Chocolate began as beer-like brew 3,100 years ago

Researchers have identified residue of a chemical compound that comes exclusively from the cacao plant – the source of chocolate – in pottery vessels dating from about 1100 BC in Puerto Escondido, Honduras.

This has pushed back by at least 500 years the earliest documented use of cacao, an important luxury commodity in Mesoamerica before European invaders arrived and now the basis of the modern chocolate industry.

“The earliest cacao beverages consumed at Puerto Escondido were likely produced by fermenting the sweet pulp surrounding the seeds,” the scientists wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The cacao brew consumed at the village of perhaps 200 to 300 people may have evolved into the chocolate beverage known from later in Mesoamerican history not by design but as “an accidental byproduct of some brewing,” Cornell University’s John Henderson said.

The image shown here was taken in Bolivia in 2010 while harvesting wild cacao. There is so much juice around the seeds that it drips off during collection. Rather than letting it go to waste, a small trench is dug into the earth and lined with banana leaves to collect the juice, which is drunk using a cup made from a cocoa pod cleaned out with a machete.