Powerful Plants: The Power of Plants as Food, Medicine and Raw Materials Before Agriculture

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Powerful Plants (PP) is based on the hypothesis that plant use was transformative in human evolution, long before agriculture developed. Plants are essential to our physical, psychological and physiological wellbeing. They provide us with energy, nutrients and raw materials. They can improve our mood and reduce stress while many of today's top prescription drugs are based on plant secondary compounds. The depth of the human connection to plants suggests this embedding happened during our evolution. Yet the full role of plants during the approximately 3 million years of the Palaeolithic and beyond up to the emergence of agriculture around 10,000 years ago is virtually unknown, primarily due to a lack of archaeological evidence. PP will use traditional and recently developed methods in an interdisciplinary approach to investigate three areas in which pre-agrarian plant use was pivotal in shaping future human trajectories, with implications that are still evident today. We will recover evidence for processed carbohydrate consumption, a highly efficient energy source with major consequences for humans then and now and genetic evidence to explore its impacts. PP will identify edible, poisonous and psychoactive properties of plants from pre-agrarian plant assemblages to develop a prehistory of medicine and the use of mind-altering plant substances. Twisting fibres into cordage was a major conceptual and technological development enabling composite technology to develop and the very extensive stand-alone, technologies based on looping and weaving. We will use the accumulated archaeological evidence, supported by experimental archaeology and ethnographic data, to investigate the influence of plants on social, cultural and genetic adaptations before farming. Our data will change perceptions of the pre-agrarian world and will provide a new perspective on the drivers and consequences of our recent evolution.