Mesolithic Europeans Loved Hazelnuts

[@DanDavisHistory]

This is a clip from my video on prehistoric diets: kzbin.info/www/bejne/i5KaZKOCiNJjjLM

[@sellerguru-oq3ix]

So begs the question did they purposely grown hazelnut stands?! If so how many to produce that number of nuts

[@BogusDudeGW]

i'm betting they preferred honey glazed ham with roast potatoes :)

[@Shoshana-xh6hc]

My Hungarian grandmother made amazing cakes with hazelnuts, never knew the tradition was that old 🌰

[@kiuk_kiks]

They didn’t have agriculture to produce high carb flour much less cakes or nut favoured cakes with sugar. Timelines people

[@KevinSmith-yh6tl]

I've always wondered why I have a huge love of Hazelnuts.

[@LaughingMan44]

​@@kiuk_kiksHe's taking about the eating of hazelnuts clearly

[@franceshorton918]

@shoshanna Do you have any of your Grandmother's recipies for ground hazelnuts? They would be treasures.... and I believe these ancient traditions survive in many traditions. Greetings from Auckland New Zealand, where we are already eating Christmas Fruit mince pies!! An old English tradition ❤

[@42ZaphodB42]

​@@LaughingMan44Is he? Hes talking about baking

[@michaelcotter6094]

You’re killing it lately with these short form posts. They’re info-dense without feeling rushed. Great stuff!

[@DanDavisHistory]

Thank you very much indeed 🙏

[@HAIRHOLIC_1]

It’s interesting because Hazelnuts and chestnuts are still incredibly popular in European cuisine, and for good reason. Living in Switzerland, I’ve noticed just how many dishes are made with them. Their flours are used in everything from bread, pasta, cakes to gnocchi. Chestnuts, especially, are everywhere: roasted as a snack, made into spreads and jams, or even used in soups and desserts like the famous vermicelles. They also have a fascinating history. During war periods, chestnuts were a lifeline. When staples like wheat were scarce, people relied on chestnuts for their nutrition and long shelf life. Hazelnuts, too, have been part of European food traditions for centuries think of pralines, baked goods, and of course, Nutella! These nuts aren’t just delicious; they’re part of what makes European cooking so special, we even have chestnuts festivals here, they remain a staple.

[@franceshorton918]

@Hairholic Agree! Thank you for your post, very interesting. I'm a post war baby boomer, but my parents were WW II survivors from London, UK. Their deep love of all European nuts was passed down, to myself and many other descendants here in New Zealand. If I had more land, I'd get a few hazlenut bushes !!

[@slyasleep]

The chestnut truly is a all-in-one food.

[@HAIRHOLIC_1]

@@franceshorton918 they did indeed save many people from famine ❤️

[@arkamukhopadhyay9111]

"European Cuisine" is an oxymoron.

[@internetguy8075]

@@arkamukhopadhyay9111 You don't know anything about European cuisine then.

[@bigblue6917]

One fact I came across when studying archaeology was that roasting hazelnuts extends the self life of the nuts by some six months. Hazelnut trees were the the most commonest tree found at this time which led me to believe that the people were practising a form on proto-farming in that they were planting the nuts to make sure there was an abundance of them.

[@LeoRHood]

Most definitely

[@StacyL.]

Now I understand why I love hazelnuts so much! I have a strong Hungarian/ Western European ancestry so this makes sense.

[@camelopardalis84]

You're from the US?

[@kajadaw]

That’s nuts!

[@arthogof]

clear evidence of giant fire breathing squirrels

[@ridhimalifestyle100]

Most tin foil cap thing I've ever heard

[@MarigoldThyme]

😂😂😂😂

[@readingwithric6588]

knew it! 😂

[@moonie-zw5by]

Community like this is why I love YT. 😂 thank you ❤❤

[@kraytard]

Finally someone has opened their eyes to Cube Earth and its host of fire breathing vermin

[@davedrewett2196]

I hypothesise that it was the combo of eating Hazel's and meat and fat that enabled hunter gatherer women to achieve the Venus body type. Stored fat is rare in hunter gatherers so this combo of extra carbs with fats enabled them to achieve that.

[@johannageisel5390]

We have a hazelnut bush in our community garden and the nuts are really good! Collected a few handful this fall, but I'm eating them fresh, not roasted. Walnuts should also be popular among prehistoric people, but I'm not sure if they are actually native to Germany. Could be, though. The crows definitely love them. They are the perfect winter stash for them.

