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A long-held stereotype is that ancient humans were big on meat. A new study suggests more plant-based foods were on the menu.Researchers gleaned insights into ancient diets by studying human remains unearthed from Taforalt Cave in Morocco. What did people in the Stone Age eat before the advent of farming around 10,000 years ago? A long-held stereotype — one that’s influenced modern fad diets — is that ancient humans hunted large animals and chowed down on mammoth steak.
“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,” said lead study author Zineb Moubtahij, a doctoral studentat Géosciences Environnement Toulouse, a research institute in France, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
“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,” said coauthor Klervia Jaouen, a researcher at Géosciences Environnement Toulouse, in an email. “Humans consume these foods and the isotope information is recorded in tissues like bones and teeth,” Moubtahij said. “By analyzing this tissues that we find in archaeological records, we can know if a person ate more meat or they ate more plant-based food.”The isotope technique shows the amount of plants eaten but not the type.
“This contrasts with hunter-gatherer societies where extended breast-feeding periods are the norm due to the limited availability of weaning foods,” according to the study.— which analyzed the remains of 24 early humans from two burial sites in Peru dating from 9,000 to 6,500 years ago — revealed that ancient diets in the Andes were composed of 80% percent plant matter and 20% meat.
Evidence for meat-eating, in the form of butchered animal bones, is often more “archaeologically visible” than the evidence for plant eating, said Briana Pobiner, a research scientist and museum educator at the Human Origins Program in the department of anthropology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. She wasn’t involved in the study.
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