News Archaeology

A taste for wild cereal sowed farming’s spread in ancient Europe

Balkan hunter-gatherers ate starchy grains several millennia before they cultivated crops

image of an ancient tooth covered in plaque

Food deposits on the teeth (one shown) of ancient people who inhabited what’s now Serbia and Romania contributed to new evidence that hunter-gatherers ate wild cereals for several thousand years before crop cultivation reached Europe.

Emanuela Cristiani

By Bruce Bower

- More than 2 years ago

People living along southeastern Europe’s Danube River around 11,500 years ago never planted a crop but still laid the foundation for the rise of farming in that region some 3,000 years later, a new study finds.