Eating grains

What did early hunter-gathers gather? The easy stuff, archeologists say: roots, fruits and nuts. But that’s not all, according to someone who’s been examining the left-overs inside a cave in Mozambique. They went after grains, too:

But Julio Mercader, an archeologist at the University of Calgary, has now found evidence from a cave in Mozambique that humans were eating sorghum grasses at least 105,000 years ago. The evidence was in the form of microscopic starch granules found on stone tools from the cave.

Yes, I’m aware that only one in 100 readers will find that of much interest, but this post is for you, #100. Fascinating stuff, isn’t it?

Lonely times: And speaking of caves, I’ve forgotten about the French man who spent two months alone in a cave. There’s an interview here. The interesting stuff is about how his perception of time changed without daylight and without a clock. When he emerged after 59 days, he thought only 25 had gone by. And he got good sleep:

My sleep was perfect! My body chose by itself when to sleep and when to eat. That’s very important. We showed that my sleep/wake cycle was not twenty-four hours, like people have on the surface on the earth, but slightly longer—about twenty-four hours and thirty minutes. But the important thing is that we proved that there was an internal clock independent of the natural terrestrial day/night cycle. Interestingly, during the subsequent experiments I did with other research subjects, all of the people in the caves showed cycles longer than twenty-four hours.

Traveler: Jo Thompson took care of a midlife crisis by boarding a bus and traveling 10,000 miles. Odd for a mother of five. Read her story here:

Three months have passed since I boarded a bus filled with strangers and watched Cleopatra’s Needle, London Bridge and my family disappear from view. Since then, I have travelled across the world with those strangers. We have sailed at dawn on the Ganges, watched the sun rise at the Taj Mahal, been detained in Iran, made friends with the snipers on our roof in Pakistan, got lost in Kathmandu, climbed mountains in the Himalayas and slept under the stars in the Australian Outback. I have laughed much more than I have cried; I have daydreamed and I have developed muscles in my legs, as well as a Rip Van Winkle-like propensity to sleep in moving vehicles.

Posted in Food & such.