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What did folks within the Stone Age eat earlier than the arrival of farming round 10,000 years in the past? An extended-held stereotype — one which’s influenced fashionable fad diets — is that historic people hunted giant animals and chowed down on mammoth steak.
However new analysis on a Paleolithic group known as the Iberomaurusians, hunter-gatherers who buried their lifeless in Taforalt collapse what’s now Morocco between 13,000 and 15,000 years in the past, is including to a rising physique of proof that challenges the notion human ancestors predominantly relied on meat, in response to a examine revealed Monday within the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Scientists analyzed chemical signatures preserved in bones and tooth belonging to no less than seven completely different Iberomaurusians and located that vegetation, not meat, have been their main supply of dietary protein.
“Our evaluation confirmed that these hunter-gatherer teams, they included an necessary quantity of plant matter, wild vegetation to their weight-reduction plan, which modified our understanding of the weight-reduction plan of pre-agricultural populations,” stated lead examine writer Zineb Moubtahij, a doctoral pupil at Géosciences Environnement Toulouse, a analysis institute in France, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
The share of plant assets as a supply of dietary protein within the people whose stays have been studied was just like that seen in early farmers from the Levant, the present-day Jap Mediterranean international locations the place plant domestication and farming have been first documented.
Researchers additionally noticed the next variety of tooth cavities among the many Taforalt specimens than is usually seen with hunter-gatherer stays of that interval. The proof advised that the Iberomaurusians consumed “fermentable starchy vegetation” equivalent to wild cereals or acorns, in response to the examine. The findings elevate some intriguing questions on how agriculture unfold throughout completely different areas and populations.
“Whereas not all people primarily obtained their proteins from vegetation at Taforalt, it’s uncommon to doc such a excessive proportion of vegetation within the weight-reduction plan of a pre-agricultural inhabitants,” stated coauthor Klervia Jaouen, a researcher at Géosciences Environnement Toulouse, in an e-mail.
“That is possible the primary time such a big plant-based part in a Paleolithic weight-reduction plan has been documented utilizing isotope methods,” Jaouen added.
The researchers used a way known as steady isotope evaluation to study concerning the weight-reduction plan of every of the Iberomaurusians studied.
Nitrogen and zinc isotopes (variants of a component) contained in collagen and tooth enamel can reveal the quantity of meat historic diets as soon as contained, whereas carbon isotopes can make clear whether or not the primary supply of protein was meat or fish.
“People eat these meals and the isotope info is recorded in tissues like bones and tooth,” Moubtahij stated. “By analyzing this tissues that we discover in archaeological data, we are able to know if an individual ate extra meat or they ate extra plant-based meals.”
The isotope method exhibits the quantity of vegetation eaten however not the sort. Nonetheless, botanical stays of charred candy acorns, pistachio, pine nuts, wild oats and pulses found on the web site help the knowledge gleaned from the human stays. Grinding stones unearthed on the web site additionally counsel plant processing passed off close by.
Nonetheless, the Iberomaurusians weren’t strict vegetarians, the examine famous. Minimize marks on the stays of Barbary sheep and gazelles, in addition to historic horselike and cowlike mammals, advised that some animals had been butchered and processed for meals.
The elevated reliance on plant meals was most likely pushed by a number of components — together with a wider vary of edible vegetation and maybe a depletion of huge recreation species, in response to the examine.
The isotope evaluation additionally detected proof of 1 case of early weaning, with starchy plant meals launched into an toddler’s weight-reduction plan earlier than its loss of life at between 6 and 12 months outdated.
“This contrasts with hunter-gatherer societies the place prolonged breast-feeding durations are the norm as a result of restricted availability of weaning meals,” in response to the examine.
The analysis solely investigated the diets amongst one group of Stone Age hunter-gatherers. Nonetheless, a similar study published in January — which analyzed the stays of 24 early people from two burial websites in Peru relationship from 9,000 to six,500 years in the past — revealed that historic diets within the Andes have been composed of 80% p.c plant matter and 20% meat.
A November 2022 study revealed that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens have been refined cooks, combining plant-based elements equivalent to wild nuts, peas, vetch, lentils and wild mustard.
“I don’t suppose that there’s a customary weight-reduction plan for everybody (on this interval), nevertheless it depends upon the setting. People are resilient and versatile of their weight-reduction plan habits,” Moubtahij stated.
The work undermines the concept a Stone Age weight-reduction plan was meat heavy — a inflexible assumption perpetuated by present-day dietary tendencies just like the Paleo weight-reduction plan. However the stereotype possible has its roots in previous analysis, and there are just a few attainable explanation why.
Proof for meat-eating, within the type of butchered animal bones, is commonly extra “archaeologically seen” than the proof for plant consuming, stated Briana Pobiner, a analysis scientist and museum educator on the Human Origins Program within the division of anthropology on the Smithsonian Nationwide Museum of Pure Historical past. She wasn’t concerned within the examine.
One more reason for the concept meat was central to early human diets is “the notion that searching was a key behavioral innovation that occurred early in our evolutionary historical past — rooted partially in early hunter-gatherer research carried out by male students that primarily targeted on massive recreation searching by males and didn’t doc, discounted, or downplayed the necessary dietary position of girls gathering smaller recreation and plant assets,” she stated through e-mail.
Jaouen stated that within the Levant area, archaeologists had documented an analogous plant-based weight-reduction plan amongst one other group that practiced a hunting-and-gathering life-style simply earlier than the event of agriculture, elevating questions as to why the transition to farming didn’t concurrently happen among the many Iberomaurusian inhabitants.
“These findings point out that a number of populations on the finish of the Paleolithic adopted a weight-reduction plan comparable by way of plant content material to that of farmers,” she stated.
The transition to agriculture was a posh course of that occurred at completely different instances and proceeded at completely different charges, in several methods with completely different meals, elsewhere, Pobiner stated.
“In different phrases, it was largely a neighborhood phenomenon that would contain transitional types of subsistence — not a single, sharp, simultaneous worldwide shift,” she added.