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You are what you eat, and that seems to have been true even 2 million years ago, when a group of pre-human relatives was swinging through the trees and racing across the savannas of South Africa.
A study published in the journal Nature reveals that Australopithecus sediba, an ape-like creature with human features living in a region about 50 miles northwest of today's Johannesburg, exclusively consumed fruits, leaves and other forest-based foods, even though its habitat was near grassy savannah with its rich variety of savoury sedges, tasty tubers and even juicy animals.
"This astonished us," explains Benjamin Passey, a Johns Hopkins University geochemist on the international team that conducted the study. "Most hominin species appear to have been pretty good at eating what was around them and available, but sediba seems to have been unusual in that, like present-day chimpanzees, it ignored available savannah foods." (Watch a video about the discovery here.)
Our ancestors left the forest
These new findings add detail to the emerging picture of our various pre-human relatives, and why some thrived and continued to evolve, while others became extinct.
"We know that if you are a hominin, in order to get to the rest of the world, at some point you must leave the forests, and our ancestors apparently did so," said Passey. "The fates of those that did not leave are well-known: They are extinct or, like the chimpanzee and gorilla today, are in enormous peril. So the closing chapter in the story of hominin evolution is the story of these 'dids' and 'did nots.'"
In order to learn what these 4-foot-tall, small-brained, bipedal beings had for dinner most nights 2 000 millennia ago, Passey wielded a laser to extract and vaporise infinitesimal bits of fossilised tooth enamel from two Au. sediba individuals.
Tooth enamel hardest mineral in the body
He then used a mass spectrometer to detect, in the vapour, the ratio of two forms of carbon (called "isotopes"): carbon-12 and carbon-13. These chemical "fingerprints" became locked into the sedibas' enamel in their youth, as their teeth formed. A reading heavy in carbon-12 indicates a diet comprising mostly forest foods, such as leaves and fruits, and a reading heavy in carbon-13 signals a diet that included larger amounts of savannah foods such as seeds, roots and grasses.
"We study tooth enamel because it's the hardest mineral in the body and preserves its chemical and isotopic signatures over time, so it has a lot to tell us," Passey explains. "We couldn't get the same analysis from a bone fragment, for instance, because it will be affected by the composition of the soil surrounding it."
Passey and the team concluded that Au. sediba consumed between 95% and 100% forest-based foods, despite other foods easily available to them.
Why is this important to know?
"Well, one thing people probably don't realise is that humans are basically grass eaters," he said. "We eat grass in the form of the grains that we use to make breads, noodles, cereals and beers, and we eat animals that eat grass. In America, we eat animals that are fed corn, and corn is grass, albeit one with an incredible history of human selection.
So when did our addiction to grass begin? At what point in our evolutionary history did we start making use of grasses? Eating grasses is a hallmark of humanity, and we are simply trying to find out where in the human chain that begins."
(Eurek Alert, June 2012)
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