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

强大的植物（PP）是基于这样的假设，即植物的使用在人类进化中具有变革性，早在农业发展之前。植物对我们的身体、心理和生理健康至关重要。它们为我们提供能量、营养和原材料。它们可以改善我们的情绪，减轻压力，而今天许多顶级处方药都是基于植物的二级化合物。人类与植物联系的深度表明，这种嵌入发生在我们的进化过程中。然而，由于缺乏考古证据，在大约300万年的旧石器时代以及直到大约1万年前农业出现之前，植物的全部作用实际上是未知的。PP将使用传统的和最近开发的跨学科方法来调查三个领域，在这些领域中，前农业植物的使用对塑造未来人类的轨迹至关重要，其影响今天仍然很明显。我们将恢复加工碳水化合物消耗的证据，这是一种对人类产生重大影响的高效能源，对人类的影响和遗传证据进行探索。PP将从前农业植物组合中识别可食用，有毒和精神活性的植物特性，以开发药物和使用改变精神的植物物质的史前史。将纤维捻成绳索是一项重大的概念和技术发展，使复合材料技术得以发展，并使基于环和编织的非常广泛的独立技术得以发展。我们将利用积累的考古证据，在实验考古学和人种学数据的支持下，调查植物在农耕前对社会、文化和遗传适应的影响。我们的数据将改变对前农业世界的看法，并将为我们最近进化的驱动因素和后果提供新的视角。

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.