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We still eat laverbread [1], a gelatinous paste made from seaweed, in parts of Wales. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laverbread
I also really enjoy most seaweeds I've tried. Great food generally. I'll have to see if we can get something of laverbread locally.
Maybe it's a dumb question, but how do we know these biomarkers weren't from eating fish that are the seaweed? If the biomarkers are able to remain detectable for thousands of years without breaking down, perhaps they're also able to accumulate in fish? I don't know anything about it so my idea is probably wrong, but I'm surprised the article doesn't mention it since it seems like an obvious thing to wonder.
> 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 digested. This isn't Carbon-14 dating, they identified families of plants on the the ancient teeth, not digested plant matter.
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 available for a relatively short period of a year, conditional on lots of factors like the weather, pests, disease, etc... time to put the kibosh on all other processes of generating caloric intake that we've honed for millennia!"
> 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…
> 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…
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.
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.
> 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…
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.
Actually an export product, too. https://www.dal.ca/news/2017/08/03/nova-scotia-s-best-kept-s...