The Oldest Cultivated Fruit In The World Goes Back To The Stone Age

The "good old days" were rough on the stomach. While the characters in "The Flintstones" enjoyed a full pantry and even restaurants, our actual prehistoric forebears spent most of their time hunting, gathering, fishing, foraging, and basically trying not to starve until the dawn of agriculture. When crop cultivation finally arrived, what did we start growing? Well, archaeological evidence suggests that figs were first on the menu. A dig site in Israel turned up figs from over 11,000 years ago, which scientists determined would have been grown from trees that couldn't reproduce without human help; making them the oldest example to date of cultivated fruit.

You may have tried figs before — fresh, dried, or in the ever-popular Fig Newton (whose actual name may surprise you) – but unless you're a botanist, you probably don't know the complex way they grow. The sweet, soft figs that many people enjoy eating and which were found at the Stone Age archaeological site come from a sterile mutation in female fig trees. These ancient trees can't organically reproduce, but periodically show up in the wild through natural mutations. However, these trees can be cultivated if humans cut their stems and replant them, which is what our prehistoric ancestors appear to have done to enjoy figs without waiting for the occasional mutant tree.

While we now know figs were on the Stone Age menu, surely people living millennia ago didn't survive on figs alone, without so much as a pizza to put them on. In fact, the figs our ancestors were growing fit into a varied diet and were used as sweeteners in the ancient world before sugar became available. Figs are one of the foods mentioned in the Bible along with other ancient dishes like bread, wine, stew, and roasted meat, which highlights the important role figs played in our diets. 

The fondness for figs extended to the ancient Romans, who ate them in a variety of dishes and also used them as a form of animal feed. A lavish Roman meal might end with cheese (another food that's been around for thousands of years, as seen in the ancient Chinese cheese mummies), fresh grapes, and a sweet treat of dried, spiced figs. Meanwhile, Roman pigs were often force-fed figs to fatten them up. Adding insult to injury, fig-stuffed ham in pastries shaped like pigs was a famous Roman feasting dish.