Hunger encourages people to eat food they have never eaten before. According to a new scientific study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), this statement refers to our ancestors who lived more than 2 million years ago.
An international team of scientists have found that nutritional and dietary adaptations may have played a crucial role in the evolution of the first humans on Earth. For example, scientists led by Professor Gerhard W. Weber of the Anthropology Department of the University of Vienna in Austria found that our ancestors probably preferred to eat large nuts and seeds because that was the only food they could get.
The PNAS publication is the first in a series of studies on the feeding mechanisms of primates and australopithecines. The researchers’ findings prove that the facial skeleton of Australopithecus africanus – a relative of a 2 million-year-old South African man – was suitable for this type of food and that its premolar teeth could withstand such bites. Rather, key aspects of the craniofacial morphology of Australopithecus relate to the consumption and precooking of large, mechanically protected foods such as coarse grains and nuts, the researchers said.
The study found that Australopithecus was able to add nuts and seeds to its species’ diet due to a lack of regular food. “Our analysis reconciles the apparent discrepancies between nutritional reconstructions based on biomechanics, dental morphology, and micro-wear of teeth,” the authors write.
And we, recall, have already told before what else our ancestors ate and explained why it is so important to eat walnuts.