It's heavy on plants but plants seem like a trickier source for fossil foods since most plants we eat are domesticated and/or otherwise evolutionarily recent - we eat lots of grasses. Animals we catch might be a good source for new entries - sharks and sturgeons are ancient, hagfish are eaten. Maybe some of the edible seaweeds haven't changed much morphologically?
It's pretty fascinating how recent most plant foods humans eat are.
As you note, grasses (wheat, rice, oats, rye, barley, ...) and maize are both recent developments and exceedingly selected and hybridised by humans.
Both grasses and flowering plants post-date the first emergence of dinosaurs.
Numerous other crops are similarly recent: stone fruits, pomes, etc. Others were available locally but not worldwide: potatoes and tomatoes. I suspect tubers and berries may be among the older plant foods eaten.
Some sort of global disaster appears to have occurred around 12,000 years ago, with evidence of massive flooding and wildfires and dramatic shifts in climate happening over the course of days and weeks all over the world.
Agriculture and advanced culture may have existed prior to the event, but it looks like the source for flood myths. Aside from Gobekli Tepe and a handful of other sites, it appears most knowledge and culture was lost. People had to start from scratch, so agriculture begins at most 12,000 years ago, comprising almost every plant we eat today. There's no way to know what might have been utterly lost.
There's evidence of modern humans going back almost 300,000 years. (Crazy to think we were without dogs for ~260k years. Humans are better with dogs around. )
Humans probably invented language and writing and all sorts of proto-sciences many times over those hundreds of millenia, but everything before 12,000 years back is gone. There's virtually no evidence of the vast majority of human culture before then. Entropy sucks.
There's relatively little archaeological evidence of ancient humans generally. The conditions favouring preservation are fairly strict.
Given that:
1. Human populations tend to travel along and settle near coastlines and rivers, or in low valleys with rich soils whether supporting agriculture or nonagricultural hunter-gatherer societies.
2. Sea levels during the Quaternary Glaciations periods of maximum glacial extent were as much as 100m (330ft) lower than today. Many settlements, communities, and artefacts would be under water now, and many likely degraded.
3. Glaciers themselves would destroy many other terrestrial remains in regions subject to glaciation. Glaciers in particular scour valleys.
The Quatenary Glaciations are multiple periods of cooling and warming extending back over 2.86 million years ... or roughly the entire time since genus homo split from its common ancestors with chimpanzees. Anatomically modern humans are about 200,000 years old. Much of our evolutionary and anthropological history has been subjected to the same stresses and transformations of repeated periods of glaciation and warming.
The places that traces would likely remain tend to be lower latitudes, nearer the equator, away from coasts, and geologically reasonably stable --- sedimentation helps preserve remains, violent tectonic activity not so much. This tends to favour Africa and south-central Asia.
There’s a few different myths and theories here. There was an event that killed most humans 50,000+ years ago, probably a volcano.
Later, in the 5,000-15,000 year timeframe there were a few different flooding events, in the Black Sea, Middle East, the North Sea, etc. Presumably they were related, but hundreds or thousands of years may have separated these events. More recently, in the 12th-13th century, tens or hundreds of thousands of people were washed away in the Frisian islands.
Lowland plains are the most fertile places to live, and probably contributes to the universal nature of the flood myth. I would imagine that the current Black Sea was a paradise lost when it flooded, probably quite suddenly, 7,000 years ago.
When you think of ancient oral histories and myths that endured into modern religion, concepts like the garden of Eden, Noah’s flood, days of judgement, etc are powerful morality tales that may have been boiled down from some derivative of actual history. I’ve always found the idea inspirational, as life & humans have a way of powering on in the face of incredible adversity.
A minority view holds that the YD was caused by an comet disintegrating and creating a chain of impacts or airbursts across the Northern Hemisphere. A further subset of that minority suggests that those events are the source for flood myths around the world, and speculates that advanced civilizations existed prior.
Point, though given the present significance of both the broader class of flowering plants, and the specific case of grasses, it's worth noting each individually.
