And that had a huge effect on our biology.” “We know that the evolution of meat-eating basically required stone tools. “It's not a coincidence that the oldest evidence for eating meat shows up around the same time as tools,” Lieberman says. Flaked tools can also slice foods into easily chewable pieces or remove skin, cartilage and other bits that are harder to chew. Those tools could have been used as pounders to tenderize foods, a practice seen in modern chimps. However, we have plenty of evidence that hominins had begun making stone tools some 3.3 million years ago. Also, evidence from archaeological and paleontological research points to a spike in human meat consumption by at least 2.6 million years ago. With human chewing it just stays in a clump, and studies have shown how that makes digestion far less efficient.”Ĭooking makes it easier to chew meat, but evidence suggests that the regular use of fire for cooking didn't pop up until perhaps half a million years ago-far later than the changes to H. “Human teeth don't have the kind of shearing ability that, say, dogs' teeth have, and that is necessary to break down meat. “If I gave you a piece of raw goat, you would just chew and chew it, like a piece of bubble gum,” Lieberman explains. A diet of more calorie-rich meat could help explain things, but consuming it regularly would have presented some challenges. erectus also had smaller teeth, weaker chewing muscles and more feeble bite force than earlier humans-less than half that of australopiths-and a smaller gut to boot. And later we went through some amazing transitions in our evolutionary history where we now chew so little that we barely think about it at all.”īy the time Homo erectus appeared on our family tree some 2 million years ago, humans were boasting bigger brains than their ancestors, as well as bigger bodies that required a more substantial caloric payload. If you're an australopith ancestor of Homo, you probably spend half the day chewing. "But if you're a chimpanzee, you spend half the day chewing. “Chewing is something we take for granted-we don't do it all that often and we don't think about it much," he says. “An important step was just using a simple stone tool to cut our meat and bash our vegetables,” says Harvard University evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman. The researchers suggest that with the advent of stone tools, ancient human relatives were able to tenderize their food and make it far easier to chew and digest. But while a growing appetite for meat probably did shape our evolution, some of the biggest changes may have happened when our ancient relatives developed a taste for tartar.Īfter measuring chewing and biting in modern humans, scientists found that a diet that includes one-third raw meat requires far less chewing and bite force exertion than meals of tubers alone. ![]() ![]() Dietary flexibility may help chimpanzees survive as natural forest resources disappear, but simultaneously may bring them into greater conflict with their human neighbours, thereby further imperilling them.Firing up the grill can invoke feelings of kinship with our early human ancestors. These observations point toward the dietary flexibility of chimpanzees inhabiting anthropogenic landscapes, though mechanisms of novel food acquisition, particularly for subterranean fruits and tubers, are not well understood. ![]() We report the confirmed consumption of subterranean plant organs of three species - sweet potatoes ( Ipomoea batatas), yams ( Dioscorea alata) and peanuts ( Arachis hypogaea), as well as unconfirmed consumption of cassava ( Manihot esculenta) - by chimpanzees in a human-dominated landscape in western Uganda. Such plant parts, which include underground storage organs (USOs), have been found to play a key role in the diets of some chimpanzee populations as well as, potentially, our hominin ancestors. Although chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes) are ripe fruit specialists, they sometimes consume other plant parts including subterranean organs like roots and tubers.
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