stews. Wheat berries cracked occasionally. Sometimes rice. All were normal on our table
That should say corn meal mush. Auto correct is silly
Perhaps something like Pemmican to keep and store for the winter months.
Love you two, the subject, all great. Can you get rid of the texy that disapears on a timer? i am still reading and listening to you both but it goes.
Before making bread, you have to make beer because beer supplies the yeast, which is what differentiates bread from dried gruel.
Lol! I have friends that go the other way and call beer 'liquid bread'!
Another casuality dilemma
Which came first?…
Not exactly. Beer or an alcoholic fermented drink and making bread with natural yeast can be separately developed. Sour dough bread takes flour and water and allowes it to ferment from natural yeasts. It takes a lot longer than using yeast from beer making but probably was developed alongside fermenting grains and fruits.
From the wikipedia page about gruel:
Gruel predates the earliest civilizations, emerging in hunter-gatherer societies as a meal of gathered grains soaked in water. For these societies, the application of water and especially heat to grain improved its digestibility and nutritional content, and sanitized the mixture. This gruel also presented a viable medium for yeast to develop and ferment, serving as an important precursor for both bread and beer.[4]
This info is from a book referenced in the footnote.
let's consider the amount of energy it takes to grind grain to flour. maybe the the women who were tasked with feeding hungry families decided cracked grain softens faster in liquid than it takes to make finer flour breads. Women's time and energy is seldom considered in archeology.
Steve Lekson has a presentation about Chaco in the US southwest.
Two things I remember him saying-
They are pretty sure slaves had to do the gringing there, in horrible conditions.
Also get down in that position long enough and there is telltale changes to your leg bones, visible in the osteo-record.
I just made porridge, I'm quite suggestible! Lol
Based on the grinding marks, they already knew these stones were for pounding, not grinding. And that's easier and cheaper than chemical analysis of phytoliths. Technology is developing faster than we can use it everywhere we'd like
The grinding stones could have been used for grindings other stones and making polished stone axes, or for sharpening sticks.
Grains were used boiled whole in Eastern and Northern Europe until very recently, and to fatten cattle or to feed horses. Brain was mostly a ceremonial food or a luxury food.
I made a pilaf with whole wheat and meat last week, tastes better than rice.
Effin hell it's the Prehistory Roux brothers. 🤣🤣🤣
"Gruel" might be a misleading term here, I'm brought to mind of a medieval-style pottage. Grains form the base, and then you can toss in anything you have at that moment - peas, nuts, nettles and other greens, bit of meat if you have it, maybe marrow. You'd have to crack the bones to extract the marrow. Some sort of pounding may be required? 🙂
but I like the word 'gruel'. In Dutch we have 'watergruwel', which is a delicious combination of fruit juice, dried fruits and cooked grains.
There is a dish which i tasted in Georgia (country in Europe) ... It consists of grinded walnuts ... It tastes so great. I believe it to be a really ancient dish. Could this what they were grinding on the first grinders? When the weather grew colder towards the viking age ... Then i suppose the walnut trees were on the decline ... because they need warmer weather. So then they focused on other staples of food ... like grains eyc
Today what’s for dinner today sawdust and hay.
My thought upon watching your show was that the pounding (rather than grinding) goes back to the beginning of getting "good stuff" out of "hard" or "stalky" stuff using a mortar and pestle or a rock on a hard surface probably went thru a long process. Monkeys do it now. Break out the good stuff and toss it in a pot-wala a meal
The important thing in durum wheat is, it's hard to make bread of it. It lacks the gluten necessary to "tie" the dough together. There's a word for it in my language, but I don't know it in English. So if durum wheat was all they had, it would make sense to just crack the grain a bit and then boil it, not bothering with grinding it.
This is way off topic, but the first thing that struck me about the site plan was the shape, outlined by what I presume were stones. It looks an awful lot like a boat with a bluff bow and a transom stern. If I had seen it without any explanation my first thought would have been, "It's the remains of a small naval vessel from the Napoleonic era." That, of course is ridiculous, but still, the boat shape might be worth exploring further.
I'd certainly prefer hot gruel to bread if I lived in cold Denmark. Nice bowl of oatmeal ... yum.
What about grinding beetles and rocks and non-food plants to make dyes? (a note to Americans: in England flapjack is more like granola bars than pancakes)
Griddle cakes are easy to make and transportable without having to be re heated once made
speaking of rabbit holes
(i wonder if Lewis Carroll ever imagined that phrase would come to mean what it has),
at the mention of pottery, i started to wonder what impetus brought on turning clay into
containers?
humans have been playing in the dirt for...how long? always?,
and shaping the dirt they played in, into things representative of other things,
and it would be inevitable that at one point, probably numerous times in numerous places,
some bright spark thought, "i like the shape of this so much i want to keep it."
and left it about only to notice it became hard once it dried out.
but.
what happened to make someone think this playing in the dirt thing could be used to make
an excellent bowl?
an inspiration arguably more important than any wheel...i think.
