14 DAY TRIAL // A new study performed by Dolores Piperno, a staff scientist from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the National Museum of Natural History, in collaboration with Tom Dillehay, an archeology professor at Vanderbilt University, focused on analyzing teeth of ancient Peruvians. The research was aimed at determining the culinary habits of the old, by examining the starch preserved on the teeth discovered.
The experts studied a number of 39 teeth, possibly belonging to six or eight individuals and dating, as indicated by the carbon-based technique, from 6,000 to 9,000 years ago. The starch grains discovered on the teeth proved that the ancient Peruvians from a northern site called Nanchoc Valley consumed quite a large spectrum of cultivated crops, and they did so at least two millennia before previously believed.
“We found starch from a variety of cultivated plants: squash, Phaseolus beans - either limas or common beans, possibly, but not certainly the former, pacay and peanuts,” shared Piperno, quoted by Eurekalert. “Parts of plants that often are not evident in archaeological remains, such as the flesh of squash fruits and the nuts of peanuts, do produce identifiable starch grains.” The starch grains from the teeth scarping particles were compared to those modern ones collected from over 500 plants.
The finding brings new evidence to the long debate on whether people also ate these plants or only used them for non-dietary purposes. “Some teeth were dirtier than others,” explained Piperno, adding that “We boiled beans in the lab to see what cooked starch grains looked like - and recognized these gelatinized or heat-damaged grains in the samples from the teeth”.
“Starch analysis of teeth, which, unlike other archaeobotanical techniques, provides direct evidence of plant consumption, should greatly improve our ability to address other important questions in human dietary change relating to even earlier time periods,” she said.