Key ingredient in your pumpkin spice latte goes back 3,500 years
Love it or hate it pumpkin spice season has been with us for a very long time. A key component of “pumpkin spice” is actually just nutmeg and a team of archealogist now date its use back thousands of years!
It turns out the story of nutmeg reaches much further back into history than scientists expected. An archaeological team investigated a site on the island of Pulau Ay in Indonesia and discovered nutmeg residue on pottery fragments estimated to be 3,500 years old.
The research team, led by anthropologist Peter Lape from the University of Washington, says the find pushes the earliest known use of nutmeg back by about 2,000 years.
“This site shows us how people adapted to living on these small tropical islands in stages, from occasional use as fishing camps to permanent occupation,” Lape said.
The nutmeg find is fascinating, though it doesn’t mean the long-ago residents of Pulau Ay were mixing up pumpkin-spice lattes or squash-based pies. The researchers did find traces of purple yam and sago, a starchy food extracted from some types of palm.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
