"People who lived 15,000 years ago in what is now Israel feasted on snakes and lizards, archaeologists have discovered." Source: Live Science.
"Prior excavations in the Levant, a geographic region that historically included Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and parts of Syria and Jordan, unearthed thousands of bones belonging to lizards and snakes. Animal bones are usually found where ancient people once lived if the animals were being eaten. But it was unknown if lizards and snakes were part of the human diet or if their bones were left behind by other predators.
"By experimenting on the bones of modern squamates — the group that includes lizards and snakes — researchers developed visual references for different types of surface damage, such as erosion, burning or digestion by birds of prey. When the scientists compared these patterns to damage in squamate bones from the el-Wad Terrace, a cave site near Israel's Mount Carmel that was occupied by humans between 11,500 and 15,000 years ago, they determined that many of the ancient bones there had been eaten by people."
This entire lecture series should play automatically, but if it doesn't, the rest of the series can be found here.
"For all of the glory and grandeur of Ancient Rome, the Roman economy never developed into anything terribly complex compared to modern economies. Ancient Rome was an agrarian and slave based economy whose main concern was feeding the vast number of citizens and legionaries who populated the Mediterranean region. Agriculture and trade dominated Roman economic fortunes, only supplemented by small scale industrial production." Source: "Ancient Roman Economy," United Nations of Roma Victrix.
According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, "The growth of Rome to a city of perhaps 250,000 in the time of the Gracchi and of up to one million under Augustus, far outstripping the productive capacity of her hinterlands, created an unprecedented demand for imported foodstuffs." The regular distribution of "a set monthly ration of grain at a set price for adult male citizen residents" was established by the populari Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, later assassinated for his reforms, and the ration was made free by P. Clodius Pulcher in 58 BC.
The Gracchi brothers were representatives of the lower class who attempted to make reforms benefiting the common people. Both were murdered by the ruling aristocracy for (among other things) their land reforms which would have had a major impact on the patrician's power and incomes. This conflict between the commoners and the rapacious nobility still continues to this day.
The emperor Augustus stabilized the number of residents entitled to the grain dole "at or below 200,000" in 2 BC. "[The] public supply, drawing on the grain paid to the state as rent or tax in Sicily, Africa and (from 30 BC) Egypt, helped the privileged minority who held tickets of entitlement, which could be inherited or sold. But the monthly ration did not meet a family's need for grain, and the tickets did not necessarily go to the poor." (OCD)
"Grain made into bread was, by far, the most important element in the Roman diet." (Wikipedia) In later years the grain dole, known as the Cura Annonae, and the construction of the new Colosseum led to the development of the "bread and circuses" system for controlling (or trying to control) the population of Rome, making the grain supply of Egypt critical to the survival of the city.
Even the state couldn't meet the huge demand for grain in a city the size of Rome, however, and this created all sorts of problems. "State grain met no more than a portion of the city's annual grain needs," according to the OCD. "The rest had to be supplied by the free market. Furthermore, the importation of the state grain depended upon private traders, who in times of crisis had to be offered considerable incentives to involve themselves in the trade."
The grain supply of Egypt was so crucial that the Roman emperors made sure to keep the country under tight control:
"As a key province, but also the 'crown domain' where the emperors succeeded the divine Pharaohs, Egypt was ruled by a uniquely styled Praefectus augustalis ('Augustal prefect'), instead of the traditional senatorial governor of other Roman provinces. The prefect was a man of equestrian rank and was appointed by the Emperor." (Wikipedia)
If the wrong man was appointed to govern Egypt, he could easily pressure Rome into meeting his demands. I don't think it ever happened in reality, but this scenario was portrayed in HBO's Rome where Marc Antony withholds the grain supply in order to force Octavian into declaring war.
Analyzing a "vast amount of food waste" discovered during a dig at the kitchen in Durham Cathedral, archaeologists have recreated the diet of the monks and other people who lived there over the centuries (app. 14th cent - Second World War).
According to The Journal (2014), "fish would have been an important part of the religious order’s diet, and the finds showed that the monks were eating North Sea cod, herring, sole, turbot, and salmon and trout from the River Wear."
