What did early humans really eat?
When we think of Stone Age humans, meat eaters certainly comes to mind. Before figuring out farming, they hunted and gathered to survive, living off meat and animal products. However, a recent excavation at a cave in Taforalt, Morocco, is ready to turn this common belief on its head. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, analysed the teeth and bones of hunter-gatherers known as Iberomaurusians who lived about 15 000 years ago in the area.
Plants on the menu
The research team found that they relied heavily on plants – not animals – for survival. The Iberomaurusians never developed agriculture. The findings were published in the journal ‘Nature Ecology & Evolution’. “Our analysis showed that these hunter-gatherer groups, they included an important amount of plant matter, wild plants to their diet, which changed our understanding of the diet of pre-agricultural populations,” lead author Zineb Moubtahij, a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, told ‘CNN’.
More gatherer than hunter
“While not all individuals primarily obtained their proteins from plants at Taforalt, it is unusual to document such a high proportion of plants in the diet of a pre-agricultural population,” explained co-author Klervia Jaouen, a researcher at the French research institute Géosciences Environment Toulouse. “This is likely the first time such a significant plant-based component in a Paleolithic diet has been documented using isotope techniques.” The study also found that plants may have even been used to wean infants. It’s possible plant-based food was their primary source of nutrition. “Interestingly, our findings showed minimal evidence of seafood or freshwater food consumption among these ancient groups,” Moubtahij told ‘Reuters’. “Additionally, it seems that these humans may have introduced wild plants into the diets of their infants at an earlier stage than previously believed.” “Understanding why some hunter-gatherer groups transitioned to agriculture while others did not can provide valuable insights into the drivers of agricultural innovation and the factors that influenced human societies’ decisions to adopt new subsistence strategies,” he added.
Keywords
hunter-gatherer, diet, Iberomaurusian, plant, agriculture, meat, animal