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Eating acorns

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dublin View Drop Down
Janissary
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  Quote dublin Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Eating acorns
    Posted: 05-Dec-2014 at 18:41
Why are Thunder deities always linked with agricultural cults? Maybe because the first corn was acorn, the fruit of the thunder tree, oak...I am continuing my articles about oaks and acorns. I hope you will find this one interesting.



How did hunter gatherers start to eat acorns? How did they get the idea to invent all the technologies and tools necessary for gathering, storing and leaching acorns? What are the procedures and tool which our hunter gatherer ancestors used for gathering, storing and leaching acorns? How did our hunter gatherer ancestors cook the acorns, and turned them into food? And what type of food was most commonly made from acorns? Did acorn kick start the Mesolithic to Neolithic transition milleniums before any cereal was anywhere to be found?


These are the questions that I would like to answer in this post. I hope you will find it an interesting read.


You can read more here:


http://oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.ie/2014/12/eating-acorns.html
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red clay View Drop Down
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  Quote red clay Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 06-Dec-2014 at 11:03
You have researched this topic well.  However you make some leaps that have some gaps or holes.

The Archaic peoples who inhabited the coastal plains of New Jersey, had the same cooking tech as many other folks of the time.  However, this region wasn't wooded until approx. 1500 bce. Prior it was an extremely wet savannah.
Nutting stones are commonly found on occupation sites here, along with metates, [grinding stones]
This indicates that they were using other nuts for food, or were importing or trading for acorns.  With the abundance found here at the time it's doubtful they would have used time for this activity.
There are other plants, which would have flourished in a wetlands environ.  These had edible roots which would have required processing.

Another point you missed is boiling foods. You mentioned baskets, a basket takes a lot of time and energy to produce.  Even the earliest folks who inhabited this region used the following.  They would dig a hole and line it with hides.  In the bottom they would place a "discoidal stone" to prevent the hot stones from burning through.  Boiling stones were usually a very dense stone high in Iron Oxide.  The heating and rapid cooling caused the iron to change and produced bright colors, usually only visible when wet.
In some areas in the region I live in, you can easily spot these when it rains.

BTW- The valley I live in has been inhabited for at least 10,000 years.  The Archaic people were gone by approx. 1,000 years when the Lenni Lenape arrived.
There was a transitional population here.  There is evidence that someone had pottery about that time.  I've found several "cord marked" fragments, along with "stacking cookies" which indicates firing was happening here.  Unfortunately these were surface finds and there is no reliable means of dating.






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dublin View Drop Down
Janissary
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  Quote dublin Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 20-Dec-2014 at 14:08
Thank you for you comment, red clay. Your comments are valid. So let me try to answer them:

Once cooking technology with hot stones was invented it can be adopted, changed. I also believe that people new how to cook in water before they invented baskets and pottery. Have a look at 


Once you develop the knowledge about how something works you can change it. Use pots instead of lined holes....Also technology is transferable. Once someone invents a technology for grinding acorns it can be used for grinding anything...The grinding stones can be brought from forest areas to grasslands and swamps and can be used for grinding what ever food needs to be ground there. When grains became dominant starch foods the same grinding stones were used to grind them. Acorns and nuts were collected and used together in all the early cultures together with roots and other starch carrying plant parts. But acorns were so dominant as a food source that this is why I believe that they probably played the dominant role in the invention of all the mentioned technologies. Not the sole role...

I hope this makes it a bit clearer.


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