Other menu items included "'white meat' calves" and "a wide range of birds" that ranged "from domestic fowl to game and wild birds from the estuaries and moors of the region." The monks may have also eaten puffins and lapwing.
Comment: This menu is necessarily incomplete because things like fruit, vegetables, bread, etc., wouldn't have been preserved after so many years, but it sounds to me like these monks and the other inhabitants of the castle ate better than most people do today. Their food was undoubtedly more healthy than today's diet of sugar-coated lard and processed "meat products" saturated with preservatives, artificial flavoring and other toxic waste.
Note: "Durham Cathedral was built in the late 11th and early 12th centuries to house the relics of St Cuthbert (evangelizer of Northumbria) and the Venerable Bede. It attests to the importance of the early Benedictine monastic community and is the largest and finest example of Norman architecture in England. The innovative audacity of its vaulting foreshadowed Gothic architecture. Behind the cathedral stands the castle, an ancient Norman fortress which was the residence of the prince-bishops of Durham." Source: UNESCO World Heritage List.
"Henry's food was prepared, in a private kitchen, under the direction of the Privy Master Cook, John Bricket." Source: Historic Royal Palaces.
"The King ate in his private rooms, away from the crowds but on more formal occasions he sat alone at a high covered table in his Presence Chamber, under the canopy of state. He chose from a huge buffet, sampling whatever took his fancy. Dishes included game, roasted or served in pies, lamb, venison and swan.
"For banquets, more unusual items, such as conger eel [see below] and porpoise could be on the menu. Sweet dishes were often served along with savoury.
"Only the King was given a fork, with which he ate sweet preserves. Forks were used to serve, cook and carve, but eating with them didn’t become popular until the 17th century."
Comment: I love the term "presence chamber." Technically the outer room of the privy chamber, a private "apartment" the king maintained at his various royal residences, the presence chamber was the place where ordinary mortals were granted the privilege of entering into the awesome presence of the king himself. At times, they had the extra honor of viewing the majestic king stuffing his face with the endless stream of food that came out of the royal kitchens.
In his youth, Henry VIII was an athlete, but as he grew older he turned into a seriously grotesque chubster who was apparently so fat he couldn't even walk around on his own:
"Late in life, Henry became obese, with a waist measurement of 54 inches (140 cm), and had to be moved about with the help of mechanical inventions. He was covered with painful, pus-filled boils and possibly suffered from gout." (Wikipedia)
Henry ate a lot, true, but that isn't the primary reason he got so fat. Everyone at court ate like he did back then (more or less). Furthermore, everyone in Tudor England was drunk all the time (see 0:29 in the top video). Henry probably started to turn into a blimp when leg injuries forced him to become more sedentary:
"Even by modern standards, and certainly by those of the ordinary man or woman in 16th-century England, Henry ate a good deal. That was what his social group, the high nobility, did. When the noble entertained, food was often served in large quantities as part of the display of generosity or 'magnificence' incumbent upon them, and as proof of their high social status." Source: Zocalo Public Square.
"...His diet was highly calorific, but until his late 30s, Henry’s relentlessly active lifestyle burned most of them off almost as fast he absorbed them. In his early 20s, the king had a 32-inch waist and 40-inch chest. His athletic build at 29 can be judged fairly accurately from a made-to-measure suit of armour he wore at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the meeting held in June 1520 with his great rival Francis I of France.
Henry suffered various injuries over the years from jousting and hunting accidents. He also developed leg ulcers which seriously hampered his mobility but had no effect on his ability to cram food into his increasingly bloated pie-hole:
"Henry was clearly often disabled, unable to move without intense pain. Exercising in the way he had done as a young man proved impossible, although he continued to ride and to hunt for some years. His appetite was, nevertheless, undiminished. He quickly gained weight, which could then not be worked off. An unhealthy cycle was set in place."
If I could eat like Henry VIII I'm not sure I could resist it, either. Just looking at the food in the top video makes me hungry, but then again I get hungry watching instructional videos about how to slaughter and butcher hogs. Venison, lamb, sweet preserves, game pies -- it sounds delicious and I don't think I would feel particularly guilty about chowing down on a porpoise or a swan. Eels sound nasty, though, or they did until I watched the next video.
