(Food-Beverage-News.Com, June 26, 2013 ) England, UK -- The skull of the Australopithecus africanus specimen was discovered and gave the world an idea of just how old the human ancestry line might be. The primate ancestor made a shift in diet around 3.5 million years ago, which scientists say is an important point in their turning toward becoming human.
It was assumed that human ancestors held a diet strongly tied to a modern chimps diet type, says Thure Cerling. He is a geology and biology professor at the University of Utah and was the lead author for two of the major studies which held dozens of researchers focusing on the ancestry. Cerling describes the work, "We have a look at 4 million years of the dietary evolution of humans and their ancestors."
In determining what the ancient ancestors ate, the researchers utilized unique carbon atoms within plants, which was a major component of the our ancestors' diet. The use of carbon dioxide, water, and light to create sugar and oxygen is common among plants, but separate plants hold differing photosynthetic traits. As a results, the sugars produced are different.
Researchers looked at the compositions within the primates' diet (found through the examining of teeth). They discovered the ancestors moved from a C4 to C3 diet. The former consists of a diet filled with grass, roots, and seeds. The latter consists of plants-leaves, fruits, vegetables, barley, herbs, and wheat.
Evolutionary biologists believe that the dietary expansion could have contributed to the evolution of the species as well. The diet shift would have enabled them to move out of the forests where many apes lived. "Diet has long been implicated as a driving force in human evolution," says Matt Sponheimer, anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and lead author of the third study.
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