English Feasted on Frog Legs Long Before French, Discovery Suggests

The English may have served up frog legs long before the French adopted the food source as their own, new evidence uncovered at an archaeological dig suggests.

Charred toad leg bone was discovered alongside small fish vertebrate bones and burnt Aurochs bone, the predecessor of cows, at a site known as Blick Mead located not far from Stonehenge. The artifacts date back to a period between 6250 BC and 7596 BC, making the burnt toad humerus the earliest evidence of cooked toad or frog leg in the world.

"It would appear that thousands of years ago people were eating a Heston Blumenthal-style menu on this site, one and a quarter miles from Stonehenge, consisting of toads' legs, aurochs, wild boar and red deer with hazelnuts for main, another course of salmon and trout and finishing off with blackberries," said David Jacques, senior research fellow in archaeology at the University of Buckingham, which is funding a new dig on the site.

"This is significant for our understanding of the way people were living around 5,000 years before the building of Stonehenge and it begs the question -- where are the frogs now?" Jacques, who leads the dig, asked.

The site, located in Amesbury, Wiltshire, is something of an archaeological goldmine, already having produced some 12,000 discoveries all from the Mesolithic era. According to Andy Rhind-Tutt, chairman of Amesbury Museum and Heritage Trust, the ongoing discoveries may help unravel some of the mystery behind Stonehenge.

"No-one would have built Stonehenge without there being something unique and really special about the area," Rhind-Tutt said. "There must have been something significant here beforehand and Blick Mead, with its constant temperature spring sitting alongside the River Avon, may well be it -- I believe that as we uncover more about the site over the coming days and weeks, we will discover it to be the greatest, oldest and most significant Mesolithic home base ever found in Britain."