Stone Age Meals
© Christian Jegou/Science Source
What did early humans eat? The people in this illustration lived a little bit earlier than the people whose cooking pots scientists studied.
What did people eat for dinner back in the Stone Age? You might picture a big piece of meat cooking over a fire. But a new study shows that Stone Age dining wasn’t always that simple. In fact, meals were carefully planned.
Researchers studied cooking pots that were used 5,000 to 8,000 years ago in 13 different parts of Europe. The people who used these pots were hunter-gatherers, which means they hunted for animals and gathered plants. Even after all this time, these pots held bits of food too small for us to see with our eyes. Researchers used microscopes to find out what the food was.
Many people believe that Stone Age humans mostly ate meat, but their cooking pots show that they ate plants as well. The researchers focused on the bits of plants in the pots, including leaves, seeds, grasses, and berries. The microscopes allowed them to look at the cells of each plant to determine which plants the Stone Age people were eating.
González Carretero L, Lucquin A, Robson HK, McLaughlin TR, Dolbunova E, Lundy J, et al. (2026) Selective culinary uses of plant foods by Northern and Eastern European hunter-gatherer-fishers. PLoS One 21(3): e0342740. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0342740 (CC BY 4.0); Photo illustration Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Researchers used microscopes to study bits of plants they found on shards (pieces) of ancient cooking pots.
Researchers found that Stone Age cooks didn’t just eat whatever food they could find. They seemed to be thoughtful about which foods they cooked together. For example, one group of people in what’s now Poland cooked a certain type of berry with fish. Modern cooks know that this kind of berry isn’t safe to eat unless it’s cooked. It also doesn’t taste good unless it’s cooked with the fats from a fish. It seems that the Stone Age people also knew this.
The researchers also discovered that not all Stone Age people made food the same way, even if they had the same ingredients. One group might put a certain kind of fish with a certain kind of grass. Another might prefer seeds. That’s similar to how people prepare food today. Each culture and community has its own recipes.
“Each [Stone Age] culture had [its] own complex culinary traditions,” the researchers wrote.
