Babies get their intestinal viruses in stages
A fascinating new paper by Guanxiang Liang and coworkers in Nature looks at how infants end up with a community of viruses in their guts: “The stepwise assem...
All posts tagged with diet
Killing it: From handaxes to hafted spears, no difference in hunting or meat-eating
The change in technology from Acheulean to Middle Stone Age in Africa was a major event in human prehistory. Or was it?
Border Cave rhizomes from the early Middle Stone Age
I’m pretty excited about today’s paper revealing new evidence of cooked rhizomes from Border Cave in South Africa. The paper is in Science, by Lyn Wadley and...
Chimpanzees learn to crack nuts faster than humans
Early this year, Christophe Boesch and coworkers released a paper describing their observations on how fast chimpanzees and humans learn to crack nuts. They ...
The bison bone bed at Gran Dolina
In an earlier post, I looked at work by Mark White, Paul Pettitt, and Danielle Schreve, which considered evidence for Neandertal prey selectivity at five sit...
Neandertal slaughters
Back in 2016, Mark White, Paul Pettitt and Danielle Schreve published an interesting analysis in which they compared how Neandertals hunted and butchered ani...
Richard Lee tells a story about the nuclear arms race
Richard Lee is best known to followers of anthropology as one of the co-organizers of the “Man the Hunter” conference in 1966. His fieldwork with the Dobe !K...
The fattest bear
I enjoyed the Washington Post account of the “annual fattest bear contest” in Katmai National Park: “America’s fattest bear has now been crowned”.
The dawn of bread
Archaeologists working at Shubayqa 1, a site in northeastern Jordan, found tiny fragments of an ancient unleavened bread as they were excavating a hearth. Th...
Why do bamboo lemurs have such a diversity of gut microbes?
North Carolina State University has put out a news article about some recent work by Erin McKenney, who is studying the gut microbiome of lemurs: “Can You Gu...
Homo naledi was chipping its teeth amazingly often
I’d like to point everyone to this new article that may give some insight into the diet or behavior of Homo naledi: “Behavioral inferences from the high leve...
Notable: Female chimpanzees eat more meat when pregnant
Notable: O’Malley, R. C., Stanton, M. A., Gilby, I. C., Lonsdorf, E. V., Pusey, A., Markham, A. C., & Murray, C. M. (2016). Reproductive state and rank i...
Notable: Glyptodonts and megatheres were herbivores
Notable: Bocherens, Hervé, Martin Cotte, Ricardo A. Bonini, Pablo Straccia, Daniel Scian, Leopoldo Soibelzon, Francisco J. Prevosti. 2017. Isotopic insight o...
Mushroom-munching poplar-popping Neandertals
Neandertals ate mushrooms. That’s the conclusion of new work examining the DNA remnants in ancient dental calculus. Can we believe it?
Link: Captive monkey microbiomes are more like humans
Ed Yong writes about an examination of the microbiomes of different monkey species in captivity versus wild populations: “Captivity Makes Monkey Microbiomes ...
Link: The phylogeny of our plant foods
The Botanist in the Kitchen takes a look at the phylogenetic relationships among some of the major plant foods in Western diets: “The Food Plant Tree of Life...
Link: Obesity on the rise
The National Post of Canada has a long article by Sharon Kirkey on the rise of obesity: “The shape of the future: Is obesity a crisis or just the latest stag...
Notable: Beeswax found in Neolithic pottery vessels across Europe
Notable paper: Roffet-Salque, Mélanie et al. 2015. Widespread exploitation of the honeybee by early Neolithic farmers. Nature 527: 226–230. doi:10.1038/natur...
Why do male bonobos have such low body fat?
I can’t be the only one surprised at how little body fat male bonobos have. A study of bonobo dissections by Adrienne Zihlman and Debra Bolter (2015) include...
Link: ‘Ancestral’ microbiomes
Ed Yong covers a new preprint quantifying the microbiome diversity of hunter-gatherer people in Cameroon, in comparison to local agricultural people: “Surpri...
