Oats were first cultivated in Switzerland and to a slight extent in Denmark. The oldest known cultivated oat remains were found in caves in Switzerland that date back to around 1000 BC.
Oats was known in the Bronze Age in Europe and Romans writers like Cato, Ovid and Cicero often refer to it. Marcus Tullius Cicero suggested its used for medicinal purpose.
Oats became important only during the Roman Iron Age. It was increasingly to the fore from the first century AD onward.
In ancient times, both Greeks and the Romans spurned oats in favor of wheat. During that times oat seeds often contaminated wheat and as the soil became exhausted the wheat grew less successfully and the oat became dominant since it required less fertile soil.
The Greeks and Romans also know how to appreciate oatmeal. They used to make a kind gruel which a thinner version of porridge tatty may be often drunk than eaten.
Pliny the Romans author said that Germans grow oats and that a ‘porridge’ made from oats is their staple diet.
Englishman once thought oats were fit only for horse feed, while Scottish have long favored oats as a sustaining cereal.
Scottish favorite an old fashioned breakfast of porridge oats. They shared their oatmeal with their border collies, collies and sheep dogs.
When oats arrived in the New World, Americans grew its primarily as horse feed – that is until two temperature developed a machine that could be easily cut it groats, or whole oats, into a steel-cut oatmeal for a palatable cereal.
Ancient history of oats
