Good morning paleo-digest Readers,

Reading the Paleo-Digest of May 8-9th., my attention was attracted to what Dr. [log in to unmask]  and
Staffan Lindeberg <[log in to unmask]> wrote about pottery, baking and cooking for detoxifying
plant-foods.

AM:
>>> On the other hand we do have farming cultures, notably the Pre-pottery
>>> Neolithic of the Near East, where there is clearly massive reliance on
>>> cereal crops but no pottery in which to cook them.  They clearly needed to
>>> cook their crops, but we have little idea of how they did it.

SL:
>> Could it be that they wrapped them in leaves and covered and baked them in
>> the ground with heated stones like for instance the Trobriand Islanders and
>> many others traditionally did? Would this leave any traces?

AM:
> It is possible but we are talking about the earliest towns with large
> numbers of people living together, and intensively farming the surrounding
> area, and given that leaves are likely to be a one-use cooking vessel
> their environmental impact would have been very great.  This might tie in
> with what is known from 'Ain Ghazal (Jordan) where from the middle
> Pre-pottery Neolithic B (PPNB c. 7200-6500 C14 years BP) through the late
> PPNB (6500-6000 C14 BP) to PPNC (6000-5500 C14 BP) we see a decrease in
> the size of posts used in construction.

Not being a specialist in the History of Cooking Technologies, I am missing something here. I do not understand
this "pre-pottery" expression.  How could a population rely on cereals crops without basic cooking/detoxifying
technology?

As far as I am aware, most if not all (always a few exceptions to confirm the rule) tubers and seeds (i.e.
grains and beans) must be detoxified before we can eat them safely.  This implies the use of some "fire
technology" to inactivate a wide variety of anti-nutritional factors.  For instance, today, that means cooking
for soybeans, baking for wheat grains, malting for barley grains, roasting for cocoa beans, etc.  Yesterday, in
the abscence of this variety of technologies, it seems that grains and beans were all detoxified by grinding
them, by throwing them into water, and by cooking the mixture, the water-suspension.  For instance, that is how
American Indians detoxified cocoa beans to get their original and safe "chocoatl" beverage, at the time of C.
Colombus.  It's onbly in the 19th. Century that the roasting technology and chocolates were invented.

About dates : Man learnt to control and to use the fire some 700,000 years ago.  Millstones were used in
High-Egypt some 17,000 years BC.  The first cultures of cereals happened in the fertile crescent some 10,000
years B.C.  The technology to detoxify grains and beans must have existed BEFORE agriculture.  Indeed, without
an ability to detoxify these poisonous foods, i.e. to cook them, there would have been no point at developing
agriculture.  Thus, it seems, at least to me, but I may be wrong, that the synergy of fire technology and
cooking technology (in some kind of pot or jar, or something similar) must have been an essential pre-requisite
to the development of agriculture.  Malting and brewing barley would have been just impossible without adequate
containers for liquid fermentation, and beer-drinking.  And why would someone cultivate barley if he cannot
detoxify it?

So, shouldn't some kind of "pre-pottery" have been developed, or used-as-found, earlier than some 7,500 BC as
mentionned in the exchange between Stefan and Andrew?  Have some of you information, or references, about the
early technologies that must have been available for detoxifying plant-foods (tubers, grains and beans), before
the development of agriculture, i.e. before some 12,000 years ago?

With anticipated thanks for you help, and kind regards to all,

Luc


--
Luc De Bry, Ph.D.; Head of Research Department; DANONE BISCUITS NORTH
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