Vedika

In 2022, researchers excavating the Shanidar Cave complex in Iraq unearthed the charred remains of some of the world’s oldest cooked leftovers. As Ceren Kabukcu, an archaeobotanical scientist at the University of Liverpool and the lead author of a paper on the discovery, says in an email, “It looked like the seeds were soaked before they were cooked. You can tell if it’s soaked or cracked before it’s mashed into a patty. From this, we suggested [the food underwent] something like a flat preparation.” The 70,000-year-old culinary treat was, in other words, a proto pancake.Defined simply as flat cakes prepared from starch-based batter, pancakes—or at least rudimentary versions of them—were one of humanity’s earliest, most important foodstuffs. While previous research suggested cooking emerged during the Neolithic era (roughly 7000 to 1700 B.C.E.), when prehistoric people transitioned to larger, more structured communities and began to domesticate crops and animals, more recent findings indicate otherwise. Kabukcu cites evidence of “cooking with different plants (tubers, nuts, seeds) much earlier than the Neolithic.” Some 30,000 years ago, for instance, Stone Age people made flour out of cattails and ferns, likely combining the powder with water and baking the mixture on a hot rock to create a flat cake.