Neolithic Scandinavians ate water and gruel, not bread

Early Neolithic farmers in what is now Denmark grew cereals and used grinding stones, but not to grind the cereals into flour to make bread. A new study has revealed that 5,500-year-old grinding stones discovered at the Early Neolithic Funnel Beaker site at Frydenlund on the island of Funen bore no traces of any of the grains found at the site.

The Funnel Beaker culture (4000–2800 B.C.) emerged in northern Europe in the Early Neolithic. They played an essential role in introducing farmed crops to the region, but our understanding of what food they grew and how they prepared it is limited by the scarcity of surviving plant remains (mostly preserved in waterlogged contexts). Microbotanical analysis opens up new avenues of information, as it draws information from small amounts of food residue, like charred crusts attached to pottery, food preparation artifacts, coprolites (fossilized poop) and even dental calculus.

The grinding stones found on Funen are some of the oldest examples in Denmark. They are the first to be subjected to the cutting edge analysis of microremains, traces of plant residue left in tiny cavities on the stone surface. Researchers were able to recover phytoliths (microscopic mineral deposits in plant tissues that remain after the plant has decayed) and starch granules from 14 stones.

More than 5,000 kernels of charred grains were found at Frydenlund, primarily consisting of durum wheat, emmer wheat and naked barley. Other food remains include hazelnuts, blackberries, raspberries and dewberries. The plants the phytoliths and starches came from could not be identified, but they were definitely wild plants, not the cultivated cereals found at the settlement nor any of the foraged nuts and fruits.

What the grinding stones were used for remains open to interpretation, aside from the fact that they lack clear wear marks from the pushing motions used for grinding grain.

“The trough-shaped querns with traces of pushing movements emerged 500 years later. The grinding stones we studied here were struck with pestles made of stone, like crushing in a mortar. We also found such pestles at the site, resembling rounded, thick stone sausages. However, we have not analysed them for phytoliths or starch,” explains Niels H. Andersen.

This is the first time a state-of-the-art combination of phytolith and starch analyses has been performed on grinding stones from the first farmers in Northern Europe. The results support a hypothesis that archaeobotanists and archaeologists elsewhere in Northern Europe also have proposed after discovering remains of grains cooked into porridge and gruel: that the first farmers did not live on water and bread but rather on water and gruel, alongside berries, nuts, roots, and meat.

And yes, they likely drank water. According to Niels H. Andersen, no definitive traces of beer brewing have been found in Denmark before the Bronze Age.

The study has been published in the journal Vegetation History and Archaeobotany and can be read free of charge here.

Eleven of the 14 grinding stones discovered at Frydenlund have been scanned and 3D models created. You can view all of them here.

* This article was originally published here