14 DAY TRIAL // Perhaps you cannot imagine life without chocolate. And many women give up sex for chocolate easily. Now we know when it was discovered: over 3,000 years ago, five centuries earlier than previously thought. A new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that chocolate was an "accidental" discovery, as Central American Indians were initially using the pulp of the pods produced by the tree to make beer, discarding the seeds.
The researchers tracked the origins of chocolate on pottery remains dating 1100 - 800 B.C., dug between 1995 and 2000 near Puerto Escondido (Honduras).
Chocolate is made of cacao fermented seeds, but around 1100 B.C., ancient Indians made only cacao beer from pulp of the tree's large pods, while the seeds were neglected.
"It was beer with a high kick. But it would not have tasted anything like the chocolate we have today," said co-author Rosemary Joyce, an anthropologist at University of California, Berkeley.
"About 300 years later, however, people began using the discarded fermented seeds to make a non-alcoholic beverage that was highly prized despite its bitter taste," said co-author John Henderson, an anthropologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
"The drink was poured from special pitchers that created froth in the drinking cups and served to celebrate special occasions such as marriages and births," said Joyce.
Many of the Honduran pottery fragments were 3 millennia old and still maintained cacao residue. Spaniards were the first to bring chocolate to Europe in the 16th century and the item turned even more familiar with the milk-chocolate bars, first made in 1894 in US.
"The discovery that fermented cacao seeds could be used to make a chocolate beverage was a "happy accident"-one that eventually gave the world one of its most popular pleasures," said Ann Krueger Spivack, co-author of "The Essence of Chocolate", not involved in the research.
