5,500-Year-Old Stone Tools Reveal Surprising Secrets About Neolithic Farmers’ Diets

Neolithic Grinding Stones

A grinding stone, as the name suggests, is a flat-surfaced tool traditionally used for grinding against another, smaller stone.

Archaeologists recently uncovered 14 such stones during the excavation of an Early Neolithic Funnel Beaker Culture settlement at Frydenlund, on Strandby Mark, southeast of Haarby on Funen (see fact paragraph at the bottom of this article). Alongside the stones, they discovered over 5,000 charred grains, including naked barley, emmer wheat, and durum wheat.
Given the presence of these grains, it’s easy to assume that the settlement’s inhabitants, 5,500 years ago, used the stones to grind cereals into flour for bread-making — a common interpretation of such tools.

A New Perspective on Stone Usage

The team examined the stones for microscopic plant remains, such as phytoliths and starch grains, trapped in small surface cavities. Surprisingly, they found no evidence of cereal processing. Instead, the few phytoliths present, along with the identified starch grains, originated from wild plants rather than domesticated cereals.

Mysteries of Neolithic Plant Processing

“We have not identified the plants the starch grains originate from. We have merely ruled out the most obvious candidates – namely the cereals found at the settlement, which were not ground, as well as various collected species, including hazelnuts,” explains archaeobotanist, PhD Welmoed Out from Moesgaard Museum.

“The trough-shaped querns with traces of pushing movements emerged 500 years later. The grinding stones we studied here were struck with pestles made of stone, like crushing in a mortar. We also found such pestles at the site, resembling rounded, thick stone sausages. However, we have not analyzed them for phytoliths or starch,” explains Niels H. Andersen.

This is the first time a state-of-the-art combination of phytolith and starch analyses has been performed on grinding stones from the first farmers in Northern Europe. The results support a hypothesis that archaeobotanists and archaeologists elsewhere in Northern Europe also have proposed after discovering remains of grains cooked into porridge and gruel: that the first farmers did not live on water and bread but rather on water and gruel, alongside berries, nuts, roots, and meat.

And yes, they likely drank water. According to Niels H. Andersen, no definitive traces of beer brewing have been found in Denmark before the Bronze Age.

However, as the two researchers from Moesgaard Museum emphasize: “This study only involves one settlement. While it supports other findings from the Funnel Beaker Culture, we cannot rule out the possibility of different results emerging when this method is applied to finds from other excavations.”

Facts:

• The Funnel Beaker Culture was an early farming culture in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe during the period ca. 4000–2800 BCE, marking the introduction of agriculture and cattle farming to Scandinavia. The name refers to the culture’s commonly found clay beakers with funnel-shaped necks.
• The discovery on Southern Funen is the most extensive find of grinding stones and grains from the Funnel Beaker Culture in the entire region it encompassed.