We weren’t all bland and fair-haired

Six thousand years ago. Assuming Northern Europeans were fair-haired Back in the Day.

‘Prehistoric Europeans Liked Spicy Food, Study Suggests’

“Prehistoric human civilizations in northern Europe may have enjoyed their food with a spicy kick, using a garlic-mustard-type seasoning to flavor their dishes, thousands of years before the height of the prolific global spice trade, a new study finds.

“A team of researchers studied blackened deposits inside ancient cooking pots and found traces of spices on the shards of pottery. The charred pots were excavated from archaeological sites in Denmark and Germany, and date back to the Neolithic Period, roughly 6,200 to 5,900 years ago, said study lead author Hayley Saul, an archaeologist at the BioArCH research center at the University of York in the United Kingdom.

"’It was during the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture when we first started to be domesticated,’ Saul told LiveScience. ‘This takes the way people looked at food in prehistory in a completely different direction.’"

http://www.livescience.com/39066-prehistoric-european-spices.html

(I don’t know about that “completely different direction.” Science folks generally need new direction in their findings in order to get publicity. Besides, hunter-gatherers most likely wouldn’t have said, “What’s this spicy stuff in my deer gravy? I don’t like it. It’s bland or nothing for me.”)

Stumbled across at www.gatesofvienna.net