This looked great until he pureed it into a disgusting mess.
Despite his prodigious intake, Henry VIII may have been malnourished. This seems hard to believe considering the amount of food the court put away:
"Tudor cuisine was lavish. An ambassador to Henry VIII’s court is quoted as saying, '…the wealth and civilization of the world are here; and those who call the English barbarians appear to me to render themselves such.'" Source: Picture Britain.
The Tudors consumed a huge number of game animals, most of which I can't even identify:
"First of all, there was a lot of meat going on during this era. Just listen to this account of game found in one household’s larder: 'cranys, redshankes, fesauntes, sholardes, pacokes, knottes, bustardes, great byreds, hearonsewys, bytterns, reys, kyrlewes, wegions, dotrells, ternes, smale byrdes.' Henry’s daughter Elizabeth clearly had a taste for meat; her court went through 1,240 oxen, 8,200 sheep, 760 calves, and 1,870 pigs in a single year. In addition to vast amounts of meat, there were also delicious confections such as trifles, fools, whitepot (a baked dish of cream, eggs, and currants), clotted cream, and leach. Needless to say, this kind of cooking was hardly conducive to trim waistlines."
Most of the game animals with weird medieval names are birds, I think. The byttern or bittern looks especially plump and tasty.
The problem with a diet like this is that it consisted mostly of meat, breads and lots of alcohol (water was apparently considered to be unhealthy and the nobility avoided vegetables because they were thought to be "peasant food."). The lack of vitamin C and other nutrients in the royal diet could cause diseases like scurvy. The early symptoms of scurvy, in particular, include "weakness, feeling tired and sore arms and legs" (Wikipedia) which would have aggravated the effects of Henry's injuries and made it even harder for him to burn more calories than he consumed. And the result of that can be dramatic.
"Why do some animals eat or abandon their offspring? According to researchers, these might actually be forms of parental care. Their mathematical model shows that when overcrowding threatens offspring survival -- which often occurs due to spread of infection or competition for resources -- sacrificing a few so the most can live becomes the ultimate form of tough love." Source: Science Daily.
Tough love. That's hilarious. Only a sociobiologist could argue with a straight face that eating your own children is a form of "parental care." Don't get me wrong, though. I can think of lots of good reasons for eating your own babies. Maybe you can't afford the quarter-of-a-million dollars it will cost to raise that cute little rug rat to the age of eighteen, or maybe you just want to stop their incessant babbling and howling.
This baby looks particularly tasty.
Another good reason to eat babies is to save the planet from the global warming crisis. As we all know, the world will end in a few months if we don't immediately dismantle our advanced industrial societies and drastically reduce the population.
The best reason to eat babies, though, is hunger. Jonathan Swift, the famous Anglo-Irish gourmet, pointed out that plump human babies around a year old are particularly succulent and nutritious:
"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my Acquaintance in London; that a young healthy Child, well nursed, is, at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boiled; and, I make no doubt, that it would equally serve in a Fricasie, or Ragoust." -- Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729)
Swift didn't mention it specifically, but babies are also very tasty when they're barbecued.
"Corn cultivation spread from Mesoamerica to what is now the American Southwest by about 4000 B.C., but how and when the crop made it to other parts of North America is still debated. In a new study, scientists report that corn was not grown in the ancient metropolis of Cahokia until sometime between A.D. 900 and 1000, a relatively late date that corresponds to the start of the city's rapid expansion." Source: Science Daily.
Note: "Cahokia was the largest and most influential urban settlement of the Mississippian culture, which developed advanced societies across much of what is now the central and southeastern United States, beginning more than 1,000 years before European contact." (Wikipedia)
Maize (corn) is thought to have been domesticated in southern Mexico around 10,000 years ago. If the dates are correct, it took around 6,000 years for the cultivation of maize to spread to the American southwest and another 3,000 years for the crop to reach Cahokia in the midwest. This very slow spread can be explained, at least partly, by the fact that it took time for maize to adapt to northern climates, but it also suggests that the indigenous peoples of the ancient Americas were fairly static, spending most of their time in their traditional territories.
