Leftovers recovered from ancient feast

On the menu: medallions of fresh-caught tortoise and wild sirloin steak - enough to feed a party of 35. Sound delicious?

It's too late to order. This particular repast was served 12,000 years ago.

Researchers have long suspected that inviting the neighbors over to share a meal is an ancient human tradition.

But until recently evidence that humans were throwing banquets and attending block parties even before the advent of agriculture just wasn't there.

Now, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, Natalie Munro, and her colleague, Leore Grosman of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, have uncovered evidence that our ancestors were staging communal feasts - the modern equivalent of sit-down dinners and power lunches - 12,000 years ago. This week, Munro and Grosman published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

What they found, at an archaeological dig in Israel, "is the first solid evidence that supports the idea that communal feasts were already occurring - perhaps with some frequency - at the beginning of the transition to agriculture," said Munro, who along with Grosman, found the shells of 71 tortoises and the bones of three wild cows - cattle hadn't even been domesticated yet - at a burial cave in the Galilee region of northern Israel. The shells and bones showed evidence of being split open or cooked.

"Scientists have speculated that feasting began before the Neolithic period, which starts about 11.5 thousand years ago," said Munro, an anthropology professor.

The Neolithic period marks the point at which humans began to lay down their spears and take up the plow, forming permanent agricultural settlements.

"We don't know exactly how many people attended this particular feast, or what the average attendance was at similar events," Munro said. But she said her best guess is that those 71 turtles on the half-shell would feed about 35 people.

Even more important than finding the leftovers is what the meal itself signifies:

Like an office party or a meeting of supervisors over a meal, communal feasts are more than an excuse to eat, drink and be merry, they're opportunities for people to socialize, exchange ideas and hash out their differences.

And as more people gave up the more solitary life as hunter-gatherers to settle down and take up the till, the need to learn compromise, governance and negotiation became ever more critical as the human population swelled.

And nothing cools the jets and promotes peace like a dinner invite and a full stomach.

"Once you settle down in a community, you start to work things out with your neighbors," Munro said.

"Around this time, people were coming into contact with each other a lot, and that can create friction. Before, they could get up and leave when they had problems with the neighbors. Now these public events (feasts) served as community-building opportunities."