 Hello and welcome to news clip today and talking science and tech we will be discussing the diet of ancient human beings and what new research has found about what human beings were eating and how basically they were eating bread and other grains much before we thought they started eating this and you know hunter gatherers they weren't actually just eating meat they used to eat grains and you know they were not really on a carb free carb free diet as was earlier believed so we're joined by joined with Praveepa Kayastha Praveepa can you first tell us about these findings how nature in the nature article which says basically that how how did humans fall in love with bread beer and other carbs well it's an interesting heading that the nature article gives that how we got into civilization to beer and bread but if you leave that part of it out and the interesting issue is that there has been a feeling there has been a supposition that we as hunter gatherers since we had not started agriculture therefore we had a much lower carbs in our diet and that is something which led to the United States also to a lot of people in the world and I also at one point did look at it seriously what is called the palio diet in the belief the paliolytic man before the neolithic revolution did not have a large amount of carbs carbohydrates in his diet and was therefore much more fruits nuts and meat kind of purse what we discovered and this is not only the nature article but there is also other research which is available that the the amount of what would be called vegetables other fiber stuff as well as grains that human beings ate was quite varied it is not specific that we only had one kind of diet depending on where we were which part of the world we were what is the fauna flora and the fauna there they had varied diets and the varied diets could also be during the year that you had one kind of diet at one one you know time another kind of diet another time so the kind of ecological niche human beings occupied even before the neolithic revolution was much larger than we had assumed so I think that's an important finding the other part of it which I think is equally important is that we are looking at technical reconstruction scientific technical reconstruction if you will from numerous sources and the sources range from what would be called dental plaque rather gross but fossilized dental plaque what is the kind of remnants that are found on the ancient fossils and their teeth and also if we look at what are called the grinding stones how look at the micro etchings marks tool marks on the grindstone which are used and govically tepe in which the nature article talked about talks about a meeting that a huge number of grinding stones have been found and they analyzed it the nature of the tools that were used for grinding and what was ground and to what level they were ground where they ground into fine powder but the ground into essentially broken down grains and then what was done with it when they wet grains that were ground when they vaulted grains that were ground that means you germinate partially and then grind it so those kind of details that was that is the other aspect of it the third which is interesting because all of us who cook or try to cook know that we burn things when we cook particularly if we cook and do other stuff we're likely to have burned stuff on your in the kitchen now those were initially or archaeologists used to reject think the stuff which is of no value now they are providing and then how you do how do you find them in the site that's not the issue but those burnt material is now finding very useful is very useful in terms of looking at what actually was being cooked and what was the method of cooking and all of that is now slowly giving us a view of our diet which we didn't have I think the most important element of this is the belief that it was the Neolithic age and agriculture which leads to a shift in our diet I think that has been shown not to be true and that the shift in the diet in which we think occurred in fact is much older and when human beings learn to have fire at that point of time the diet seems to have had increasing amounts of grain in it as well and also other kinds of foods in it but the transition seems to be that you could then boil broken down grains all of that fire seems to have made a much larger range of food available to human beings that was earlier thought of so it is not that barbecued meat and was the major element in the diet of the human beings as it is supposed to have been I think that's a very very interesting result but I think the importance of this is also the numerous technological adjuncts to research that has that has happened and how all of them are coming together and some of them are rather gross are coming together to make this new discoveries that you just talked about right and of course as you mentioned these this remains these this evidence of this plant-based diet starting is before the Neolithic age began before the age of agriculture began so what do you think this also has to do this also tells us something about why Neolithic age began at the time that it did Well that's I think Gobakli Thepe which is the site from which this grinding evidence that we talked about in the Nature article comes it's a very interesting site and I think that's also the reason why this research on this piece of work is very interesting for all of us who've been looking at the Neolithic Revolution I from the point of view of looking at transition because I think the Neolithic Revolution is the major revolution in human society after the use of fire so that's the real break that we get and it combines both agriculture and also the investigation of animals but more important than that it starts settled set you know it starts human settlements which are relatively permanent before that you had temporary settlements but in which you sort of cycle in the seasons you went and rainy season somewhere in winter somewhere in summer somewhere so it might be still a cycle you went and you know came back to but there was still not permanent settlements of the time that the Neolithic Revolution really introduces so the Neolithic Revolution has been of great interest to people who study societies and therefore when did it really start what made it start the understanding which most people share that ability to have agriculture or the ability for agriculture is what leads to settled the habitations of the sky and what is coming out is that this is not a sudden revolution in terms of domesticating grains particularly wheat which was one of the earliest but what is what happens is that we seem to have known about this relatively earlier so here there's in the instances of all of this in as we said Gomukili Tepe which is talked about being in Turkey but since Turkey didn't exist at the time as a as a country what we are talking about is really a part of the fertile crescent and this is at somewhere in the center of the arc of the fertile crescent in Anatolian Plateaus foothills so to say the upper reaches of the Euphrates Tigris river system so it's really connected to Syria Jordan which would be called Nevant in a