I imagine the conversation between the editors at HuffPo to have gone something like…
“Like, OMG, Beckee! Did you know the cavemen cooked with fire!?!”
“No way, Sandra! You need to write about that.”
And they came up with this headline and story
It Seems Stonehenge Was Built By Folks With A Thing For Barbecue
We might not know precisely how Stonehenge was built–or why it was built. But now we know the eating habits of the people who are believed to have completed the mysterious monument more than 4,500 years ago.
And what was it that these folks ate? Barbecue.
So say archaeologists who systematically examined animal bones and several hundred pottery shards unearthed at Durrington Walls, a Neolithic settlement a couple of miles down the road from Stonehenge. That’s where the people who built Stonehenge are believed to have lived.
Traces of pork and beef, along with cheese and other dairy foods, were found on shards unearthed in Durrington Walls’s residential areas, according to a written statement released by the University of York in England.
Shards found in nearby ceremonial areas showed mostly traces of dairy foods, according to the statement. That suggests those foods were eaten only by a select few individuals.
If Stonehenge’s builders ate veggies too, there’s little evidence of it. Mostly, the archaeologists say, folks were boiling and roasting the meat–pork, in particular–and then staging elaborate feasts. The cooking seems to have been done inside people’s homes as well as outdoors.
You mean that Neolithic peoples didn’t have propane gas grills and access to convection stovetops?
It’s called using the technology you have. Cooking with fire because there is no other way to heat your food does not equate to loving BBQ.
I’d weep for them, but someday they’ll miss a safety warning label and we won’t have to worry about them taking our oxygen any more.