Zoltan Bagosi/Alamy
People living in the Mediterranean may have been sampling South Asian and East Asian cuisines up to thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
Philipp Stockhammer at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany and his colleagues examined microscopic food remains present in the teeth of 16 individuals from the Levant, a region east of the Mediterranean Sea. The people lived in the 17
th and 11
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The team found that these people – who came from a range of social classes – ate foods from South Asia or East Asia, including sesame, soybean, turmeric and banana. This pushes back the timeline for these foods appearing in this region by centuries or, in soybean’s case, millennia.