Study: Chocolate Cocoa Predates Christ
July 18 -- It was gulped as a bitter drink rather than nibbled as a sweet indulgence, but scientists have learned chocolate — and its lovers — have been around nearly 1,000 years longer than previously thought.
Residue scraped from 2,600-year-old ceramic vessels from what is now northern Belize in Central America, reveal traces of ancient cocoa. This dates the luxurious food, derived from roasted and ground seeds of the cacao fruit, to as early as about 600 B.C.
"This find pushes back the origins of chocolate by hundreds of years," says Jonathan Haas, curator of an exhibit on chocolate at the Field Museum in Chicago. "We now know that chocolate likely predated Christ."
Roots in Ancient Mexico
To create their beloved, frothy drink, these ancient people mixed paste ground from cocoa beans with water and then poured the unsweetened chocolate liquid from one container to another.
"You get a little height to it and pour the liquid back and forth to get a big head of foam," explains Haas. Then, it's bottoms up.
Artifacts taken from Mayan archaeological sites in Guatemala had revealed cocoa-containing vessels that dated to about A.D. 400. These recently analyzed vessels are about 1,000 years older and mark the start of the Mayan empire and possibly the final years of the Olmec civilization — a culture considered to be the "mother" of Meso-American culture.
The finding suggests the Olmecs may have passed the habit of chocolate consumption to the Mayan people, who grew to literally worship the food.
"They were very devoted to chocolate," says Haas about ancient Mayan people. "Royalty was served chocolate, there was a chocolate God. This was a food that was very, very important to the elite and to religion."
A Complex Delicacy
Researchers at Hershey Foods in Hershey, Pa., used analytical techniques known as high-performance liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry to detect the distinct chemical characteristics of the ancient chocolate.
Popular Reads
ABC News Live