When maize reached Cahokia it was just a small village, but around a century later (or less) the settlement began to expand dramatically:
"Beginning in about 1050, Cahokia grew from 'a little village of a few hundred people to part of a city with 5,000 to 10,000 people in an archaeological instant' ... The population eventually expanded to at least 40,000. This early experiment in urban living was short-lived, however. By 1350, after a period of drought and civil strife, most of the city's population had dispersed." (Science Daily)
"One Neanderthal child had a very bad day about 115,000 years ago. The child died — that much is certain — and the bones were gulped down and digested by a giant, prehistoric bird, according to archaeologists in Poland." Source: Live Science (2018).
"However, it's unclear whether the giant bird killed the child before the gruesome feast or whether the child died from another cause before the bird scavenged the remains, the archaeologists said."
Note: The bones, discovered in Ciemna Cave, one of several caves in Ojcow National Park in Poland, are "the oldest known human remains ever to be found in Poland." The bird that ate the child's bones isn't identified, which is too bad. I've got this picture of a Neanderthal kid wandering off from its cave and getting gobbled up by a huge terror bird, but the terror birds, unfortunately, lived in South America during a different time period.
"In the Old Norse written corpus, berserkers ... were warriors who purportedly fought in a trance-like fury, a characteristic which later gave rise to the modern English word 'berserk' ... Berserkers are attested to in numerous Old Norse sources, with their name literally rendered as 'bear-coats', along with úlfhéðnar ('wolf-coats')." Source: Wikipedia.
"...It is proposed by some authors that the northern warrior tradition originated in hunting magic. Three main animal cults appeared: the bear, the wolf, and the wild boar." The legend of the werewolf may be related to these ancient stories:
"Old Norse had the cognate varúlfur, but because of the high importance of werewolves in Norse mythology, there were alternative terms such as ulfhéðinn ('one in wolf-skin', referring still to the totemistic or cultic adoption of wolf-nature rather than the superstitious belief in actual shape-shifting). In modern Scandinavian also kveldulf ('evening-wolf'), presumably after the name of Kveldulf Bjalfason, a historical berserker of the 9th century who figures in the Icelandic sagas." (Wikipedia)
Berserkers, like Shieldmaidens, may be completely mythological. According to the National Museum of Denmark, there is little to no archaeological evidence that they ever existed. Assuming that they were real, however, and that the stories about their ultraviolent frenzies are accurate, what could account for their deranged behavior?
The Viking berserkers, we are told, went into battle in a trance-like rage and were supposed to be almost uncontrollable killing machines. Dressed in wolf and bear pelts, they would attack friend and foe alike and their homicidal madness sounds a lot like a drug-induced frenzy of some kind:
"This fury, which was called berserkergang, occurred not only in the heat of battle, but also during laborious work. Men who were thus seized performed things which otherwise seemed impossible for human power. This condition is said to have begun with shivering, chattering of the teeth, and chill in the body, and then the face swelled and changed its colour. With this was connected a great hot-headedness, which at last gave over into a great rage, under which they howled as wild animals, bit the edge of their shields, and cut down everything they met without discriminating between friend or foe. When this condition ceased, a great dulling of the mind and feebleness followed, which could last for one or several days." -- Fabing, Howard D. (1956). "On Going Berserk: A Neurochemical Inquiry. (Subscription-access only)
Note: A detailed commentary on berserkers in general and Fabing's paper can be found here.)
The legends suggest that the berserkers might have taken some kind of drug that caused these fits of berserkergang. Whatever it was, it came on with a rush of "shivering, chattering of the teeth and chill in the body," caused a spike in blood-pressure ("the face swelled and changed its color") and body temperature ("a great hot-headedness") and ended with a hangover with could last for days. No one really knows if the berserkers were high on something, but various candidates have been suggested:
"While some researchers believe the Berserkers simply worked themselves up into a self-induced hysteria before fighting, others maintain that it was sorcery, the consumption of drugs or alcohol, or even mental illness, that accounted for their behaviour. Some botanists have claimed that berserker behaviour could have been caused by the ingestion of the plant known as bog myrtle, one of the main spices in Scandinavian alcoholic beverages." Source: Ancient Origins.
