"Ancient Food and Flavor" at the Penn Museum features outdoor raised beds with plantings of the types of foods that would have been in ancient Peru, Switzerland, and Jordan. (Peter Crimmins/WHYY) ...

Along with analyzing ancient leftovers, Evershed and his collaborators tackled the challenge of disentangling environmental contamination from food signatures. Decades ago, Evershed’s team cooked up ...

Discovering how ancient civilizations ate helps us truly understand what life was like before our time. Sometimes, those insights come from ancient food itself, left behind in traces on used cookware.

Webs aren’t just for spiders. They can, in fact, describe vast networks of interconnected relationships within ecosystems, based on the food preferences of plants and animals. Understanding a “food ...

The ancient Greeks had a diet rich in natural ingredients, many of which are now celebrated as superfoods for their health ...

The remains of 3,500-year-old rice were recently found in Guam — making it the earliest known evidence of rice in Remote Oceania. Archaeologists discovered the rice at the Ritidian Site Complex, ...

Researchers have found that the physical remains of soft-bodied species are not accounted for in fossil records, implying that many current models of ancient food webs are flawed. Food webs map vast ...

Snails, ground fava beans, pork and wine were staples of the 2,000-year-old fast-food stalls uncovered in Ancient Pompeii. Ancient ruins in Pompeii, Roman town near modern Naples destroyed and buried ...

Studying ancient food webs can help scientists reconstruct communities of species, many long extinct, and even use those insights to figure out how modern-day communities might change in the future.