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Long before the Aztecs and other early Americans introduced cocoa to the world, ancient civilisations used cacao, the beginning of chocolate, to do a completely different dainty treat.

In fact, new grounds from clayware sherds shows that cacao tree was in usage much longer than previously thought.

Cacao beans, which come up from the football-shaped pods of the cacao tree tree, have got been used to do cocoa and chocolate for well over a thousand years.

Ancient Mesoamerican civilizations prized the edible beans ? they were even used as a word form of currency by the Aztecs.

Many Mesoamerican cultures, including the Aztecs, fermented the beans, dried them, land them up and amalgamated them with H2O to do a thick, acrimonious drink (called chocolatl) that was built-in to many societal and rite occasions, such as as matrimonies and births.

While excavating a land site in what is now Puerto Escondido, Honduras, research workers recently establish clayware sherds bearing residues of theobromine, a chemical chemical compound with places similar to caffeine and that is establish only in the cacao tree plant. Related
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Some of the shards, which came from carefully decorated bowls, jars and bottles, day of the month from between 1100 to 900 B.C. and 1400 to 1100 B.C., extending the known usage of cacao tree 500 old age additional into the past.

The ability to happen grounds of the residues was a immense step, said Pb research worker Toilet Henderson of Katherine Cornell University. Previously, only residues from intact, unbroken clayware preserved in graves had been identified.

Henderson states it is likely that cacao tree was used even before 1400 B.C., and he and his co-workers program to prove earlier clayware pieces to find how far back it was used and how widespread it was.

Unlike the acrimonious drink made by the Aztecs and their coevals from the acrimonious cacao tree seeds, the drink used by these earlier Mesoamerican communities was fermented from the fruity White mush that environments the seeds in the pod, called chicha, said Henderson and his colleagues.

Chicha have about 5 percentage alcoholic beverage and the effervescence of beer, but with an unusual, slightly sweet taste. "It doesn't savor like anything else," Henderson said.

It's impossible to state for certain whether the newly discovered residue came from the mush or the seeds, because theobromine happens in both, but the survey writers state they believe it is likely that early Americans used the mush of the cacao tree cod before they developed the zymosis procedure for the seeds.

While cacao tree drinks would not have got been limited to blue bloods in this early community, the drink likely was still a symbol of position and powerfulness that contributed to the outgrowth of elites in later societies, the writers compose in the Nov. Twelve issue of the diary Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It would have got been a grade of distinction," Henderson said. Like the future chocolatl, chicha would also have got been served at particular occasions.

"That's what you served to affect the guests," Henderson said.