Since mitochondrial DNA can be used to trace human ancestry along the maternal line, has there been any research done using the same logic to find out what fruits and/or vegetables are the precursors of the varieties of what we eat today?
This might be of interest.
Fascinating. But how the hell can there be a 6500 year gap between the use of wine and the use of vinegar? I’d imagine no more than a gap of a few months between the discover of the one and that of the other.
fascinating!
Amazing stuff!
Vinegar only happens if someone doesn’t DRINK the wine in time… Clearly our ancestors had more, um, respect for wine than we do.
So 6500 years before there was leftover wine? That’s a lotta respect.
Although they probably weren’t creating wine in huge amounts in the first place, most likely.
From the site:
That’s the only reason I can think of why its date is set so ridiculously late. But the quotes you get once you click on vinegar themselves talk about its production from wine and its known use since Roman times.
Good site, though. Lots of pages of reading besides the timeline itself.
Now I’m really hungry.
Concur. It can’t be that nobody made the stuff. Even with modern equipment, hygiene and methods, its exceptionally easy to accidentally make vinegar.
That, and they were using wine as a beverage. If you took a swig and got a mouthful of vinegar, you’d spit the stuff out.
Someone would have to think about using it in another context – sparingly for flavor, or to pickle something. But since it was just considered bad wine, that’s not an obvious leap.
Tracking ancestral fruit and especially vegetables is difficult, due to issues of preservation. Soft, watery plant parts decompose quickly compared to cereal grains, pits of fruit, nutshells etc. Imprints of food plant parts on ceramics, an important source of data on cereals, is likewise non-existent. Moreover, veggies are harvested before maturing and leave no trace on the pollen grain record as a result. It is more than likely that many different root vegetables and greens were domesticated alongside cereal grains already in the very early Neolithic, but there is little hard evidence of that. So we have timelines with grain X at 10 000 BC and veggie Y at 500 AD.
There’s archaeological evidence of fermentation both wine and beer, going back to 4000 BC or earlier. Vinegar has apparently not left such evidence, and all we have are written records, which don’t go back that far. One may reasonably surmise that they discovered vinegar far earlier, but there’s no evidence of its use.
Wow…what a fantastic site!