[@Donnah1979]

I think walnuts were mentioned by someone else? Also, acorns are edible (must soak in water), and oak trees have definitely been around in Europe for thousands of years.

[@zimzob]

@@Donnah1979was just thinking about acorns too. The eastern American Indians relied on acorns and chestnuts, these were reliable backup food sources when crops or game animals were insufficient.

[@Carloshache]

If you grind these nuts and then stir them with a bit of water you will actually end up with a sort of thickened emulsified sauce or Nutella-like condiment. Their cooking might've been delicious.

[@chriselliott3639]

European mommies have been amazing cooks for thousands of years.

[@zimzob]

delicious but monotonous

[@PippaRilley]

​​@zimzob Delicious YET monotonous 🎉

[@silvieb2024]

Luv hazelnuts!❤

[@adamandsteve13]

We used to collect wild hazelnuts as children

[@rosenraikov]

Can't seem to do that anymore. Whenever I've found any, they are all empty inside or eaten by worms. Have you ever noticed that?

[@LawrenceMclean]

@@rosenraikov That indicates ecological disturbance. Whatever lifeforms kept the numbers of those other lifeforms that consumed the hazelnut in check, are now largely missing.

[@jtzoltan]

​@@rosenraikov I think if you're grabbing them off the ground that's a lot more likely to happen. The longer they are, the greater the oddsj

[@robsollart2580]

I noticed the worm often already in the nuts while still on the tree

[@jtzoltan]

@@robsollart2580 the adult beetle that lays the legs inside the acorn must get up in the trees as well

[@TheLordZoka]

“That’s a lot of nuts! You want fries with that?!”

[@KimberlyPatton-x1n]

From Austrian descent,this makes total sense...and they wpuld have kept well over winter.

[@Getpojke]

Love gathering & roasting cobnuts & filberts. Usually do it at home these days, but have been known to roast them the same way as our forebears did in the video.I was also roasting a bunch of sweet chestnuts this week, they are so good. Have been making marron glacé for Christmas. 🌰

[@winstongibson3732]

I've grown hazelnuts for several years. I've gotten 2 of them. Unless squirrels are on the menu I'm not going to get any more.

[@dontfit6380]

I planted walnut, oak and hazel nuts. Just to put squirrels on the menu.

[@DanDavisHistory]

Yeah same here, only I never get a single one.

[@ReginaRedding]

😂squirrel meat is delicious😋 ​@@dontfit6380

[@user-iw7gb6hx2j]

​@DanDavisHistory Greys are quite easily trapped, and the backlegs are good eating. Interesting fact if you catch a grey squirrel in the UK, you are legally obliged to dispatch it. Releasing one alive is a criminal offense.

[@DanDavisHistory]

I would kill them all if I could

[@YamiKisara]

Germans making nutella since the Mesolithic, lol. Let's also not forget wild fruits tend to be much smaller than our modern cultivated varieties, so if the modern hazelnut weights roughly between 2-4 g, the wild variety wouldn't weight more than half of that. Just to put into scale how efficient our ancestors were.

[@Parabellum.silvano]

Nha, Nutella is more chocolate than hazelnut

[@kiuk_kiks]

Nutella is 50% sugar, 20% palm oil with chocolate flavouring with some nuts. Imagine comparing that with wild nuts 😂

[@lyvras]

Nutella is italian tho.

[@LaughingMan44]

Are modern hazelnuts all cultivars? There's still wild hazelnuts ye know

[@braydenleis4735]

I’d say it’s probably pretty similar. People didn’t domesticate or mess with the genetics of wild hazelnuts

[@apemancommeth8087]

They must’ve been so relieved that they would have a stable food supply and a tasty one at that! 🤤👍

[@DES.REVER.DESIGNS]

Nut gathering and processing is very technical work. Acorns can be put into sacks, and placed in a running river, as the water pulls out gross tasting tannins and toxins. This takes 24-72 hours of soaking before the rest of the processing can be strated

[@lavio5389]

Must be why I love hazelnuts so much. 😅 seriously tho, they are so popular throughout Eastern Europe both by themselves and in sweets.

[@rca-in-glasgow6781]

These clever individuals were members of the Nutellian Era, and breakfast would never be the same. ⭐️

[@josephpercy1558]

Hazelnut is great for my morning coffee.

