2025-01-06
Starch-rich plant foods 780,000 y ago: Evidence from Acheulian percussive stone tools
Publication
Publication
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , Volume 122 - Issue 3
In contrast to animal foods, wild plants often require long, multistep processing techniquesthat involve significant cognitive skills and advanced toolkits to perform. These costs arethought to have hindered how hominins used these foods and delayed their adoptioninto our diets. Through the analysis of starch grains preserved on basalt anvils and percus-sors, we demonstrate that a wide variety of plants were processed by Middle Pleistocenehominins at the site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel (33° 00’ 30” N, 35° 37’ 30” E), atleast 780,000 y ago. These results further indicate the advanced cognitive abilities ofour early ancestors, including their ability to collect plants from varying distances andfrom a wide range of habitats and to mechanically process them using percussive tools.
| Additional Metadata | |
|---|---|
| , , , , | |
| doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2418661121 | |
| Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | |
| Released under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (“Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International”) Licence | |
| Organisation | Staff publications |
|
Ahituv, Hadar, Henry, A., Melamed, Yoel, Goren-Inbar, Naama, Bakels, Corrie, Shumilovskikh, Lyudmila, … Alperson-Afil, Nira. (2025). Starch-rich plant foods 780,000 y ago: Evidence from Acheulian percussive stone tools. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(3). doi:10.1073/pnas.2418661121 |
|
