A buffet for early human relatives

University of Utah scientists improved a method of testing fossil teeth, and showed that early human relatives varied their diets with the seasons 1.8 million years ago, eating leaves and fruit when available in addition to seeds, roots, tubers and perhaps grazing animals.

"By analyzing tooth enamel, we found that they ate lots of different things, and what they ate changed during the year," says University of Utah geology doctoral student Ben Passey, a coauthor of the study in the Friday, Nov. 10 issue of the journal Science.

"We wanted to know if they had variability in their diets on the time scale of a few months to a few years," he says. "The new method showed that their diets were extremely variable. One possibility is that they were migrating seasonally between more forested habitats to more open, savanna habitats." read more