STONE AGE MAN USED GARLIC MUSTARD TO SPICE UP THEIR FOOD.

Metro News; Chucking in the spices usually does the trick when you want to liven up a boring dinner.

But it seems stone age man got there first, judging by the leftovers of his meals.

Residue in cooking pots show our hunter-gatherer ancestors were using garlic mustard to add a bit of zing to their cuisine more than 6,000 years ago.

The spice would have given flavour to the meat and plant diet of prehistoric northern Europe, said researchers from the University of York.

On shards of the pots they found blackened deposits of microscopic silica bodies, called phytoliths, which resemble those found in modern-day garlic mustard seeds – a peppery mustard-flavoured spice.

Lead researcher Dr Hayley Saul said: ‘The habit of enhancing and altering the flavour of calorie rich staples was part of European cuisine as far back as the 7th millennia BC.’

The pottery shards, which are at least 6,100 years old, were recovered from sites in Denmark and Germany, it was reported in the scientific journal Plos One. They date from a period when prehistoric people turned from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to farming.