[@yureituesday]

Someone’s hazelnut stores caught fire

[@freestylebagua]

Nutella dates back to the neolithic

[@helenamcginty4920]

Where I now live in Andalucia walnuts are popular. My neighbour has a huge tree by her house. Another nut seems to be popular as well its long and narrow and dark. No idea what it is as I never saw it in the UK.

[@Nembula]

Grain crops and grain like crops are little researched but important to the nutrition of mesolithic peoples. Like the use of white oak acorns in the Americas. It would be interesting to examine when we gave up some of these ancient foods. What ever happened to roman gerum

[@wtfgreg1246]

I absolutely love them gonna go eat a few now

[@LeoRHood]

Well they likely ‘farmed’ them in agroforestry systems. These areas would also attract animals to the clearings and whilst providing nuts and straight poles for a variety of uses

[@PortmanRd]

Absolutely nuts!

[@natchaos5604]

Mmm.... Nutella 😊

[@sableempire9654]

Everyone loves em! ❤

[@LeePrice-j5z]

Lucky me,another notification for another short.....

[@theboujieproletariat]

My dad used to roast them by charring- buried them under the fire and then left them for a while under the ash. It was much tastier than in the electric oven.

[@Daniel-jk7pe]

Hazelnuts are our heritage!

[@UkSapyy]

Does this mean people controlled what wild trees grew? In South America they found a high concentration of fruit trees where people are thought to have lived/travelled along. Might be people throwing out half eaten fruits making it easier for those trees to grow or maybe it was intentional. Maybe we didn't grow grains but we did manipulate forests for food. I think that's interesting. On the Steppe people created impressive complex long traps to trap game in pits. Providing thousands of reliable calories. Those in hilly and forested areas must have had ways of getting the same equally large amount of calories.

[@DanDavisHistory]

Yes they did manage hazelnut forests. See the full length video for more info about this.

[@raraavis7782]

Pretty cool, isn't it? We tend to assume 'hunting and gathering' was just taking advantage of what happened to be around. When really people might have manipulated their environment in all kinds of ways, to make it more favorable to their survival, even back then.

[@christiank1251]

Better keep looking out east for Oreshniks.

[@alister2228]

Hazelnuts on Colonsay? Wow. Not many trees nowadays

[@DanDavisHistory]

Yes they might have deforested the island collecting and roasting hazelnuts until there were none left.

[@robsollart2580]

@@DanDavisHistory Why would they deforrest the hazel they depend on and come back to every year?

[@DanDavisHistory]

It's what people do. If you gotta feed your family this winter, you can't always afford to plan for a future that might not come.

[@TheLRider]

I didn't know this but I eat roasted Hazel nuts every day. Long term memory working well.. 😂

[@Crowhillgal]

Love it!!

[@OghamTheBold]

My _hazelnut_ tree is one storey towered over by _pine_ in turn _eucalyptus_ I planted-Working in IT in 2020 for VW Porsche Suzuki JCB they terminated me for pneumonia-after ICU they stole my heat in winter to pay £57,000,000,000 interest on the rent on English rain

[@Georgieastra]

Native Americans in what was to become the south eastern US chopped and burned most trees except the American Chestnut 🌰. After a couple of centuries there were billions of American Chestnut trees but unfortunately they were wiped out by a fungus in the early Twentieth Century after contaminated Asian Chestnut trees were unwisely imported.

[@LaughingMan44]

I hate globalism

[@raraavis7782]

Can you imagine? A major food source just gone within a decade.

[@franceshorton918]

@@raraavis7782 Agree, and not only American Chestnut trees gone, but also the original, true Banana. If you're not aware of what happened to real Banana trees, perhaps, look it up in Wikipedia. Tragic. Today, we are all eating inferior varietals of the banana genus, and they are slowly improving but are nothing like the originals. Human arrogance and greed - and wilful ignorance of scientist's advice. Yep.

[@helenwalker3063]

The calories were important to survive a protein heavy diet of meat and fish

[@nijinoshita3301]

yeah looking at german sweets today, we are still obsessed with hazel nuts, sadly my least favorite nut, but I still eat them

[@pandorabryn]

I’ve always wondered why humans went for grains as a staple instead of nuts.🤷‍♀️

[@hans7856]

They were clearly making an offering to the Messiah, Peanut the Squirrel, who would return to earth one day.

