Science: 1st European cities were vegetarian

Aristos Georgiou, Newsweek, 1/5/24; Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

What was there to eat in Europe?

Prehistoric humans living in Europe's earliest mega-settlements ate a diet that was almost 100% vegetarian, a new scientific study from Germany has found.

In the study, published in the science journal PNAS, a team of scientific researchers investigated the agricultural and economic system of ancient "mega-sites," which were built around 6,000 years ago by the Trypillia ("Three Fields") culture.

Moldova coat arms

That's [in the cold Kiev Oblast, formerly part of Russia's Soviet Union] in what is now Ukraine and Moldova in Eastern Europe.

• Science proves it: Isotopes prove advanced, integral crop production, and stockbreeding strategies nourished Trypillia mega-populations | PNAS

These early European cities covered up to 320 hectares (791 acres) and housed as many as 15,000 inhabitants.

At the time, the mega-sites were the largest settlements in the world, according to the study [though probably smaller than countless megacities in the Amazon now being discovered in the Americas/"New World" using LiDAR technology].

Each of the mega-sites existed for multiple generations. But to date, the economy of the Trypillia settlements has remained poorly understood, particularly when it comes to how exactly the mega-sites' inhabitants sustained themselves with food.

Those inhabitants were largely farmers who grew crops and raised livestock. But how could such large groups of people have secured their food supply with the technology available at the time?

• [This is an odd question since the larger an organism or population, the more likely it is to be vegetarian to sustain itself -- e.g., the whale, gorilla, cow, water buffalo, and formerly the grizzly bear -- because it is much more efficient in terms of its impact on the environment. Imagine, e.g., all the grain, not to mention the water and other greens, needed to convert to just one pound of animal flesh. If humans ate that grain directly, they would be far healthier and many more of them could be fed.]

The latest study has shed new light on this issue, finding that the mega-sites survived thanks to an "extremely sophisticated food and pasture management" system, Frank Schlütz, a paleoecologist at Germany's Kiel University and one of the authors of the study, said in a press release.

The team came to these conclusions after analyzing nitrogen and carbon isotopes in human remains, animal bones, and charred crops found at Trypillia ("Three Fields") settlements, which enabled them to shed light on their ancient food webs.

Isotopes are atoms of the same element that have the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons.

• More: Diets were almost exclusively vegetarian in the first European cities (Newsweek via MSN)

Here's what the ancient diet was like throughout history

In the 1970s, a gastroenterologist created an eating plan that was supposed to imitate the Paleolithic diet, but he got many things wrong.

For instance, he assumed that ancient people didn't eat wheat [a high source of toxic gluten, a plant lectin used to protect itself from being eaten].

This proves that many people don't understand how ancient humans ate.

The human diet progressed far earlier in history than most people think. For instance, people have cooked for at least one million years, and Neolithic people processed milk [a source of hard to digest lactose, which most humans do not have the enzymes to process after they have been weaned from their mothers].

Most may be surprised how early people hunted, cooked, and farmed. Read on to learn how diet devolved throughout human history.

• More: Here's what the ancient diet was like throughout human history (msn.com)