A few of our species’ earliest ancestors might have spent much more time consuming salad than steak.
An evaluation of the chemical composition of fossilized tooth in Australopithecus africanus — an early relative of people — suggests the bipedal primates had primarily vegetarian diets, researchers report within the Jan. 17 Science. The findings present direct proof of the place certainly one of humanity’s earliest ancestors sat in its native meals internet over 3 million years in the past.
Weight loss plan has been a vital part of human evolution, says Tina Lüdecke, a geochemist on the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. A change from a vegetarian food regimen to the ordinary consumption of high-protein meals like meat is hypothesized to have fueled the evolution of people’ cognitive superpowers.
“These high-quality meals present us with a number of vitality, which we have to energy our large brains,” Lüdecke says.
The exact timing of that gastronomic shift is unclear. To get a greater have a look at diets within the deep previous, Lüdecke and her colleagues drilled samples out of the tooth of 43 roughly 3.5-million-year-old fossilized mammals from the Sterkfontein caves in South Africa, together with seven totally different A. africanus people. Locked within the matrix of tooth enamel are tiny bits of nitrogen-bearing natural materials, which reveal secrets and techniques about historic diets, because the ratio of two types of nitrogen is linked to the relative quantity of meat eaten in life.
Primarily based on comparisons of the enamel nitrogen ratios from A. africanus with these of different extinct mammals from Sterkfontein and fashionable African mammals, the early people seem to have had a variable food regimen, however not one wealthy in mammalian meat. The findings might have implications for a way researchers perceive meat consumption’s affect within the emergence of different human traits. As an illustration, diversifications in Australopithecus resembling shorter snouts, bipedalism and the power to thrive in a savanna ecosystem might have predated the transfer to a brain-boosting meat-rich food regimen.
Lüdecke notes that the findings don’t imply A. africanus couldn’t have sometimes exploited a meaty meal. The outcomes additionally don’t rule out the primates consuming numerous termites — a dependable, high-energy meals — since they comprise comparatively much less of the type of nitrogen elevated in mammalian meat. “We see that apes these days [fish for termites], so why not our ancestors?”
Now that there’s baseline information, Lüdecke says future research might use the identical strategies on the tooth of different, later human species to see how diets might have modified over thousands and thousands of years.