Notable: Fat residues on elephant-butchering tools
Notable paper: Solodenko N, Zupancich A, Cesaro SN, Marder O, Lemorini C, et al. (2015) Fat Residue and Use-Wear Found on Acheulian Biface and Scraper Associ...
Looking more deeply at a study of obesity and genetic risk
Late in December, Carl Zimmer described a research study showing that a famous gene that influences obesity in living Americans, called FTO, has actually inc...
Dan Fisher and the art of elephant preservation
The magazine of the College of Literature, Science and Arts at the University of Michigan has a nice piece profiling Dan Fisher: “The dead elephant in the ro...
Notable: Gorilla and chimpanzee niche partitioning and life history
Notable paper: Macho GA, Lee-Thorp JA. (2014). Niche Partitioning in Sympatric Gorilla and Pan from Cameroon: Implications for Life History Strategies and fo...
To fish or not to fish
This summer I pointed to an article about the FwJj20 locality at Koobi Fora, which provides the earliest known evidence of systematic fish exploitation in th...
An exotic intestinal infusion
Jeff Leach, at the “Human Food Project”, has written pungently about a bout of microbiome self-experimentation: “(Re)Becoming Human: what happened the day I ...
Investigating Neandertal behavior with Geraldine and Clive Finlayson
A week ago I was in Gibraltar for the 2014 Calpe Conference. The conference this year is focused on issues of world heritage, as the Neandertal sites of Gorh...
Selection and lactase persistence
I received a letter about lactase persistence that motivated me to a fairly long reply; I thought I would share the question and answer:
Notable: Neandertal rock dove hunting
Notable paper: Blasco, R., Finlayson, C., Rosell, J., Marco, A.S., Finlayson, S., Finlayson, G., Negro, J.J., Pacheco, F. G., Vidal, J. R. (2014) The earlies...
A chimpanzee termite-eating story
Micaela Jemison of Smithsonian Science describes a recent study by Robert O’Malley investigating the use of termites by wild chimpanzees at Gombe. The piece ...
The case of the Neandertal salmon
I’ve been doing a good amount of reading about Neandertal diets lately, and have some stuff to report. First, a recent paper by Hervé Bocherens, Gennady Bary...
Neandertal self-medication
Karen Hardy and colleagues (2013) have a brief paper in a recent issue of Antiquity putting into context their recent finding about possible medicinal plant ...
Pointing to entomophagy
Julie Lesnik is a biological anthropologist who has done a lot of research on insect consumption, by ancient hominins, living humans and living non-human pri...
Genetics of smell and population history
I want to point to a recent paper by Jeremy McRae and colleagues McRae:2013, which identifies previously-unknown genetic associations with smell sensitivity ...
Josh Snodgrass profile
The Scientist is running a profile of University of Oregon anthropologist Josh Snodgrass, who studies the biology of indigenous peoples of Siberia and Ecuado...
Lactase persistence in review
Nature this week has a nice news article about the evolution of lactase persistence by Andrew Curry: “Archaeology: The milk revolution”. The article discusse...
The complexity of obesity
A moderately long read by David Berreby in Aeon magazine looks at a gaggle of theories about the causes and consequences of the worldwide epidemic of obesity...
Domestication, plant breeding, and micronutrients
An interesting essay in the New York Times today by Jo Robinson: “Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food”. The theme is that plant domestication selected for...
Weaning a Neandertal
Last week, Nature published a paper by Christine Austin and colleagues, in which they developed a new approach to understand how breastfeeding affects the el...
Paleo and "physical culture" movements
NPR has a short piece with an interesting historical story about old-time back-to-nature fitness fanatics: “Paleo Diet Echoes Physical Culture Movement Of Ye...
Oldowan hunting behaviors at Kanjera South
Joseph Ferraro and colleagues have done some neat analyses of the faunal remains from Kanjera South, Kenya Ferraro:carnivory:2013. Kanjera South is an archae...
My review of "Paleofantasy"
I have a review of Marlene Zuk’s new book, Paleofantasy, in this week’s Nature: “Evolutionary biology: Twisting the tale of human evolution” Hawks:Paleofanta...
