Pumpkin Spice: a 3,500-year-old discovery reveals the first culinary use of nutmeg

TYears before spice pumpkins and the notion of "fundamental character" exist, humans on a small Indonesian island have laid the groundwork for one of today's most enduring and embarrassing trends. . By digging deep into the reddish soil of Pulau Ay, one of the Banda Islands, scientists have recently discovered fragments of pots bearing the unmistakable traces of an essential pumpkin spice: the nutmeg.

This 3,500-year-old residue, they write in a new Asian Perspectives study, is the oldest evidence that people have ever eaten this spice long before Starbucks forces it to cooperate with cinnamon, ginger and cloves. Previously, scientists thought humans had jumped on the nutmeg train a little later, about 2,000 years ago. But maybe we were basic long before we thought we could be it.

«Nutmeg and others [southeast] Asian spices like cloves have been popular for a long time, so I'm not surprised coffee companies have exploited what people want, "said Peter Lape, professor of anthropology at Washington State University, reverse.

He and his colleagues dug into the sand of the island to study how the Neolithic people would have settled in such an inhospitable environment. As beautiful as it is, Pulau Ay has no surface water or local sources of meat, so this is not the best place to settle. Yet bones, tools and earthenware pottery show that there were between 2300 and 3500 years of people – and these were the first known people who ate a spice that we now associate with the frappuccinos at autumn and Uggs.

The artifacts discovered by the team suggest that humans have moved on the island in stages, using it first as a temporary fishing post, and then later, when they discovered how to store water and food in pots, as a permanent encampment. In the pots, they found traces of starchy foods like sago and yam, but when they found the nutmeg, Lape said, "We were surprised!

"[We] I did not think the nutmeg would be there, especially in these very old pottery shards, "he continues.

Some 4,800 years later, in the 14th century, nutmeg helped propel the Banda Islands from relative obscurity to a valuable stop on the international spice route. "My colleagues and I found ample evidence that Pulau Ay residents were well connected with many other islands in the area, some of which may be hundreds of kilometers away, based on pottery trades, stone tools, even pigs, "explains Lape. "It is possible that the global trade in spices has its origins in these first regional trade networks."

Today, the nutmeg continues to intensify the bonds between people, be they monsters responsible for the pumpkin spice in beer or those who vehemently maintain the rumor that pumpkin spice causes constipation. That said, nutmeg was not always associated with autumn gourds. "The pumpkins come from North America, so I'm pretty sure they were not available in Pulau Ay 3500 years ago," says Lape.