Cavemen Were Making Porridge 32,000 Years Ago

Apparently cavemen enjoyed porridge just as much as we do today!

Our ancestors may have been pounding and eating various wild grains even earlier than 32,000 years ago. Just imagine! (Photo: iStock)

OMG!

Before you decide to go on a paleo-diet, (the controversial carb-free fad diet which taps into an urge for simpler food and lifestyle like the paleolithic people) here’s a side-serve of archaeology: stone-age people ate oats 32,000 years ago, much before farming took root!

The University of Florence in Italy which made this discovery says, this is the earliest known human consumption of oats.

Grinding stone from Grotta Paglicci, Italy. Re-writing history, paleo people were grinding grains 32,000 years ago. (Photo: Stefano Ricci/University of Florence)

Turns out, stones excavated in 1989 from a cave in southern Italy, were preserved for future research, using advanced methods not available back in the 1980s. Two years ago, researchers began to analyze these stones and found that they contained evidence of grains being ground into gruel during pre-historic times.

The most common grain among them was wild oats, surprisingly the same strain of wild oats still grows throughout Europe. There was residue of starch from acorns and millets on the grinding stone too.

So the cavemen probably either mixed the oats with water and cooked it as a porridge or baked it into a flat bread.

This is interesting, because paleo diet is mostly carbohydrate-free, or at least very low on refined carbohydrates. And also because farming is believed to have begun 10,000 years ago, and these grains are 32,000 years old.

Porridge kitchen: the interior of Grotta Paglicci, Italy, the site where the stone vessel was excavated from in 1989. Don’t miss the wall paintings (Photo: Stefano Ricci/University of Florence)

Porridge. This is incontrovertible proof it was on the paleo menu (Picture for representational purposes only)

The University of Florence researchers hope to continue to study the stone vessels and the caves to find out exactly what the processed flour was used for, and to what extent.