No, prehistoric humans didn’t just eat meat, they also liked cooked lentils…

We can easily imagine our prehistoric ancestors roasting a mammoth haunch on a spit, eating a few berries or fruits and, at the limit, digging up a handful of roots in times of scarcity, but not the Stone Age version of a star chef. Admittedly, the Neanderthals did not prepare a wood-fired pizza and the first Sapiens had not invented the hamburger and fries, but the cuisine of these humans from 70,000 to 12,000 years ago was varied and tasty. A study just published in the journal Antiquity reveals that these Paleolithic hunter-gatherers were already preparing sophisticated dishes, and not just meat.

The invention of agriculture, which marks the transition to the Neolithic era, profoundly modified the lifestyles of our ancestors, including their diet. From the moment they grew and raised their food, they embarked on the path that leads to our – very diverse – cuisines today. But what about their own ancestors, those who migrated with the seasons and the movements of herds of wild animals?

Svante Pääbo, a Nobel for the man who tracked down the cave genome

Ceren Kabukcu, an archaeobotanist in the Department of Archaeology, Classical Studies and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, and his colleagues have extended their investigations over nearly sixty millennia of Paleolithic times, a long period of prehistory. Their subjects of study were of course