Thanks! I can't find evidence that black pepper in particular is that old. I'm not sure what Eden Project is, but I can't find any references on the page you linked.
Searching around a bit:
[1] claims Myocene (5-20M years ago)
[2] claims the genus is as old as the Upper Cretaceous (100M years ago), but I don't see the Piper Nigrum (black pepper) species in Table 1.
So, it seems to be a bit more modern than some of the other plants in my post. Please correct me if I missed anything, or if you find a good source!
I regularly eat bunya nuts from the Australian bunya or false monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria bidwillii). It is said to have appeared in the Jurassic (~200 - 145 mya). They are very tasty.
I scrolled looking for these. I get a few every year at my place but tend to marvel at their size, eat a couple raw then throw them away. I've tried oven/fire roasting them like we do macadamias but wasnt too great. Any preparation you recommend?
For people that dont know these, think pine cone thats a little bigger than a bowling ball. They are pretty amazing looking things.
I leave the cone in a bowl until the individual seeds just start separating. Then I pull them off and put them on a tray and in the oven (~150 degrees) for 10 - 15 mins.
I am up in Brisbane. I get them from my brother who has a few trees on his property in Maleny. I used to get them from the staff at Roma Street Parkland.
It's heavy on plants but plants seem like a trickier source for fossil foods since most plants we eat are domesticated and/or otherwise evolutionarily recent - we eat lots of grasses. Animals we catch might be a good source for new entries - sharks and sturgeons are ancient, hagfish are eaten. Maybe some of the edible seaweeds haven't changed much morphologically?
It's pretty fascinating how recent most plant foods humans eat are.
As you note, grasses (wheat, rice, oats, rye, barley, ...) and maize are both recent developments and exceedingly selected and hybridised by humans.
Both grasses and flowering plants post-date the first emergence of dinosaurs.
Numerous other crops are similarly recent: stone fruits, pomes, etc. Others were available locally but not worldwide: potatoes and tomatoes. I suspect tubers and berries may be among the older plant foods eaten.
Some sort of global disaster appears to have occurred around 12,000 years ago, with evidence of massive flooding and wildfires and dramatic shifts in climate happening over the course of days and weeks all over the world.
Agriculture and advanced culture may have existed prior to the event, but it looks like the source for flood myths. Aside from Gobekli Tepe and a handful of other sites, it appears most knowledge and culture was lost. People had to start from scratch, so agriculture begins at most 12,000 years ago, comprising almost every plant we eat today. There's no way to know what might have been utterly lost.
There's evidence of modern humans going back almost 300,000 years. (Crazy to think we were without dogs for ~260k years. Humans are better with dogs around. )
Humans probably invented language and writing and all sorts of proto-sciences many times over those hundreds of millenia, but everything before 12,000 years back is gone. There's virtually no evidence of the vast majority of human culture before then. Entropy sucks.
There's relatively little archaeological evidence of ancient humans generally. The conditions favouring preservation are fairly strict.
Given that:
1. Human populations tend to travel along and settle near coastlines and rivers, or in low valleys with rich soils whether supporting agriculture or nonagricultural hunter-gatherer societies.
2. Sea levels during the Quaternary Glaciations periods of maximum glacial extent were as much as 100m (330ft) lower than today. Many settlements, communities, and artefacts would be under water now, and many likely degraded.
3. Glaciers themselves would destroy many other terrestrial remains in regions subject to glaciation. Glaciers in particular scour valleys.
The Quatenary Glaciations are multiple periods of cooling and warming extending back over 2.86 million years ... or roughly the entire time since genus homo split from its common ancestors with chimpanzees. Anatomically modern humans are about 200,000 years old. Much of our evolutionary and anthropological history has been subjected to the same stresses and transformations of repeated periods of glaciation and warming.
The places that traces would likely remain tend to be lower latitudes, nearer the equator, away from coasts, and geologically reasonably stable --- sedimentation helps preserve remains, violent tectonic activity not so much. This tends to favour Africa and south-central Asia.
There’s a few different myths and theories here. There was an event that killed most humans 50,000+ years ago, probably a volcano.
Later, in the 5,000-15,000 year timeframe there were a few different flooding events, in the Black Sea, Middle East, the North Sea, etc. Presumably they were related, but hundreds or thousands of years may have separated these events. More recently, in the 12th-13th century, tens or hundreds of thousands of people were washed away in the Frisian islands.
