Posted on 11/22/2005 1:16:13 PM PST by blam
Homo erectus ate crunchy food
Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News
Tuesday, 22 November 2005
Tooth marks suggest Homo erectus ate crunchy foods, like root vegetables (Image: iStockphoto)
Homo erectus munched on crunchy, brittle and tough foods, while other early humans seemed to favour softer fare, according to a new analysis of teeth.
All the individuals showed signs of eating a variety of foods.
H. erectus lived between approximately 2 million to 400,000 years ago and is the first known primate to use significant tools and walk upright.
The researchers say H. erectus is the only species they looked at that appears to have often crunched and chewed on foods, such as tough meat and crisp root vegetables.
Researchers now think this species enjoyed a broader diet than earlier proto-humans, such as H. habilis, which lived around 2.3 to 1.6 million years ago.
Tooth marks
Like detectives, the scientists looked for telltale marks on 18 teeth belonging to these two species and other unconfirmed proto-humans.
The marks, which were created a few weeks before the individuals died, included scratches caused by eating tough leaves and pits that resulted from crunchy foods.
"If you are eating something tough, you can fracture it most efficiently by slicing it," says lead author Peter Ungar, professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas.
"If you model teeth as scissors, the blades will scrape across the sides of the food and each other, causing abrasives to be dragged along, causing scratches," he says.
"If you try to pulverise tough or raw meat with a hammer, you get a mess, but not nice small pieces for swallowing. In contrast, a hammer would make much more sense for hard, brittle foods, such as nuts, seeds, roots and tubers. The brittle foods should leave pits as the food and teeth are pounded against one another."
Ungar and his team determined how food affects teeth by first studying the choppers of existent primate species and two early human foraging groups, the Aleut and the Arikara.
The researchers then applied this data to their analysis of the proto-human teeth, which they magnified and studied using computer software.
Findings will be published in the Journal of Human Evolution.
The handy man
The study suggests H. habilis, which some researchers have nicknamed "the handy man" because this species made the first known stone tools, was more of a fruit and veg eater than the apparent omnivore H. erectus.
Teeth for the latter had greater numbers of pits, while handy habilis teeth had more striations suggestive of pulling down on fruit and leaves.
"Both of the species would probably have focused on high energy-yield, easy-to-consume foods, such as soft fruits when they could get them," says Ungar.
"The differences between H. habilis and H. erectus suggest that the latter may have focused a bit more on tough foods. They could have been meat, tough tubers or other items."
The researchers theorised that climate and food sources started to change around 2.5 million years ago. Cooling and drying appear to have spread across Africa beginning at that time, which probably converted forests to grasslands and increased overall climate variation.
H. erectus then might have had to develop a more flexible diet that involved more than plucking fruits from trees.
World's first cook
William Calvin, affiliate professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle says, "Homo erectus ate well."
In his recent book A Brief History of the Mind Calvin writes that H. erectus "not only attained meat-eating but transport of food and raw materials and the sharing of food ... Perhaps they had learned to delay food consumption as well as to hunt, to prepare plant foods by pounding and soaking them first", making H. erectus, perhaps, the world's first cook.
Not touching this one with a ten foot barge pole.
"H. erectus lived between approximately 2 million to 400,000 years ago and is the first known primate to use significant tools and walk upright."
The 'Hobbits' discovered on Flores Island are Homo Erectus and they lived until about 12-13,000 years ago.
Cheetos?
Homo erectus??
I'd rather not hear about George Michael in the men's room...
So many jokes and so little time...
The 'Hobbits' discovered on Flores Island are Homo Erectus and they lived until about 12-13,000 years ago.
What's the margin of error on all these estimates?!?!?
That's simply not true. H. floresiensis may be descended from H. erectus but they are way too many differences to say that they are the same species.
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Great but did they have dip??? |
Great headline ping!
Maybe they didn't know enough to use soft bristled toothbrushes - the hard bristles will scratch your teeth over a peiod of time...
The writer phrased it badly. H. erectus appeared around 2 million years ago and appears to have disappeared around 400,000 years ago.
Homo erectus lmao.
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