Heart disease among the ancients
Mummy in the Louvre, photo by Jose and Roxanne (creative commons)
Coprolite microbial ecology
The advent of metagenomic analysis of microbial communities has led to some unexpected insights about human biology. These techniques have quietly been leadi...
Indus curry leftovers
Slate has a fun story by Andrew Lawler that covers some of how we study ancient diets: “The Mystery of Curry”:
Selection is for the dogs
I was really pleased to see the new paper by Erik Axelsson and colleagues Axelsson:2013 on the pattern of recent selection on domesticated dogs. As we began ...
Slow cooking Neandertal subsistence
During the past couple of years, new evidence has really shifted our view of Neandertal diet. Even three years ago, it was not unusual to hear Neandertals de...
Cheesy evidence
I’m totally socked in with work this week, but this new paper in Nature is an interesting piece of archaeological chemistry relevant to diet change in the Eu...
Chimpanzee microbiome variation is like ours
A new paper by Andrew Moeller and colleagues surveys the variation in species composition of gut microbiomes in the chimpanzees from Gombe, Tanzania Moeller:...
Panda gestion
Here’s a story that showed up in my feed this morning: “Prehistoric man ate panda, claims scientist”.
The Stalin Age diet
Dan Lieberman, writing in the New York Times, supports the Bloomburg soda ban with a call for additional regulations banning: “Evolution’s Sweet Tooth”.
Population gut metagenomics
The new research by Tanya Yatsunenko and colleagues examining gut microbiomes in different human populations is just incredibly cool work Yatsunenko:2012. I ...
Orangutan loris capture and meat-eating
Madeleine Hardus and colleagues Hardus:2012 describe long-term observations of hunting by Sumatran orangutans.
A stretch of Bronze Age river
In the course of studying recent human evolution, I’ve done a lot of work on the skeletal remains of Bronze Age Europeans. This is a series of cultures we kn...
Putting together australopithecine diets
Peter Ungar and Matt Sponheimer earlier this fall Ungar:Sponheimer:2011 reviewed the evidence for diet in early hominins, from both microwear studies (Ungar’...
Mailbag: Spuds and mutts
Re: “How widespread is Denisovan ancestry today?” and “Potato sack race”:
Potato sack race
Smithsonian magazine has a very nice article by Charles C. Mann, “How the Potato Changed the World”, focusing on the effects of the Columbian exchange on Eur...
The diet of Gigantopithecus
Gigantopithecus has often been described as a bamboo eater, based on analogy with another kind of large herbivore in China, the giant panda. Giant pandas hav...
Mailbag: Humans are predators
Re: Shellfish
Shellfish gathering, paleoanthropological strawman
We have known for many years that Lower Paleolithic people were using shellfish, fish, and littoral resources at sites across the Old World, from Trinil Joor...
Nutcracker Man debunked
This week, Thure Cerling and colleagues report in PNAS (2011) carbon stable isotope data from 24 specimens of Australopithecus boisei. This is a huge sample ...
Mailbag: Thick skulls and diet
Re: <a href=http://johnhawks.net/node/15421”>”Hard headed science”</a>:
Mailbag: Diet and isotopes
Re: “Tartar control and Neandertal plant use”.
Neandertal taste
I didn’t comment on this study when it came out in 2009, but as I’m reviewing some materials I thought it worth taking down a note. Carles Lalueza-Fox and co...
Tartar control and Neandertal plant use
Dental plaque is a biofilm made up of bacteria adhering to the enamel surface of the teeth. Plaque is soft but over many days can gradually calcify. The hard...
Thanksgiving genomics
Turkey has 80 chromosomes? No wonder I feel so full!
Copy number variation in 1000 Genomes
When I wrote earlier in the week about the 1000 Genomes Project results, I mentioned that a second paper was being published in Science. That paper, by Peter...
Lasting supper
This is a great story about “portion sizes” increasing over the centuries in “Last Supper” paintings, but I haven’t been able to get the paper yet.
Mailbag: The capuchin australopithecines
Re: australopithecine tools:
Mmmm…geese….