Lowland plains are the most fertile places to live, and probably contributes to the universal nature of the flood myth. I would imagine that the current Black Sea was a paradise lost when it flooded, probably quite suddenly, 7,000 years ago.
When you think of ancient oral histories and myths that endured into modern religion, concepts like the garden of Eden, Noah’s flood, days of judgement, etc are powerful morality tales that may have been boiled down from some derivative of actual history. I’ve always found the idea inspirational, as life & humans have a way of powering on in the face of incredible adversity.
A minority view holds that the YD was caused by an comet disintegrating and creating a chain of impacts or airbursts across the Northern Hemisphere. A further subset of that minority suggests that those events are the source for flood myths around the world, and speculates that advanced civilizations existed prior.
Point, though given the present significance of both the broader class of flowering plants, and the specific case of grasses, it's worth noting each individually.
There are some massive examples in Seattle. They are hard to miss and very peculiar. I believe they are an import from the west coast of South America: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araucaria_araucana
3-4 decades to maturity, before you can harvest seeds, and it looks like you need male and female plants to cause seeding - I wonder if that can be gamed by grafting from mature trees, or artificial hormone sprays?
3-5 cm pine nuts sound awesome, though. 50m tall trees with giant cones and tasty nuts that can live a thousand years - a grove of these on a farm seems like a cool legacy investment, with little chance of becoming invasive or problematic.
I used to ride my bike around every late summer gathering them from people's lawns.
The trees have sexes, so one has to find the female trees.
There are quite a few in Portland, and all relatively the same age because they were given away at the lewis and Clark exposition of 1905 by a representative from Chile.
The monkey puzzle tree or araucaria can be found in southern Argentina and southern Chile. The nuts are locally known as "piñon" (singular) / "piñones" (plural).
It is not my favourite nut I must say, but the flavor is OK.
Do keep in mind that these are very large trees and the leaves(needles) are very prickly to deal with. It takes a long time for them to mature and I have heard people in Seattle say that they never produce cones here.
There are several in our neighborhood, including our neighbor, but the homeowners obviously have no idea how large those trees will get based on where they are planted.
One interesting thing that might be hard to fit into here is the vast vast variety of "spring greens" different human cultures have eaten for a really long time that have since been forgotten about.
Spring is a time of a lot of growth, and young plant growth tends to be the least likely to have bitter or toxic compounds so there are a ton of plants that were munched on in the springtime and only then. Some of them, like spinach or many brassicas, were then domesticated, but many of them remained wild.
My parents grew up in Romania and had many plants they would munch on as kids while outside. And it seems to have been thought of as "kids food" since they weren't really collected in large quantities to make meals.
A lot of these forgotten edibles are often rediscovered in times of economic failures. If you pick up any foraging book today, a ton of that knowledge can be traced back to the Great Depression when people had to rediscover what foods they can rely on
i just want to know, do they really use the name "monkey puzzle tree" in english speaking countries? i was a little surprised to see that name, given that araucaria is the accepted name for the tree (in spanish).
If we dig deeper in the rabbit hole, araucaria is the name given to the tree (and the zone where the tree grows, and the indigenous (mapuche) people that inhabited, and keeps inhabiting the land) by the spanish empire.
The original name (newen) was given by the mapuche people. "piñon" is also a mapuche word and while we use "araucaria" when refering to the tree, we use "piñón" instead of "araucaria nut". to refer to the edible part.
I’ve definitely heard Araucaria araucana called “monkey puzzle” quite often in English, and many people in Australia mistakenly call the bunya pine (Araucaria bidwillii) “monkey puzzle” as well because they are closely related species and look fairly similar (I’m from Australia). There are several species of Araucaria in Australia though, so many people would also be aware of the Norfolk Island pine (Araucaria heterophylla) and probably the hoop pine (Araucaria cunninghamii). I think some people who are familiar with the different species would probably understand that if you said “Araucaria” you would be probably be referring to Araucaria araucana.
Spanish is my mother language, I can confirm that is correct. Well, "piñón" can also mean pinion, as in gear systems, but the context should make the meaning clear.
Likewise, "piña" can mean both pine cone and pineapple, due to their visual similarity.
Not the wisdom I was expecting to find in this HN post, but it absolutely is the perfect description for when someone can be considered a "professional" of anything.
The reason I’m posting that here is because for many years I don’t drink it. I was so used to hydrating from soda and other beverages advertised on TV I completely lost touch with plain old H2O.
Then one day I rediscovered its pure refreshing goodness. What a surprise! I savoured it and marvelled at the pureness of the way it quenched my thirst.
