Study: Chocolate Cocoa Predates Christ
July 18, 2002 -- 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.
HPLC separates out components in a mixture then mass spectrometry identifies the components by their molecular weight.
Chemically speaking, chocolate is one of the most complex foods, containing about 1,200 different compounds. To detect the presence of chocolate, researchers focused on compounds such as theobromine, which is abundant in chocolate.
"Certain chocolate compounds last," explains W. Jeffrey Hurst, a chocolate researcher at Hershey. "And this one in particular is very stable."
When Hurst and his colleagues noted high levels of theobromine, among other compounds, in residue from three of 14 vessels, they knew they had detected chocolate.
Hieroglyphics and previous finds suggest the ancient people who used these vessels harvested the football-shaped fruit pods from cacao trees growing in the rain forest. They stripped the juicy seeds from the pods and fermented them. Then they roasted and ground the seeds to create a paste, which was added to water.
They called the drink "chocolatl" or "bitter water" in the ancient Aztec language and believed it came from paradise and delivered wisdom and prosperity. The Aztec emperor Montezuma was said to have consumed 50 cups of chocolate a day.
"We're shocked by the thought of drinking unsweetened chocolate, but think of coffee or beer," says Haas, who adds, "it probably gave them a good buzz."
Sweetened by Spain
Sometimes Mayans added seasonings such as chili, ground corn, flowers or vanilla to the frothy drink, but it wasn't until Spanish explorers brought the cocoa bean back to Spain that chocolate brewers began making the mixture sweet.
In the 18th century, Swiss confectioners thought of adding milk, rather than water, to the paste to create chocolate milk. And around 1847, Joseph Fry of Bristol, England marketed the first chocolate bar for eating.
The rest, as they say, is history. Today the average American eats about 12 pounds of chocolate a year while the Swiss are the chocolate champions, eating about 24 pounds per person each year.