The problem with the bog-myrtle theory is that the plant was commonly used to make beer back then and doesn't appear to produce this kind of dramatic effect on people. Maybe I missed something, but I couldn't find any mention of it in The Vaults of Erowid, a site which covers psychotropic plants and herbs in exhaustive detail.
Bog Myrtle (Myrica Gale) is a natural insect repellent, among other things. It was used (along with other herbs) to flavor beer in the middle ages until "hops supplanted gruit herbs for political and economic reasons." (Wikipedia). Bog Myrtle itself isn't psychedelic, as far as I can tell, but various mixtures of gruit herbs could act as euphorics and some of them had hallucinogenic or deliriant properties, so the idea that the Berserkers were stoned on some kind of herbal drink when they went into battle isn't all that outlandish.
"Helpful for enhancing lucid dreaming and astral work generally, bog myrtle was a flavoring for a type of European beer known as gruit up until the introduction of hops. The other components of gruit (1) were yarrow and wild rosemary. Some say this brew was behind the Berserkers [sic]. In northern Europe, bog myrtle and yarrow have been ingredients in fermented drinks made from grain, honey, or fruit since the Iron Age, and it is still used in Scandinavia to make a liqueur called 'snaps.'" Source: Alchemy Works.
(1) Medieval brewers used a wide variety of gruit herbs in their beer.
If the berserkers were high on something, the most likely candidate is gruit beer, but if they were that drunk it's hard to see how they could function very effectively. Some sources I've found speculate that they were tripping on the psychedelic amanita muscaria mushroom, but the psychoactive ingredient in the mushroom is muscimol, which is described as a "sedative-hypnotic," i.e., a tranquilizer -- just the opposite of what you would expect. Also, I've never heard of a psychedelic that consistently produces outbursts of violent rage. If the berserkers were taking a drug, it sounds like it was a medieval form of PCP.
Were the berserkers mentally ill? Again, it doesn't sound like it. Their furies seem to have been situation-specific, only occurring during battles or perhaps when they were working in their villages. If they were crazy they would've been prone to go berserk for no reason at all, but none of the sources I've found describe them flipping out at random. So, unless they were elite warriors who ate some plant that drove them into a homicidal rage the most plausible explanation for their reported behavior is that the berserkers are simply characters from Old Norse mythology. In other words, maybe they never actually existed.
"Humankind first started farming in Mesopotamia about 11,500 years ago. Subsequently, the practices of cultivating crops and raising livestock emerged independently at perhaps a dozen other places around the world, in what archaeologists call the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. It's one of the most thoroughly-studied episodes in prehistory -- but a new paper in the Journal of Political Economy shows that most explanations for it don't agree with the evidence, and offers a new interpretation." Source: Science Daily (2019).
According to this study, farming, at least in the beginning, was less efficient than hunting:
"'It is very unlikely that the number of calories acquired from a day's work at the advent of farming made it a better option than hunting and gathering and it could well have been quite a bit worse' ... Prior studies, including those of human and animal bones, suggest that farming actually took an extreme nutritional toll on early adopters and their livestock. So why farm in the first place?"
One possibility is that farming was a kind of forced labor imposed on one group by another, but if the first farmers were malnourished slaves then who were their masters?
"Some have suggested an inferior technology could have been imposed by political elites as a strategy for extracting taxes, tribute, or rents. But farming was independently adopted millennia before the emergence of governments or political elites capable of imposing a new way of life on heavily-armed foraging communities."
This theory doesn't require a "political elite," however. A large, strong clan of hunter-gatherers could have easily enslaved a smaller tribe and forced them to do farm work. That's a perfectly plausible scenario and I wouldn't be surprised if it actually happened at different times and places, but saying that this is how the Neolithic Revolution started is a completely different matter.
The agricultural revolution couldn't have started this way. These hunter-gatherers must have already known how to farm before they could force another clan to do it for them.
"A study has tracked the shift from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to early farming that occurred in prehistoric Europe over a period of around 1,500 years. An international team of scientists, led by researchers at the University of York, analysed the molecular remains of food left in pottery used by the first farmers who settled along the Atlantic Coast of Europe from 7,000 to 6,000 years ago." Source: Archaeology News Network.