Yes, starches and husks would be interesting
Yeast can be a beast!
Peas Porridge hot, peas porridge cold. Peas porridge in the pot nine days old. We know they made bread of different kinds, we have the evidence. These encompassing statements are based on a very minimal amount of evidence. Querns, with their distinctive shape were used to grind grains. You can be sure that gruel's and porridge was also eaten
Food for thought, that's it going on to the next:)
Just had cream of wheat
This may be also a question of available grains and how hard the resulting bread would be and how bad the peoples' teeth were.
In Danemark! That would explain the fact that those women where not that thinner than their men and not that reduced to slavery than in the rest of humanity. They where not destroying their articulations grinding flour on a stupid stone! Thank you guys, really interesting.
I'm glad I wasn't invited for dinner.😂
Grinding flax to extract the fibers?
Sounds like they were making Christmas Pudding!
Durum wheat is used for Couscous, too. Or maybe they invented a whole-grain pizza?
Scandinavian bread was usually coarse and whole grain and still is. Ash cakes (flapjacks), moreover, go back way back. In short, refined flour may not have held much appeal to the people. Gruel, potage, and pancakes can also be made from the spent grains after beer brewing.
Makes me think of north American pemmican where you grind/smash up dried meats
I wonder if they could have been molting to grain as well more nutritious that way probably easier to digest what do you think?
Perhaps next research will show that their beakers were not used for liquids, but as dice shakers for their gambling games ? ? 🤣
It make more sense, to spend time processing hazelnuts, when you remember, that the nutrients in them, are higher than in wheat.
It's much less damaging to the teeth to grind nuts.
They had bad teeth. They probably often ground up various foods just to make them easier to eat. We have modern dentistry and would not usually consider this.
They had better teeth than us.
Always enjoy learning about old stuff with these two old guy's lol
Why not? It's faster, easier and cheaper to make, plus it's also warmer to eat.
Edit, I see we are all thinking along the same lines.
"It's a poultice. . . " :-)
I have a problem with these so called grinding stones they found.
They're flat and if you're pounding on grain or nuts You would not want a flat surface, what you're pounding on would go flying all over the place.
You would want something more like a mortar and pestle. A rock with a natural hollow in it would do much better. And why didn't they test one of the pounding rocks?
And even if you're just pounding grain you're going to have some powder, that could have been used as a thickener in the soup. And if you spill any of it on a hot rock you're going to end up with a whole grain bread basically cooking on the hot rocks around the fire. I'm not saying what they found is invalid but I think they need to think it through a little more.
When looking at stable isotope studies from Neolithic farming settlements with grain agriculture, it does not show up as contributing significantly to the diet, so it was probably mostly fed to animals which were then consumed 😉🤫
A grueling course, of course.
Start testing quern stones? First, the saddle quern from Abu Hureyra? 🤔
💕🐐❤🙏❤🙏👍💕
Bread baking requires a low but even heat as you would get from building a fire and letting it die back to coals. You're not melting metal for tools here. In medieval times often the bread oven was fired with dry grass and twigs as a big fire wasn't needed.
Rupert's right, semolina is yuck! (they were still forcing it on us at school in the 1970s) 🙂
They were making hard tack "clack clack"
😂 Two usually knowledgable gents discussing food preparation 5500 years ago.
Stew?
Has anyone considered baby food for animals?
I grind my grains course to make beer. Easier to strain.
They could have been making flat bread. It's much faster to cook.
So, this paper was a real cereal killer.
Crispbread is not bread and is a type of birch wood.
Beer first, then bread.
Maybe they didn't know about bread or how too make it.
This episode was rather gruel-ing.
Probably making beer, not gruel. They were Danes after all.
Drugs lol. Everyone needs a grinder for their substances
May be toothless.
Pottage.
Is there a gruel starter being used as in fermented bread? The fermentation can take place in chunky, very little surface area gruel compared to coarse flour but takes much longer for the same healthful biotics to appear, increasing the chance of deadly contamination in the meantime. If you are sprouting the grains anyway, dry the sprouted grains (labor free), and grinding into a coarse flour is easier. Add the benefits of years of fermented locally adapted sourdough starters and lower interior temp of bread (160f-190f) versus gruel's (212f), leaving more of those more safely made biotics in the finished product alive and available and you can see why bread outweighed gruel as our knowledge grew, in my opinion.
Oatcakes are easy to make and keep better than read dozx.