Breaking new ground in our understanding of early human diet and evolution, scientists have discovered that our ancient relatives may not have been the avid meat-eaters previously believed. Research reveals that Australopithecus, one of humanity’s earliest ancestors who lived in South Africa between 3.7 and 3.3 million years ago, primarily maintained a plant-based diet rather than regularly consuming meat.
Scientists have long debated when our ancestors began regularly consuming meat, as this dietary shift has been linked to several crucial evolutionary developments, including increased brain size and reduced gut size. Many researchers believed meat-eating began with early human ancestors like Australopithecus, partly because stone tools and cut marks on animal bones have been found dating back to this period.
“Tooth enamel is the hardest tissue of the mammalian body and can preserve the isotopic fingerprint of an animal’s diet for millions of years,” says geochemist Tina Lüdecke, the study’s lead author, in a statement. As head of the Emmy-Noether Junior Research Group for Hominin Meat Consumption at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand, Lüdecke regularly travels to Africa to collect fossilized teeth samples for analysis.
When living things digest food and process nutrients, they create a kind of chemical signature involving different forms of nitrogen. Think of it like leaving footprints in sand. Herbivores leave one type of print, while meat-eaters leave another. By examining these ancient chemical footprints preserved in tooth enamel, scientists can determine what kinds of foods an animal ate. Meat-eaters consistently show higher levels of a specific form of nitrogen compared to plant-eaters.
The research, published in Science, focused on specimens from the Sterkfontein cave near Johannesburg, part of South Africa’s “Cradle of Humankind,” an area renowned for its abundant early hominin fossils. Using innovative chemical analysis techniques, researchers examined fossilized teeth from seven Australopithecus specimens, comparing them with teeth from other animals that lived alongside them, including ancient relatives of antelopes, cats, dogs, and hyenas.
Source : https://studyfinds.org/ancient-tooth-enamel-early-human-diet-meat