larger sense and of course you have the Euphrates Tigris river system which comes down Iraq and so on now this part of it and it's really at the center of the fertile crescent so to say is a is a is a very interesting place that Gomukili Tepe we are talking about the others as well this is not the only one which shows that you start looking at architecture that equivalent of buildings existed people came and there were large vats kind of thing so the question is what do they do with these vats and we now discover they were used for essentially either brewing beer or were also used in cooking porridge so you get polygons to and beer all of these are available and the interesting part of this it starts by looking at not at these vats itself but also at a field where a large number of grinding stones were there so it's a it is called the rock garden somebody a researcher who's very close basic paper we are looking at as one of the more important ones she recreates these grinding stones but grinding different kinds of things in it and looking at the micro indentations and of course you have the tools for doing it so then you see that each kind of grain and each kind of preparation need a different kind of mark on the grinding stone and from that trying to recreate what is the food of course you also have the burnt food that we talked about how to look at it but all of this has made it possible for us to understand that large amounts of grains broken grains were cooked in these places so the initial understanding of the place is that people used to come there there is a huge number of quote unquote monuments equivalent over there and into the temple it's a religious place people used to come at certain points of time and used to celebrate with beer and maybe antelope meat steaks so this is somewhat the football analogy if you will particularly the united states where people go or park themselves in front of the television camera with food and beer and watch sports okay now that was the idea that they have earlier of the govakili tepe but now that we look at this it appears that this wasn't really what it was people stayed there for certain periods and also the kind of wheat grains that define is closely related they used wild grains they have not started agriculture as yet but nearby there are places where you can see that they were actually growing the first domesticated wheat in the whole region what's called the iron corn wheat basically that was the earliest precursor to all the other weeds we know about nurung wheat or red wheat all of this they were growing that so it seems to be closely related though it is pre it predates settled agriculture because what we find in terms of the remnants of the food that we see it doesn't seem that iron corn had yet been domesticated but the iron corn wheat they used was wild but it is closely related genetically to what was available just a little later in terms of domestication of wheat so it also gives us that it is not a sudden change this is about really a little before the neolithic revolution started so somewhere near say maybe 8000, 9000 BC 10,000 BC that you see this structures coming up and it is one of the earliest and most striking ones but not the only one so this is I think a very interesting continuity we get that the domestication of wheat barley other things that happened was not just a sudden transition that it has a long continuity and it starts by of course using the wheat and other grains boiling them making them into porridge or making them into beer it's also fermenting it means also preserving it for longer periods so all of that is what is also part of our diet so we have been herbivores for much as long as we are also carnivores that seems to be one of the conclusions that we get there's something which we've also seen the Neanderthal diet which you can talk about a little later that this is something which long predates what is seen here that humanity's ability to eat different kinds of food have been much earlier but this whole research avenue of looking at grinding stone I find that a very interesting one dental plaque we've discussed we can discuss in the Neanderthal issue where this this has been seen or done much more closely this is other rather gross aspect of the research which is that fossilized paleophysis called corpolites is what is also studied now why is that studied because from the teeth and all this grinding stones burned food we can discover grains which are harder therefore they're not that easily destroyed in terms of age but vegetable matter that's rather difficult to see so the corpolites or paleophyses they fossilize and you can discover a lot of the vegetable matter in them so corpolites is really crapolytes it's just crap okay so that also gives us information about what the paleo human actually consumed so we are getting a picture slowly reconstructing what was being used in the diet of the just pre-deolithic revolution and of course as we know the fertile crescent is one of the earliest in this of course it was paralleled in different places at different times and it not it's not that every agrarian community owned its roots to the fertile crescent there are independent places where all this has happened but this was one of the earliest and of course the continuity we tend now to talk about research papers saying Syria, Jordan, Israel, Turkey, Iran, Iraq and all of that but really one continuity continuum that you can see in the arc of the fertile crescent and they seem to have parallel communities which means there was also transfer of knowledge across the region there may be roving groups interaction amongst people whichever way it is and I think those would be uncovered as you go deeper into it but the interesting part is the Neolithic revolution was just not one striking event which spread everywhere but it had a much longer continuity and the pre-neolithic period is also a very interesting period in which we see the transition and of course post-neolithic and you know is also equally interesting because how do the states emerge from all of it is also an interesting area of research which we can take we can discuss some other day so I think this is a very very interesting research area not because of what the discoveries are merely but also because of the kind of tools so the access to new tools that we are seeing and therefore broadening our range of discoveries range of issues we can examine much much more and I think that's a very very interesting development so instead of looking at what we think was there in India's past which there is a group of people who specialize in trying to find all evidence to fit whatever they want to believe in which is that Aryans all came from India they were all the proto Aryans were used only speaking Sanskrit from respect all over the world and the human history is so much more interesting when you look at the multi-dimensionality of it and what when you look at all the tools now we have which can go into this much more than we could earlier I think that's a fascinating exercise and finally talking about Neanderthals which you mentioned before we see that of course is evidence of plant-based diet is not just there