Cave cooking

The trend for cooking more ‘plant-based foods’ continues unabated, but it really is not a new phenomenon. In fact, you could say it is one of the oldest trends in human history. That’s because a new discovery shows that people have been cooking plants for nearly 170,000 years.

The recent find, in the Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains on the Kwazulu-Natal/eSwatini [formerly Swaziland] border of southern Africa, provides evidence that humans were cooking starchy plants much longer than scientists had previously thought. “It is extraordinary that such fragile plant remains have survived for so long,” says Dr Christine Sievers, a scientist from the University of the Witwatersrand who performed archeobotanical analysis for the project.

As the team looked through the underground food plants that were uncovered during excavations, they identified small, charred cylinders as rhizomes of a variety of Hypoxis, commonly called the Yellow Star flower. The rhizomes were mostly found near fireplaces and ash dumps. “The Border Cave inhabitants would have dug Hypoxis rhizomes from the hillside near the cave, and carried them back to the cave to cook them in the ashes of fireplaces,” says Lyn Wadley, a scientist from the Wits Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. 

Because of the areas where the rhizomes were found, it is likely that whoever cooked them shared them with others in a communal setting. That means that for eons longer than anyone thought, people have been passing the mashed potatoes (or their long ago equivalents).

Photo of Perfect mashed potatoes with saffron garlic butter from 101 Cookbooks by Heidi Swanson