New York is considering a plan “to eliminate 170,000 wild Canada geese”:
Mailbag: Milk drinking
I read some older posts on your blog about dispersal of lactase persistance world wide. Is it not so that everyone can digest lactose at birth and that the p...
The lion diet
National Geographic News a couple of weeks ago ran a story about lion-eating at Gran Dolina (“Prehistoric Europeans Hunted, Ate Lion?”):
Fishy story from Koobi Fora
I have to credit a reader for that headline, and for forwarding the paper. It’s another case of the infamous PNAS release policy. The press that came from th...
Papyrus and A. boisei
I’ve had on my stack for quite a long time, a short paper by Nicholas van der Merwe and colleagues, assessing the stable carbon isotope ratios in several spe...
UC-Berkeley genetic tests for freshmen
I’m not sure which tags to apply to this story. I’m torn between “colossally-bad-ideas” and “university-auditions-for-big-brother”.
What, if anything, is Australopithecus sediba?
Today we finally get to learn about the exceptional discovery of four partial hominin skeletons from Malapa Cave, South Africa. Two of the fossil skeletons a...
Mailbag: Food nostalgia
Re: “The simple foods”:
The simple foods
James McWilliams comments on the simple, local foods movement: “The Persistence of the Primitive Food Movement”. His theme, with several interesting historic...
Mailbag: Hidden lactase persistence alleles?
I just noticed this new article that I thought you might be interested in, suggesting that lactase persistence known genetics can't currently wholly explain ...
Bonobo cannibalism
Ewen Callaway in New Scientist:
Food guidelines
As long as I’m linking to the Daily Mail for their “Neanderthal metrosexuals” quip, I thought I’d pass along a story I liked – “Unlikely but brilliantly simp...
Mailbag: What my ancestors ate?
Regarding the “caveman” trend:
"The cavemen are happy in the modern world"
I blame Harold Dibble. Oh, sure, all these “paleo diet” people point the figure at Loren Cordain, but Dibble was the first to give them a cookbook!
Mailbag: Grasses and bedding
Re: MSA sorghum use and starches adhering to tools non-obvious for seed processing:
Seeds of MSA diet breadth
Julio Mercader reports in a short Science paper that the MSA stone artifacts from Ngalue cave, Mozambique, preserve thousands of grains of sorghum starch, al...
The fishy spaces of the Middle Pleistocene
In Science this week, Nira Alperson-Afil and colleagues report on recent excavations at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel. I saw some of this research presented a...
You are what your ancestors ate, part 1
Ann Gibbons has a long news article in the current Science reporting on an interdisciplinary conference on recent human diet evolution (“What’s for Dinner? R...
Just ducky
A week or two ago, I was pointed by a press release to some recent research from Bolomor Cave, Spain, where the levels occupied by early/pre-Neandertals have...
High-tech honey extraction, chimpanzee-style
Most people know that hunter-gatherer men hunt meat. Fewer people know the major secondary target for male foraging in many hunter-gatherer societies: honey....
The shells of Trinil
I want to share a paper that might not get a lot of attention but that I think makes an interesting contribution to understanding the ecology of early Homo a...
Finding the identity of animal (and plant) fats
Last week I made a note about some ongoing work at the Spanish site of El Salt, which suggested taxonomic identifications for burned traces of animal and pla...
The network effect
Jonah Lehrer writes in Wired about two researchers using network theory and data mining to understand how obesity spread in the American population: “The Bud...
Neandertals, plants, and fish
I don’t read Spanish well, but I’m going to go ahead and link a news article in a Spanish journal about Neandertal diet and cooking at the Spanish site of El...
Lactase persistence on the march
Everybody’s noticing the new article in PLoS Computational Biology about lactase persistence, which I’ve been emailed from several readers. Thanks for sendin...
Food: it's so good
Tara Parker-Pope of the NY Times reports on former FDA chief David Kessler’s new book, The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appet...
But will it include recipes?
I’ve ordered a copy of Richard Wrangham’s new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. I was weighing it, and a reader tipped me over the edge. I’ll g...
Arrested adaptation and "diseases of civilization"
While I was browsing papers for a research project, I happened to re-open the paper, “Stone Agers in the fast lane,” written by S. Boyd Eaton, Melvin Konner,...
