The processing of plant ingredients for food has characterized the genus Homo, with the grinding, fermentation and cooking of plant ingredients improving their nutrient intake and leading to increases in brain-size, improved population sustainability, and cultural development (e.g. Stahl 1989; Wrangham 2009). Plants have fed human societies since Palaeolithic times and their central position has been increasingly highlighted over the last decade through sophisticated analytical methods extracting pollen and starches from Neanderthal teeth, or phytoliths and starches from the surface of Palaeolithic tools. Barbara Bender’s inversion of the hunter-gatherer stereotype into gatherer-hunter back in 1978, was very perceptive though little-noticed by researchers of prehistoric communities of the Old World. Four decades later, the shift in emphasis and discourse on prehistoric food is clear: wild plants and plant foods in general appear to have been the staff of life, sustaining human populations since the Palaeolithic era (e.g. Aranguren et al 2007; Carrión et al 2018; Hardy 2018). It seems that the stereotype of the male hunter and his team bringing meat to the hearth is giving way to plant foods, including medicines, being harvested from the wild and consumed by the pre-agricultural human communities that inhabited different regions of the Earth. The transformation of plants into food was perhaps largely associated with women, assuming that the available ethnographic evidence can, to some extent, be extrapolated to the prehistoric past.