The timing and the significance of this critical dietary adaptation and earliest hominin strategies for meat procurement have been the subject of vigorous debate. The emergence of our genus has been often interpreted as a convergence of different anatomical, physiological and social changes attributed mainly to our tendency to eat more meat. The authors' acknowledge the funds awarded to University of La Laguna by the Agencia Canaria de Investigación, Innovación and Sociedad de la Información, cofunded by 85% with European Social Funds.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. yawara for research permission and field support. Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was supported by a grant (NNA13AA90A) from NASA Astrobiology Institute to RES. Muller, and funds for faecal collection by JMR was supported by Cornell University. Long-term data-collection by KCP was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (BCS-0849380, BCS-0648481 and IOS-0416125) to RW and M. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedĭata Availability: All relevant data is available in the paper.įunding: This research was funded by a Canarian Government predoctoral grant and a European Asociation of Organic Geochemistry travel award to AS. Received: FebruAccepted: Published: June 10, 2015Ĭopyright: © 2015 Sistiaga et al. PLoS ONE 10(6):Īcademic Editor: Roscoe Stanyon, University of Florence, ITALY Our results suggest that the chemometric analysis of faecal biomarkers is a useful tool for distinguishing between NHP and human faecal matter, and hence, it could provide information for palaeodietary research and early human diets.Ĭitation: Sistiaga A, Wrangham R, Rothman JM, Summons RE (2015) New Insights into the Evolution of the Human Diet from Faecal Biomarker Analysis in Wild Chimpanzee and Gorilla Faeces. This investigation reports the first faecal biomarker data for wild chimpanzee ( Pan troglodytes) and mountain gorilla ( Gorilla beringei). In this study we explored the nature and proportions of sterols and stanols excreted by our closest living relatives. A limiting factor in the application of the faecal biomarker approach is the striking absence of data related to the occurrence of faecal biomarkers in non-human primate faeces. Faecal biomarkers are proving to be a valuable tool in identifying relative proportions of plant and animal tissues in Palaeolithic diets. So maybe primates pretty much had to go with the flow, though it took them a few million years to order from the new menu.Our understanding of early human diets is based on reconstructed biomechanics of hominin jaws, bone and teeth isotopic data, tooth wear patterns, lithic, taphonomic and zooarchaeological data, which do not provide information about the relative amounts of different types of foods that contributed most to early human diets. It was about 10 million years ago that Africa's forests started to give way to open savanna. that grazing animals discovered a long time before, about 10 million years ago." Says geochemist Thure Cerling from the University of Utah, one of the scientists who did the work: "For a long time, primates stuck by the old restaurants - leaves and fruits - and by 3.5 million years ago, they started exploring new diet possibilities. In the terminology, they switched from C3 plants to C4 plants. What the tale of the teeth reveals is this: About 3.5 million years ago, our ancestors started switching from the ape diet - leaves and fruit - to grasses and grass-like sedges. William Kimbel/Institute of Human Origins There's evidence that meat-eating came about a million years or so later. We switched from an ape-like diet of fruits and leaves about 3.5 million years ago, according to fresh research. Nom Nom Nom: From left, a cast of teeth from a chimpanzee, Australopithecus afarensis and a modern human.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |