Europeans are spicing food for 6 thousand years

Europeans had a taste for spicy food at least 6,000 years ago, it seems.

Researchers found evidence for garlic mustard in the residues left on ancient pottery shards discovered in what is now Denmark and Germany – the BBC online news service reported.

The spice was found alongside fat residues from meat and fish.

Writing in the journal Plos One, the scientists make the case that garlic mustard contains little nutritional value and therefore must have been used to flavour the foods.

“This is the earliest evidence, as far as I know, of spice use in this region in the Western Baltic; something that has basically no nutritional value, but has this value in a taste sense,” said Dr Hayley Saul, who led the study from the University of York, UK. (MTI)