FOXSYLVANIA

– – Shut up and eat your creamed spinach!  New research has suggested that early human ancestors in central Africa 3.5 million years ago ate a diet of mostly tropical grasses and sedges before evolving a taste for meaty flesh.

After studying the fossilized teeth of three early human relatives excavated at two sites in Chad,  Oxford researchers found the signature of a diet rich in plant foods through analysis of carbon isotope ratios in specimen teeth.  They were not equipped as carnivores are with sharp teeth and also lacked cow-like guts to break down food such as leaves, so probably feasted more on roots and bulbs at the base of the plants.  Their diet was more like that of a cow than that of a Great Ape, indicating that our ancestral human diet diverged from that of the apes much sooner than was previously thought…

This entry was posted on November 14, 2012 at 2:08 am and is filed under evolution, prehistoric life, science. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.