Chinese archaeologists find 2,200-year-old ancestor of Dragon Boat Festival treat

When the weather turns warm around June, people all across China gather for the annual Dragon Boat Festival, and one of the most famous dishes from the celebration is the zongzi.zongzi is a rice dumpling with a delicious filling, wrapped in bamboo leaves before being cooked. The leaves add aroma and flavour to the rice.In mid-August, a group of scientists from China announced they had discovered an ancient ancestor of zongzi made around 2,200 years ago.However, Yong Ge, a study author from the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said it would be a stretch to “directly recognise” the food as zongzi, adding that the comparison is fair but “should not be overinterpreted.”“Well-preserved plant materials are rare, and we currently do not have a distinct route of zongzi evolution. The only unequivocal evidence of a zongzi belongs to the Song dynasty (960–1279), about 1,000 years later than our findings,” said Yong.Yong told the SCMP that what happened in the millennium between “remains a black box”. All that we know is the tradition was passed down, and the material, morphology and function were kept almost the same while spreading to other regions.The timing of the artefacts also aligns with that of Qu Yuan, whose legend is the backbone of the Dragon Boat Festival.