Mozambican Grass Seed Consumption During the Middle Stone Age
Mozambican Grass Seed Consumption During the Middle Stone Age
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DOI：
10.1126/science.1173966
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发表时间：
2009-12
期刊：
影响因子：
56.9
通讯作者：
J. Mercader
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
J. Mercader
粮食作物的种子比坚果或水果更难收获。早期人类何时开始广泛依赖谷物尚不清楚，但Mercader（第1680页）在莫桑比克一个洞穴遗址的石器上发现了淀粉残留物的薄膜，其历史可以追溯到大约10万年前。这些残留物与野生高粱中的淀粉粒一致，表明早期人类对谷物的依赖比以前认为的要早得多。因此，莫桑比克高粱开发的例子代表了世界上已知的最长的谷物使用传统。石器上的残留物表明，早在10万年前，早期人类就已经在处理草籽了。淀粉植物在早期人类饮食中的作用以及淀粉的烹饪加工何时开始，一直难以在考古学上追踪。在更新世时期，南部非洲的采集者通常认为采集种子是一项无关紧要的活动，因为谷物加工的技术难度很大，而且人们相信，在过去10万年以及更早的时间里，根、水果和坚果，而不是谷物，是维持生计的基础。从莫桑比克的中石器时代石器表面发现了大量淀粉颗粒，表明早期智人至少从105，000年前开始依赖草籽，包括高粱草的种子。
Seed for Food The seeds of grain-producing plants are more difficult to harvest than nuts or fruits as food. It has been unclear when early humans began to rely extensively on grains, but Mercader (p. 1680) has discovered films of starch residues on stone tools at a cave site in Mozambique dating to about 100,000 years ago. The residues are consistent with starch grains from wild sorghum and indicate that early humans relied on cereals much earlier than previously thought. The Mozambican example of sorghum exploitation thus represents the longest known tradition of cereal use in the world. Residues on stone tools imply that early humans were processing grass seeds by 100,000 years ago. The role of starchy plants in early hominin diets and when the culinary processing of starches began have been difficult to track archaeologically. Seed collecting is conventionally perceived to have been an irrelevant activity among the Pleistocene foragers of southern Africa, on the grounds of both technological difficulty in the processing of grains and the belief that roots, fruits, and nuts, not cereals, were the basis for subsistence for the past 100,000 years and further back in time. A large assemblage of starch granules has been retrieved from the surfaces of Middle Stone Age stone tools from Mozambique, showing that early Homo sapiens relied on grass seeds starting at least 105,000 years ago, including those of sorghum grasses.