in ancient homo sapiens even in Neanderthals there is evidence we found evidence that they used to consume this diet and not just for food purposes but you also see evidence of them discovering plant-based medicines and treating themselves with it so can you can you tell us about that that's again another fascinating exercise we have seen this paper earlier that what was the Neanderthal consumption of food and different places there have been Spain and other places as well this has been examined and again it was examined by looking at essentially the teeth of people in the teeth block that that accumulates over there which is fossilized now that showed some very interesting examples and what you talked about that we should not be talking about the discovery of aspirin being something we need in modern times because they seem to have used it for toothing that there is a particular fossil which shows a abscess of teeth tooth which is there in the fossil you can see that and then you find that in the diet of the person what you preserve that it appears that they use a bark of a tree which is known to be rich in aceticicicic acid i.e. aspirin so that they were using painkillers we also found they were using that in the diet there was a kind of mold that was being used looks like to treat abscess because it doesn't it doesn't seem to be normal in other people's diets so this person who had abscess was also using a painkiller and also what would be called a penicillin antibiotic because that's what the mold would have had so both of this we should credit to neolithic age not to the modern age flaming is not the discoverer of penicillin neolithic age seemed to have all discovered it much earlier so of course this we know that plant-based medicines were widely used and lot of modern medicine comes from looking at what they have used going through it scientifically rigorously finding it what works and what didn't work so and it is not whether it is Ayurveda or Unani which are much later that's not the source of this kind of knowledge it is really empirical knowledge of the groups and quite often for a set of people within the group and also women who were the natural looking at medicinal plants and so on which we see still in our houses that the grandmother's remedies that that's what they're effort to so that this has been a part of the much larger history and the fact that we find not only plant-based diet as you see but also this medicinal plants being used in this particular form I think it's very very interesting what of course does it does show if we look across the diets of neolithic pre-neolithic population the panolithic population and now there's evidence coming up from other parts as well that the human beings occupied a much larger niche in terms of food than we earlier thought so the hunter-gatherers just didn't hunt and gather food the fruit and meat diet the paleo diet as we were talking about earlier but they depending on which place there were which season it is they could use a much larger range of foods and I think particularly the fact they had fire and they could break down a lot of the primary material for food whether it is what is called the vegetables the plants even in terms of meat that fire was an extremely important element of making a much larger set of foods available to the human population and therefore the change of the diet is much earlier than we thought so when we look at the ability for human beings to consume carbohydrates we find that our cousins the other ones which share 98 percent of the genetic material forms to the chimpanzees and so on their ability to digest carbohydrates is much lower than ours and the genetic variation which allows us to do this that started much earlier than we thought so I think the combination of looking at different kinds of fossils dental plaque to crap to grinding stones combined with the genetic changes within what are in our bodies and so looking at also in the plaque what is the bacteria which is there which also tells us of the kind of food that we used all of this is giving us a picture which is just enriching our understanding of evolution the social evolution of human beings because there is a tendency to focus too much on the genetic evolution but the real important part of it is what is it that we did what are the tools we used and ultimately we are what we are because of the food we ate so I think all of that combined think it was a much richer history of humanity and its evolution and the social history of that evolution then we would get simply from looking at skeletons which is all that we did earlier and saying big head small head and so on so I think that's where I find the current all this research extremely interesting because it also brings genetics in and just today as you're talking about it we have found a new skull which seems to indicate there was a different lineage of Homo sapiens which also contributed genetic content to Neanderthals also people in East Asia and that also brings us that the history of humanity is not as we thought of one lineage breaking up into groups and a kind of tree but it is a much more dense network where groups split off but also mated with each other over a much longer period new lineages coming from there and this seems to fit a hypothesis that in the Neanderthal East Asian lineage there is a genetic component which we haven't identified as yet and this could be a part of that component so I think this is something in Asia and Europe is possible also because the cold climate in the northern parts of this region so the fossils are much better much easier to get than better state when it comes to Africa South Asia hotter climates we are going to have a more of a problem because the fossils are not that easy to get numbers are less degradation of the material is much more so but the way the speed at which archaeology of this kind lied to different scientific tools that are becoming available I think we have a very exciting history that is going to unfold before us maybe I'm only seeing the beginning of it but I think your generation is going to see the change of human history at least the prehistory pre-neolithic revolution what happened and also understanding the social changes of the Neolithic period and the cities I think all of this we'll have to rewrite not that we'll have to rewrite completely because I don't think the major findings will change but I do think the understanding of how it happened and why it happened is going to see significant changes and this is really one more example of the gathering of this kind of information combining it with understanding of history and this is exciting times for archaeology the discipline of archaeology rather than the discipline of history which focuses much more on the written word and therefore the text combines with all the archaeological evidence here we have nothing left of the text we don't know what languages are spoke that's not preserved but what is preserved is what they did and what they ate and I think that's that's the exciting part of this with this part of our discoveries. Thank you Pravee for joining us today and that's all the time we have keep watching you skip.