THE Mayan people discovered the joys of chocolate a thousand years earlier than previously thought, first guzzling the decadent treat as long as 2600 years ago.
Jeffrey Hurst from Hershey’s in Pennsylvania, along with food technologists and anthropologists from the University of Texas, scraped out the inside of teapot-shaped jugs from the pre-classical city of Colha in Belize. They found traces of theobromine in the jugs – a compound found in cocoa plants (Nature, vol 418, p 289).