Water! Quenching thirst since before the dinosaurs.
Affordable. Convenient if you have a tap. Amazing on a hot day if you have a fridge and a pitcher.
Someone recently was exclaiming how good water was. We had been drinking heavily and I insisted they drank water while we were drinking alcohol since they were complaining about hangovers. They woke up with no hang over.
It turns out they just don't really drink water. It's always something in a can - flavored seltzers or soft drinks.
It kinda blew my mind that there are people out there who don't drink water. It feels as natural as breathing to me.
My kids had friends (round 10 yo) who claimed they did not like the taste of water. That blew their minds since they'd been drinking water their whole life.
It is still the main beverage we drink, and there are still those who never drink it. Incredible.
To be fair, tap water in different places tastes different. If you're in a rural area of the US with well-water, what comes out of the faucet can have a strong rusty taste.
Exactly. As a kid, I thought I hated the taste of water. Our municipal tap water was terrible -- it was safe, but no one drank it because it was so unpleasant.
On the other hand, NYC and SF both have excellent tap water. And other cities are somewhere in between, or at the extreme end can even be dangerous (Flint MI).
The same is true of well water. Some of the best-tasting and perfectly safe water I've ever had has been well water. And as you mention, it can also come in all sorts of off-putting flavors. And it can be contaminated and dangerous (biologically or chemically).
People talk a lot about the variations of coffee or wine or beer, but I think the variations in water are even more interesting (and sometimes contributive to the others).
There's something very wrong with the first world when people discover drinking water. I'm not singling you out, I've heard the same story from other people, usually from the US, and it's mind boggling to me. I know it's the parents fault.
It's like discovering that clean air is pretty good for you and feels nice when inhaled.
That is not true of most areas in the US where tap water is fine to drink. Some localities do have high concentrations of iron or sulfates in the water that taint the flavor.
Isn't the availability of bottled water a relatively recent thing? It certainly wasn't available for most of the time that I lived in the UK (1955 to 1985), but sweetened carbonated drinks have been a thing for well over a hundred years.
I used to drink soda for every meal and I went down like 2 inches on my waist size when I stopped. I mean I did eventually gain that back, I guess, but it took years.
I have heard folk wisdom to the effect that a can of Coke a day results a pound of weight gain per month. According to this (somewhat dubious) article, 20oz of soda per day results a pound of weight gain per week!
After watching How to Grow a Planet, I thought about this same question.
Considering flowers appeared to the end of the dinosaur era, there wouldn't be much to eat, except the dinosaurs themselves, and other animals (lots of sea food!).
It's interesting to read about these other plants.
Flowers are necessary for fruit, but not for plants in general. Plants and algae and fungi existed long long before flowers evolved. You can still rely on leaves (spinach, lettuce, chard, etc), roots/tubers (yams, potatoes, carrots, etc), stems (celery, asparagus, bamboo, etc), and many other parts. Not to mention the majority of lichen are edible and the many many edible mushroom species. Also edible algae and seaweeds
Ostrich also evolved from the dinosaurs and has its own unique taste. I bet it varied though probably the range of bird meat tastes is a good place to put our first guesses.
Does anyone enjoy horseshoe crab? I've had it once, and there's very little edible meat. Seems more of a novelty than sustenance. (I may have been eating it incorrectly.)
Not clicking on that. I recall seeing a picture of rows of hundreds of crabs strapped to harnesses, bent in half, with needles in their backs draining their blue blood. Still can't get it out of my head.
had a friend in college who did that as his summer job. They take great care to make prevent them from dying but then they get sold to fishermen to be used as chum... go figure.
Interestingly, many of the plants on that list are toxic to some degree. Many take repeated boiling, or can only be eaten in small quantities (eg. Ginkgo).
I think it's fair to say most plants are toxic. The ones we eat as staples are the exception. Foods that you might want to use as a staple, like pine nuts and some beans, end up being toxic when consumed regularly, and anything left isn't really suitable as a main source of calories.
Wikipedia on the Sago Palm: "In metabolic conditions, cycasin is hydrolyzed into glucose and methylazoxymethanol (MAM), the latter of which dissociates into formaldehyde and diazomethane.
Life finds a way to weaponize diazomethane. God help us all.
https://www.edenproject.com/learn/eden-at-home/a-guide-to-pr... has a nice list of plants of the era and "Black peppers" seems to be one that ticks the box's and not upon the list.