Credited to Mozambique. The claim rests on starch grains recovered from tool surfaces at a single site. Collecting wild grain in the Middle Stone Age had conventionally been seen as unimportant, and the finding pushes cereal use back roughly 90,000 years.
How it began
Ngalue is a limestone cave near Lake Niassa in Mozambique that foragers used on and off for more than 60,000 years. In 2007 Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary and colleagues from Eduardo Mondlane University excavated it. Deep in the cave they recovered dozens of stone tools, animal bones and plant remains. The tools showed that early Homo sapiens there relied on grass seeds starting at least 105,000 years ago.
Before it existed
Gathering wild grain during the Middle Stone Age had conventionally been regarded as an irrelevant activity, less important than collecting roots, fruits and nuts. The comparable evidence for grass seed use by hunter-gatherers elsewhere dates from the closing stages of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago.
How it works
Several thousand starch grains were found on the excavated grinders and scrapers. They showed that wild sorghum was brought to the cave and processed systematically. Turning hard grass seeds into food requires grinding and cooking. The tools also carried traces of the African wine palm, the false banana, pigeon peas, wild oranges and the African potato.
What lasted
The find is the earliest direct evidence of humans using pre-domesticated cereals anywhere in the world. It widened the timeline for the use of grass seeds by about 90,000 years. Wild sorghum is the ancestor of the chief cereal eaten today in sub-Saharan Africa as flour, bread, porridge and beer. The results appeared in Science on December 18, 2009.
