Long before farming, our ancestors were already transforming plants into food, medicine, and tools—and this project will recover the lost evidence of that deep history. For roughly three million years of the Palaeolithic, and up until agriculture emerged around 10,000 years ago, plants were central to human survival and evolution. Yet almost nothing is known about how they were used, because organic remains rarely survive. This project fills that gap by combining traditional archaeology with new methods to recover evidence of processed carbohydrates (a highly efficient energy source), identify edible, poisonous, and psychoactive plant compounds, and trace the development of fibre-twisting into cordage—a conceptual leap that enabled composite tools and weaving. If successful, the research will rewrite the pre-agrarian world, showing that plant use was transformative long before domestication. It will reveal how early carbohydrate consumption shaped human genetics and metabolism, and how plant-based medicines and mind-altering substances influenced social and cultural evolution. This is fundamental science: it does not promise an immediate practical application, but understanding the deep roots of our relationship with plants could inform future work on nutrition, pharmacology, and material technologies.
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Powerful Plants (PP) is based on the hypothesis that plant use was transformative in human evolution, long before agriculture developed. Plants are essential to our physical, psychological and physiological wellbeing. They provide us with energy, nutrients and raw materials. They can improve our mood and reduce stress while many of today's top prescription drugs are based on plant secondary compounds. The depth of the human connection to plants suggests this embedding happened during our evolution. Yet the full role of plants during the approximately 3 million years of the Palaeolithic and beyond up to the emergence of agriculture around 10,000 years ago is virtually unknown, primarily due to a lack of archaeological evidence. PP will use traditional and recently developed methods in an interdisciplinary approach to investigate three areas in which pre-agrarian plant use was pivotal in shaping future human trajectories, with implications that are still evident today. We will recover evidence for processed carbohydrate consumption, a highly efficient energy source with major consequences for humans then and now and genetic evidence to explore its impacts. PP will identify edible, poisonous and psychoactive properties of plants from pre-agrarian plant assemblages to develop a prehistory of medicine and the use of mind-altering plant substances. Twisting fibres into cordage was a major conceptual and technological development enabling composite technology to develop and the very extensive stand-alone, technologies based on looping and weaving. We will use the accumulated archaeological evidence, supported by experimental archaeology and ethnographic data, to investigate the influence of plants on social, cultural and genetic adaptations before farming. Our data will change perceptions of the pre-agrarian world and will provide a new perspective on the drivers and consequences of our recent evolution.
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