Despite the common advice, eating what birds eat is not necessarily a good guide to what’s edible to humans. For one thing, birds pass toxic seeds through their digestive tracts without digesting them, whereas humans can break them down and have problems. In the case of olives, birds don’t care about the bitterness of the fruit since they swallow it whole.
Apparently olives were first cultivated for their oil. It was the Romans who discovered how to treat them with lye to make them edible.
Egyptians knew about how to mummify folks. I think they might have been able to preserve a hunk of camel meat.
I also think ancient humanoids ate a lot of rotten stuff and bad berries and fungi.
Belly ache meant: don’t do that again.
You can still get it.
https://purity.nf.ca/products/
And you can still break a tooth on it. I know this for a fact. :mad:
The Egyptians preserved mummies with natron and resin. Meat preserved according to the mummification process would taste pretty much like pine-tar soap. 
So, better than lutefisk.
Coffee! Who in the Hell harvested the beans, roasted them, then brewed them in hot water?
I mean, I’m GRATEFUL, but still…
And what about artichokes?
~VOW
I often think how could anyone look at a lobster and say “Yummy, good eats!”
I was hoping they used a slightly different recipe. Maybe rosemary and pine-nuts?
George Carlin probably had it right when he speculated that shepherds probably watched goats eat the beans then party all night.
There are several legends about the discovery of the invigorating qualities of coffee, one of the most popular being that of the goatherd Kaldi. He found his goats dancing about after eating the coffee berries and then tried them himself. Other legends involve a Sufi monk noticing that birds became more agitated after eating the seeds. But coffee was apparently first used by Sufi monks trying to stay awake during their devotions.
Coffee was originally prepared by boiling the skin and pulp of the fruit, or by boiling the green seed. It was brewed as a stimulant rather than for its flavor. It was discovered much later that roasting the seeds improved the flavor, and grinding them improved extraction of the caffeine and flavor compounds.
Then Starbucks discovered that you could sell substandard, over-roasted crap to anybody if you raised your prices to something ridiculous.
Cheese and beer were very important products in the Neolithic. I’ve heard it claimed — only half joking? — that the hunter-gatherers of northern Germany and Denmark adopted farming circa 4000 BC only after learning the recipe for beer!
I hoped to read answers to this interesting question. I’d use two question marks myself, but that’s my persnicketiness.
Is asking a question about question marks and forgetting to end it with a question mark an example of Muphry’s Law? Or is it more like Umhoefer’s Law, Hartman’s Law, or some other law?
Incidentally, coffee “cherries” are edible and somewhat sweet. The pulp and skin contains a small amount of caffeine. Primitive people were in the habit of brewing up infusions of all kinds of plants, so it’s not surprising they might boil up dried coffee cherries. Even today, the dried pulp is made into tea. So all it takes is just leaving some seeds in with the pulp to get a drink with some kick.
These will keep forever. Virginia or Kentucky Country Ham
