A “groundbreaking” study from last year suggested the ancestors of both humans and Neanderthals were cooking lots of starchy foods at least 600,000 years ago. ScienceMagArchives
Here's another blow to the popular image of Neanderthals as brutish meat eaters: A new study of bacteria collected from Neanderthal teeth shows that our close cousins ate so many roots, nuts, or other starchy foods that they dramatically altered the type of bacteria in their mouths. The finding suggests our ancestors had adapted to eating lots of starch by at least 600,000 years ago—about the same time as they needed more sugars to fuel a big expansion of their brains.
The brains of our ancestors doubled in size between 2 million and 700,000 years ago. Researchers have long credited better stone tools and cooperative hunting: As early humans got better at killing animals and processing meat, they ate a higher quality diet, which gave them more energy more rapidly to fuel the growth of their hungrier brains.
Researchers analyzed the bacterial DNA preserved in dental plaque of fossilized teeth, such as this one from a prehistoric human.The starchy plants gathered by many living hunter-gatherers are an excellent source of glucose, however.
"This pushes the importance of starch in the diet further back in time," to when human brains were still expanding, Warinner says. Because the amylase enzyme is much more efficient at digesting cooked rather than raw starch, the finding also suggests cooking, too, was common by 600,000 years ago, Carmody says. Researchers have debated
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