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Like rats, human ancestors went underground for dinner
May 2 : Palaeontologists studying the teeth of mole rats in South Africa in a bid to uncover their dietary habits, belief that some of humanity’s oldest ancestors may have once gone underground to find and eat their food.
A group led by Justin Yeakel of the Santa Cruz-based University of California, have opined that African mole rats have similar chemical signatures in their teeth to those of two ancient hominin species found at the same site, suggesting that they may have had similar diets.
The discovery could help to solve a paradox surrounding the diets of ancient hominins like the Australopithecus Africanus and Paranthropus Robustus, which lived in southern Africa around 2.5 million and 1.5 million years ago, respectively.
According to Yeakel and his colleagues, when the chemical signatures of their teeth were recently analysed, the results suggested that these hominins ate grassy plants, or the remains of animals that had eaten such plants. But their flat, wide teeth, while good for crushing hard objects, would have been useless at tearing through these tough foods.
A group led by Justin Yeakel of the University of California, Santa Cruz, reasoned that one solution to this problem would be if hominins chewed on the starchy bulbs and tubers from those same grassy plants, rather than tearing up the upper green portions. That would explain both the chemical signature and the design of their teeth.
“Hominins had teeth like ours, which were designed to eat something really, really hard, like small seeds — not tough grasses or raw meat,” says Yeakel’s colleague Nathaniel Dominy.
The chemical signature in teeth comes about because different foods have a distinctive mixture of carbon isotopes, which shows up in the teeth of animals that eat those foods. Grassy plants, for example, give a particular isotopic signature.
The researchers looked for this signature in the teeth of present-day mole rats (Cryptomys) and in fossilized mole-rat remains from almost 2 million years ago. As they report in Proceedings of the Royal Society B1, the range of isotopes seen in these species overlaps with that found in A. africanus and P. robustus. (ANI)
Disclaimer: Bioscholar is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. The articles are based on peer reviewed research, and discoveries/products mentioned in the articles may not be approved by the regulatory bodies.- The Evolution of Human Diet
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