[@siervodedios5952]

Unfortunately I'm allergic to hazelnuts so I can't have any. It sucks, man. 🙁

[@juwebles4352]

reminds me of how native americans in the american south used to harvest and cultivate pecans.

[@jakobraahauge7299]

Hazelnuts do take rather intensive care to givsuch yields - I don't understand why biomanagement is so narrowly understood as growing grains, legumes, and the usual suspects of domesticated animals. I believe that these people were very carefully managing their hazelnuts in a way that would be understood as food forest agrogorestry.

[@DanDavisHistory]

It's not narrowly understood, exactly, but there is a difference between domesticated grains and animals and the wild varieties. However, archeologists do show that hazelnut woodlands were managed by Mesolithic Europeans, along with wild animals. I talk about this in the full length video this is clipped from.

[@jakobraahauge7299]

@DanDavisHistory Awesome! Thanks! And great! I guess at one point, we'll get to have a little more of seeing biomanagement on a spectrum rather than a narrowly binary dichotomy between agriculture and hunter gathering as a mere one way relation with nature instead of an active management of it! Looking very much forward to seeing your video - amazing topic, and you're a lovely narrator!

[@Balthazare69]

Didnt know that nutella is so old 😄😄

[@DanDavisHistory]

Nutella is basically just palm oil. It's 70% palm oil and only 13% hazelnuts.

[@fail4lot]

@@DanDavisHistory that is sad. Palmella :D

[@smowl2679]

I thought I was having a stroke first seeing that map of Germany, took me a while to realise it's due to the lower sea levels back then lmao

[@AustinB.3322]

Everyone loves hazelnuts.

[@joshualawson1579]

Nutella owes these people a debt of gratitude.

[@thetrojanfish]

So we are Descendants of squirrells?😄🐿️

[@StacyL.]

I'm pretty sure that the hunter-gatherer is actually ate the squirrels lol

[@Humbug-ge6ne]

I must be a throwback because I simply love Hazel nuts and could survive on them forever. Except my teeth....☹️

[@BARBARYAN.]

Does the word hazel derive from these nuts somehow?

[@vollderchriss]

The hazelnut industry of neolithic germany. I guess they also used their goods to trade with other tribes.

[@CradaOC]

If there is one thing that goes with chocolate....its hazelnuts....oh yeah!!

[@shannadene9654]

Makes me wonder about my heritage cuz I hate hazel nut , pecan, walnut, almond,and love pistachio, cashew, and boiled peanut

[@WTFisDrifting]

Russia’s new missile is called hazel tree in English. Coincidence? Yes those happen

[@immortaljanus]

So... the people back then were a bit nuts?

[@DorchesterMom]

I really dislike hazelnuts. Maybe my ancestors ate so many that I’m permanently off them 😂

[@iainmair485]

Fun fact: The Mesolithic people loved Nutella.

[@jimicwhite]

Me too

[@thomasmills3934]

Seems over-analyzed to me. Why would they need to bury them if they were over cooked. Couldnt they just throw them aside?

[@zivkovicable]

Interesting that Britain was attached to Europe back then, then separated by sea...The original Brexit.

[@dinsel9691]

These guys would have loved Nutella.... aren't we lucky.

[@Kevinmc-j7l]

I like eating nuts.

[@DanDavisHistory]

We've heard that about you.

[@ReginaRedding]

🙌🏼🤣😆💀 ​@@DanDavisHistory

[@inkandesk]

didn’t know my girlfriend was a neolithic gatherer

[@JimmyMatis-h9y]

Did they put them in their coffee too? 🤔 🤭

[@DavidThomas-gm7gu]

Sounds like they traded them .

[@DEIYIAN]

Mel Gibson!?!?

[@randyallen2966]

People liked food back then? Crazy

[@jimcy1319]

They invented Nutella.😋

[@elliottjames671]

Hot nuts

[@winwinmilieudefensie7757]

n u t e l l a

[@LetsTakeWalk]

Hmmmmmm, Nutella.

[@ladyalexandra2980]

Nutella😂

[@bettylocks2.0]

I do not understand the love hazelnuts had and still have! I think they are awful! They taste like dust!

[@kimjongduex7431]

That’s nuts! 😂

[@christiank1251]

Rumor has it they got some in Bastogne.