61–70 of 268 posts
Sushi rolls (Japan) and Kimbap (Korea) are wrapped with Nori (seaweed). Historical accounts as far back as year 702 mention the taxation of seaweed. https://marutaka-nori.co.jp/en/nori1.html#:~:text=The%20hist... .
> archaeologists had long assumed that the introduction of farming during the Neolithic era meant that early humans largely abandoned such foods from the sea Always hard to tell if researchers are really as dull as these press releases make them to seem, or it's just academia's form of clickbait. Did anyone in their right mind really think that people went "ok, we've found a very labor intensive way to have food avai…
Could it be evidence of cultural change? Most of the ethnicities we associate with Europeans are Indo-European in origin: pastoral, patriarchal nomads who swept down from the steppe in the distant past. If the pre-Indo-Europeans disappeared quickly enough or were culturally overwhelmed, it makes sense that unfamiliar foods from the sea would be ignored by agriculture oriented steppe people.
I've thought about harvesting and eating seaweed which is basically everywhere near my home village. I've never heard of anyone eating it and I've been wondering why. How would I go about figuring out if a particular species of seaweed is edible or not (Google doesn't seem to help me in this)?
You got to find a local foraging group or just knowledgeable individual. If it's edible someone is eating it. But practical foraging is dominated by local concerns like microseasons, regional land/industrial history, soil & water quality etc.
Some of us still do! In Northern Ireland, we have a lesser-known seaweed dish called Dulce. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180522-the-renaissance-... It's tricky to find it fresh, you usually only get it in small greengrocers or at the Auld Lammas fair. Used to be quite cheap for a bag. Very salty but quite edible and said to be nutrient-dense.
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Could it be evidence of cultural change? Most of the ethnicities we associate with Europeans are Indo-European in origin: pastoral, patriarchal nomads who swept down from the steppe in the distant past. If the pre-Indo-Europeans disappeared quickly enough or were culturally overwhelmed, it makes sense that unfamiliar foods from the sea would be ignored by agriculture oriented steppe people.
You’re a bit mixed up here. A few millennia before the Indo-Europeans was the farming expansion out of Anatolia, and that already had a dramatic impact on the ethnic landscape in Europe. Moreover, the early steppe-oriented Indo-Europeans were not major practitioners of farming but pastoralists, and they only settled into farming once they merged with the settled agriculture communities that were already there in Euro…
But still, two radically different food producing paradigms meeting an established hunter-gatherer population could lead to some of the traditional foraged foods from the region being ignored.
I don’t know if seaweed is eaten or even prevalent in the seas around Anatolia, but steppe based cultures who drive herds would be likely to ignore it IMO
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I think they kind of cover that: > They found the chemical biomarkers of seaweed and aquatic plants in 26 samples, which suggests that early humans were eating—or, at the very least, chewing—these bounties from the sea Like, yeah maybe the fish they were eating was covered with seaweed, but unless they were popping the stomach/intestines into their mouth... for the parasite load(?), the seaweed in the fish is digeste…
There are plenty of compounds that aren't broken down by digestion. Salmon flesh is pink because of the astaxanthin in its natural diet, for example. And the article doesn't make any mention of which specific biomarkers they chose or whether they're affected by digestion. They're obviously pretty hardy compounds to begin with if they're not broken down by saliva to begin with, or thousands of years of natural decay.…
>Aquatic ecosystems are complex with some isotopic variability even within the same species of seaweed, freshwater algae, and freshwater aquatic plants (macrophytes), making use of this C&N isotopic data to detect these resources somewhat challenging, certainly where it represents https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41671-2#Sec8
Sushi rolls (Japan) and Kimbap (Korea) are wrapped with Nori (seaweed). Historical accounts as far back as year 702 mention the taxation of seaweed. https://marutaka-nori.co.jp/en/nori1.html#:~:text=The%20hist... .
You can buy packaged nori and eat is as a snack. Also, Onigiri is wrapped in nori, and the Japanese developed a special technique to keep it separated from the rice (so it stays crispy) until you open the package.
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The most important benefit might have been the high content of iodine, which is usually insufficient in terrestrial food. Obviously they did not have iodized salt, like us, to provide the required iodine. They might have noticed that eating a little amount of seaweed will prevent illness. For omega-3 fatty acids, they had much better food sources in bone marrow or in fish (the multicellular algae have very low conten…
Which makes me think that seaweed was staple food at some time right? We wouldn't have evolved to need more iodine than we can get in our environment otherwise...
Evolution works through reproduction so any condition that doesn't impact survival until sexual maturity is unlikely to face any evolutionary pressure. Since humans are tribal and took care of their offspring in group settings, survivability after procreation also has little effect.
[1] https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/43010/9241592001...