>>17895424 (OP)
I can't for the fuck of me find it, but they unearthed a caveman from Northern Africa and he had died because he had eaten so much honey that all of his teeth rotted away, the rot became impacted, and it infected his jaw, traveled up his bones, and ate a thumb-sized hole in his skull.
Anyway,
>How did ancient cultures coped without desserts?
They still had sources of sweetness: honey, maple syrup, birch syrup, fresh and dried fruits (when they were in season a lot of people would just sit and eat figs, dates, apples, and berries all fucking *day). A lot of "table ales" or everyday low-alcoholic content beverages were pleasantly sweet from the fermentation process making the sugar available, like that drink where you chew up corn or banana mush, spit it into a clay vase, and let it ferment.
White people don't eat them anymore, but Asian old-world beans produce a mild sweetness: boiled, mashed, mixed with some kind of fat, and then baked into a confection or used as a filler. Other vegetables like yams, beets, turnips, sweet potatoes, purple yams, cassava, have sweet varieties. Any really starchy root vegetable has/can potentially be bred into a variety that turns more of that starch into sugar, that can be used for cakes.
*My mother grew up in a subsistence agricultural family and she ate so many gooseberries, blackberries, juniper berries, crab-apples, saskatoons, etc.. That she gets nauseous whenever she's exposed to them.
