Asian spices of aromatic herbs such as turmeric and fruits such as bananas had already arrived in the Mediterranean more than 3000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought.
A team of researchers working alongside archaeologist Philipp Stockhammer at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (LMU) has shown that even in the Bronze Age, the long-distance food trade it was already connecting distant societies.
Working with an international team to analyze food waste in toothpaste, the LMU archaeologist has found evidence that people in the East (Eastern Mediterranean) were already eating turmeric, bananas and even soy in the ‘Bronze and early Iron Age, about 3,700 years ago. The study is published in PNAS.
“Asia’s exotic spices, fruits and oils had reached the Mediterranean several centuries, in some cases even millennia, earlier than previously thought,” Stockhammer says in a statement. “This is the earliest direct evidence to date of turmeric, banana and soy outside of South and East Asia.”
It is also direct evidence that already in the second millennium BC. C. already existed a flourishing commerce to long distance of exotic fruits, spices and oils, that thinks that it connected the south of Asia and the Levant through Mesopotamia or Egypt. While substantial trade in these regions is widely documented later, tracing the roots of this nascent globalization has proven to be a persistent problem. The findings of this study confirm that long-distance trade in culinary products has connected these distant societies since at least the Bronze Age. People obviously had a keen interest in exotic foods from a very early age.
For their analysis, the Stockhammer international team examined 16 people from the excavations at Megiddo and Tel Erani, which are in present-day Israel. The southern region of Levante served as an important bridge between the Mediterranean, Asia and Egypt in the second millennium BC. C. The aim of the research was to investigate the kitchens of the Levantine populations of the Bronze Age by analyzing traces of food remains, including ancient proteins and plant microfossils, which have been preserved. in human dental calculus for thousands of years.
The human mouth is full of bacteria, which continually petrify and form stones. Small particles of food are trapped and preserved in the growing calculus, and it is these tiny remains that can now be accessed for scientific research thanks to cutting-edge methods.
For the purposes of their analysis, the researchers took samples from a variety of individuals at the Megiddo Bronze Age site and the Tel Erani Early Iron Age site. They analyzed what food proteins and vegetable waste were conserved in the calculation of their teeth. “This allows us to find traces of what a person ate,” Stockhammer says. “Anyone who doesn’t practice good dental hygiene will still be telling archaeologists what they’ve been eating for thousands of years from now on!”