Bulrush provided valuable carbs for ancestors

10:19am Monday 12th November 2007

THE weekend before last was the pinnacle of autumn here in Wyre Forest district. The weather preceding this was mainly mild, with the odd mild frost, but most importantly it was very still.

This gave the trees plenty of time to allow their leaves to go through the full range of autumn colours.

This still air was also laden with moisture giving very vivid optical conditions which further amplified the true majesty of the autumn spectacle put on by our trees.

To me, it was a must to spend as much time as possible out and about, as the wonderful arboreal colours transformed vista after vista. I suppose everything has to come to an end and just like the melting of the snow these wonderful landscapes of colour were taken from us swiftly with the change in the weather.

The squalls that rattled through the district last Thursday tore the leaves from the trees and sent them blowing like swirling seas of colour across parks, fields and streets, creating one last brief spectacle before they lay dormant on the ground a drabber shrivelled versions of their former selves, leaving the landscape a drabber and much less hospitable looking place behind. To our ancestors who depended on the landscape to hunt and gather their food, such a stark change must have been accompanied with a slight feeling of apprehension.

Along with the loss of the wonderful colour came the disappearance of so many of the options early people would have depended on for food.

Wild fruits would be almost non-existent and fresh green herbs just a distant memory. There would still be a few fungi to be harvested but the arrival of the first deep frosts would soon see them off.

Of course, there would still be that ever present staple that kept people moving on to follow the herds of herbivores as they migrated across our prehistoric landscapes.

A diet rich in meat would seem to be fine but if you look at the make up of a modern diet it would be immediately apparent that the food group that would be almost totally absent in this option would be carbohydrate, the food group that gives us immediate energy.

This would seem to be a rather unfortunate situation but our hunter-gatherer relatives would have known how to get carbohydrate even out of this barren-looking landscape.

One of the secrets would lie in our wetlands in the familiar form of the bulrush. Commonly growing in dense beds, the bulrushes would have spent the summer months soaking up the suns rays and through photosynthesis, turned this into carbohydrate rich starches.

Come autumn the bulrush flowers would have matured into the familiar brown sausage shaped seed heads, we are all familiar with.

The plant then, like the trees, would die back, sacrificing its leaves and leaving the seed heads to dry until conditions were right and the plant could release its hundreds of thousands of fluff covered seeds into the mercy of the wind to distribute.

The sugary starches the plant had accumulated being drawn back down to the roots.

Here a determined hunter -gatherers could with a little effort dig it up.

It is estimated that just one hectare of bulrush bed would be sufficient to produce eight tons of starch rich flour. This is more than enough to see a hungry family though the winter.

Just a quick warning to any would-be hunter-gathers at heart that might still be out there these days, bulrushes are few and far between and many of the sites they grow give them legal protection.

Also, and probably not so well known to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, wetland plants frequently harbour minuscule internal parasites such as parasitic worms and flukes which might not immediately kill you but over time can do you much harm and could eventually be the death of you.

The expected life span of our ancestors was a long way off what we hope for these days.

EDITOR'S CHOICE