Palaeolithic Vegetal Diet in the Southern Levant: The Archaeobotanical Evidence

This chapter reconstructs the Palaeolithic vegetal of seed and fruit remains from three Pleistocene sites from the southern Levant - Gesher Benot Ya’aqov (GBY), Kebara Cave, and Ohalo II. All three sites demonstrate the importance of plants as foodstuffs. At GBY, seeds and fruit are common, as well as water plants. The variety of the site’s edible plants is evenly split between grass species, sugar- and oil-rich fruits, and greens. The high varieties of oil and fruit plants at GBY indicate their higher importance in the vegetal diet than in the other sites. In Kebara, the diet is largely based on legumes and is therefore high in toxins. Plants rich in protein constitute 40% of the varieties of edible plants at this site. Additionally, there is twice the amount of variety of oil-bearing plant seeds in Kebara when compared with the other two sites. At Ohalo II, a wide variety of plants was exploited. Unlike the other two sites, it has a large number of grass grains, which constitute ~40% of the varieties of plant taxa. Throughout the Palaeolithic: (a) Mediterranean climate and vegetation existed, and (b) the plants used were similar.