Nature pushes the date of the very first hot cocoa back by a millennium, with evidence of the dawn of chocolate in 3,300 BCE:
Until now, the oldest archaeological evidence for cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) dated to 3,900 years ago and came from a Central American site, although genomic analysis suggested that the tree’s place of origin lay further south, along the Amazon River.
Michael Blake at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and his colleagues analysed residues on bottles and other items from the Santa Ana-La Florida archaeological site in the South American nation of Ecuador. These residues contained cacao DNA, grains of cacao starch and theobromine, a stimulant found in cacao beans.
Results from this analysis indicate that the site’s people, who were part of the Mayo-Chinchipe culture, consumed cacao 5,300 years ago — more than 1,000 years before the next-earliest evidence. The Mayo-Chinchipe people might have consumed cacao as a beverage, a food, a medicine or a stimulant, the authors say.