The oldest edible food in the world is honey, found in a tomb in Ancient Egypt. It's around 3,000 years old and hasn't spoiled due to the honey's antimicrobial properties. Because honey is high in sugar, has low water content, and contains a tiny bit of hydrogen peroxide, bacteria and other microbes can't grow on it.
First found in a tomb in Ancient Egypt, honey is about 5,500 years old. Revered in ancient Egypt, honey remains edible over long periods. In 2015, while excavating tombs in Egypt, the archaeologists found about 3000-year-old honey that was fully edible.
A recent study found what could be the earliest known evidence of ancient cooking: the leftovers of a fish dinner from 780,000 years ago. Cooking helped change our ancestors. It helped fuel our evolution and gave us bigger brains.
Oldest Foods In The World | What Are The World's Oldest Food That Exists Today #foods #eating
What did ancient peoples eat?
Plants - These included tubers, seeds, nuts, wild-grown barley that was pounded into flour, legumes, and flowers. Since they had discovered fire and stone tools, it is believed that they were able to process and cook these foods.
A new study, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, suggests that early humans first cooked food around 780,000 years ago. Before now, the earliest evidence of cooked food was around 170,000 years ago, with early Homo sapiens and Neanderthals using fire to cook vegetables and meat.
By the time modern humans emerged roughly 50,000 years ago, our ancestors had adopted an omnivorous diet of cooked starches, meats (including organs), nuts, fruit and other plant foods.
Porridge, gruel, and later bread became the basic staple foods that made up the majority of calorie intake for most of the population. From the 8th to the 11th centuries, the proportion of various cereals in the diet rose from about a third to three-quarters.
The earliest known written recipes date to 1730 BC and were recorded on cuneiform tablets found in Mesopotamia. Other early written recipes date from approximately 1600 BC and come from an Akkadian tablet from southern Babylonia. There are also works in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs depicting the preparation of food.
Kootan Soru. This dish finds mention in the ancient Tamil texts known as Sangam Literature, which describes it as a one-pot meal made with rice, mixed vegetables, sambal fried peanuts and spicy shallots.
Traces of ash found in a South Africa cave suggest that our ancestral humans were controlling fire at least 1 million years ago, the time of our direct ancestor Homo erectus. Burnt bone fragments also found at this site suggest that Homo erectus was cooking meat.
The oldest fruits known to man are figs and dates. Evidence of fig cultivation has been found dating back over 11,000 years ago in Jericho on the West Bank, making it the earliest known cultivated fruit crop.
The diet of the earliest hominins was probably somewhat similar to the diet of modern chimpanzees: omnivorous, including large quantities of fruit, leaves, flowers, bark, insects and meat (e.g., Andrews & Martin 1991; Milton 1999; Watts 2008).
Our ancestors in the palaeolithic period, which covers 2.5 million years ago to 12,000 years ago, are thought to have had a diet based on vegetables, fruit, nuts, roots and meat. Cereals, potatoes, bread and milk did not feature at all.
By the time of the Upper Paleolithic and modern Homo sapiens, not only was a wide variety of plants consumed, but a wide variety of animals, snails and fish. In order to exploit the many different species consumed, there was a wider variety of tools made than ever before available to humans.
Researchers have already found evidence that ancient people at Border Cave cooked starchy plant stems, ate an array of fruits and hunted small and large animals. The oldest known grass bedding, from around 200,000 years ago, has also been unearthed at Border Cave (SN: 8/13/20).
Most people ate what grew near them. There was a lot of grain like barley, wheat, oat, spelt and rye. That resulted in bread being the most important food. Poorer people had to eat brown bread made out of oat and rye, while the richer noble folk also ate white bread out of wheat.
But what they actually live on is plant foods.” What's more, she found starch granules from plants on fossil teeth and stone tools, which suggests humans may have been eating grains, as well as tubers, for at least 100,000 years—long enough to have evolved the ability to tolerate them.
At first glance, the Paleo diet does have a lot of things in common with what the actual Paleolithic man would have eaten. The diet is comprised mainly of meats and fish that could have been hunted by prehistoric man, and plant matter that would have been gathered, including nuts, seeds, vegetables and fruits.
There is no one “Paleolithic diet.” As with any diet trend, the Paleo diet might also be hard to sustain and by eliminating entire food groups and types of foods, increases the risk for disordered eating. We live in a society where it is not possible to eat exactly as our ancestors ate.
How long human beings can go without food is an open question. Estimates indicate that starving people become weak in 30 to 50 days and die in 43 to 70 days. Individual factors including sex, age, starting weight, and water intake all play a role in how long someone can live without food.
sapiens was thought to have evolved approximately 200,000 years ago in East Africa. This estimate was shaped by the discovery in 1967 of the oldest remains attributed to H. sapiens, at a site in Ethiopia's Omo Valley.
