In search of wine, ancient Meso-Americans found chocolate, 500 years earlier than once thought
The human love affair with chocolate is at least 3,000 years old - and it began at least 500 years earlier than previously thought, according to new analyses of pottery shards from the Ulúa Valley region of northern Honduras. But the first people to appreciate the cacao tree were probably after a buzz of another kind - a fermented, winelike drink, research shows - and only later discovered the chocolaty taste we love today.
In research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cornell professor of anthropology John Henderson and colleagues found traces of caffeine and theobromine, an alkaloid similar to caffeine but specific to cacao, in 11 shards dated to 1100 B.C. The samples came from excavations directed by Henderson and University of California-Berkeley anthropology professor Rosemary Joyce at a site known as Puerto Escondido. The findings offer chemical evidence for the earliest cacao consumption anywhere in the world.
In the past, the only chemical detection of cacao in ancient pottery required an intact vessel and a substantial amount of residue, Henderson said. To detect much smaller chemical traces in broken shards, co-authors Patrick E. McGovern and Gretchen Hall at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and W. Jeffrey Hurst at Hershey Foods used new extraction techniques along with liquid chromatography, gas chromatography and mass spectrometry - techniques that could be used for sensitive chemical testing on many more remnants in the future.
"It's not very often that you find a whole vessel," said Henderson. "Now that you can process things from people's trash piles, you can see in much better context how these things were being used."
Since both beverages contain theobromine and caffeine, chemistry doesn't reveal whether a vessel held a winelike quaff made from pulp or the celebrated chocolate concoction made from seeds. But while the jugs of later, chocolate-drinking periods were short and wide, with broad openings to allow for pouring back and forth to create froth, the earlier bottles had long, skinny spouts.
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