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.
Oh, definitely, they must have been vegans and worshipped Gaia. And someday, when Ecotopia rules the Earth, we all will again! /sarcasm :-)
Come on, skunk beer affectionados are not THAT BAD! I even drink Heinecken once in a while!
So, Habitual Cuss was mealy mouthed, while Erect Cuss chewed up everyone and everything in site, and Pithy Cuss just sat and starved?
And now their Modern Cuss descendants are again splitting into two lines: Domestic Cuss swills down predigested Human Chow, while rotting his "brain" on DU; but Rotten Cuss spends his time killing & grilling...and posting to FR.
I think there were more than three. There is a Neanderthal type human in Asia...I posted a thread on him/it a while back. I'll see if I can find it.
Minatogawa People (An Asian Neanderthal?)
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the
"Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list or GGG weekly digest
-- Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
there's a web page for everything.
The Paleolithic Diet Page
What the Hunter/Gatherers Ate
http://www.paleodiet.com/
Did Cooked Tubers Spur the Evolution of Big Brains?
Elizabeth Pennisi
Science, Volume 283, Number 5410 Issue of 26 Mar 1999, pp. 2004 - 2005
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Pennisi_99.html
As a tribute to Yule Gibbons, I try to eat some Christmas Tree shaped cookies at least once a year...
uhhhhhh.......
you said "Homo"
uhhhh heh heh............
uhhh heh heh heh
Here's the definitive page: Beer Looter Dude
SD
Sweet little crunch-meister that she is ... )
Little Homo Felinus Tubbus Precious.
Actually, to the keen and well trained scientific eye (my left one, if I squint), one can plainly see that if they ate the carrots pictured, they must have eaten the wire bands as well, which would lead to accelerated tooth erosion, eventually.
Wharever the cause, me not surprised they ate crunchy things, because their fossils, although certainly delicious, are a bit on the crunchy side even now, I have noticed.
Like this one...ckkrrrakkkkkk....brrruuuppp...gulp....
yep....crunchy.
Ah, I thought it WAS crunch food.
So Homo Erectus rises from the grave as the nemesis of PETA!
Homos had to learn how to improvise to survive back in the day...now they just buy Granola bars.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.