Plant processing with early Oldowan tools
Ann Gibbons was at the AAPA meetings early last month, and she reports in the current Science on some of the research. Her article about the use of early Old...
"You ate raw monkey for science?"
The New York Times has an interview with primatologist Richard Wrangham, who’s promoting a new book, “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
Putting down roots
Last year, I reported on the strontium isotope study that showed that the Lakonis Greek Neandertal individual died at least 20 km from the place he was raise...
"Paleofantasies"
In the Science Times today, an essay by Marlene Zuk:
Neandertals: not all hypercarnivores
Razib points to a story about a human origins symposium at Harvard – the same one where the Neandertal genome was discussed. This story includes a review of ...
Neandertal diet was not dolphin-safe
Chris Stringer and colleagues (including Finlayson and Barton) have a paper in the current PNAS early bin describing Neandertal exploitation of marine mammal...
Apes like barbecue
A paper in the current Journal of Human Evolution by Victoria Wobber, Brian Hare and Richard Wrangham (Wobber et al., 2008) reports on a series...
The ancient struggle for existence between humans and giant clams
Giant clams are in the news today, helping to drive the expansion of modern humans out of Africa. Can we believe it? The paper (Richter et ...
Average diet versus extreme diet in robust australopithecines
I've followed the literature on early hominid diets from the beginning of the weblog. In 2005 I discussed Peter Ungar's analyses of dental occlusal morpholo...
No spongiform Neandertals, please
Julien Riel-Salvatore reviews some reasons why kuru did not wipe out the Neandertals.
The antimalarial properties of chimpanzee geophagy
It's hard to improve on the headline of this story:
Obesity in the genes
Mason Inman has a cute article on Inkling, titled "Do these genes make me look fat?" It's a riff on the thrifty genotype hypothesis:
Obesity in the genes, II
While I'm pointing to articles about obesity genetics, I should include this book excerpt by Gina Kolata, which appeared in the NY Times a couple of weeks a...
The spread of acne
I found this article by Loren Cordain et al. while I was looking for something else, and thought I'd point it out:
Linear enamel hypoplasia and nutritional status
I just wanted to take down a note about this paper from last year, along with a couple of older studies of linear enamel hypoplasia:
Lactase persistence parallelism
Nicholas Wade has an article in the Times this weekend concerning lactase persistence in Africans, which appears to have arisen in three separate mutations,...
The real Neanderthin
I was talking to some folks about the isotope values for Neandertals, and was immensely surprised to find out that nitrogen-15 (15N) proportions can be driv...
Robust australopithecine diet ablated
Sponheimer and colleagues (2006, link) zapped some Swartkrans teeth with lasers to measure their 13C content. I wrote quite a bit here last year about austr...
Shellfish use by Neandertals
I got the Neanderthals on the Edge volume by interlibrary loan to follow up the Barton shellfish consumption reference. Here is the relevant passage from th...
Fascinated by the monkey chow diet
Is it so wrong that my guilty pleasure this week is reading this man's diary of his experiment in eating only monkey chow?
The bitter taste of parallel evolution
Oops, sorry, that should be "the parallel evolution of bitter taste"...
More on myosin mutations
Melanie McCollum and colleagues have a short paper in JHE about the evolution of MYH16, the myosin gene associated with masticatory musculature.
Variation in NAT1 and NAT2
There's a new paper in AJHG by Patin and colleagues, which is just chock full of interesting stuff. The genes studied are NAT1 and NAT2, called "N-acetyltra...
Hazards of associating genetic and morphological changes
Last year, Stedman et al. (2004) presented an analysis of the evolution of the MYH16 gene in humans, which concluded that a mutation deactivating the gene w...
Tooth wear in early Homo
Discovery News has an article summarizing some of Peter Ungar's recent work on tooth anatomy and wear in early Homo.
Tuber or not tuber? Rats are the question
From a new paper by Greg Laden and Richard Wrangham:
More microwear from South African australopithecines
Scott and colleagues (2005) examined dental microwear in some Swartkrans (A. robustus) and Sterkfontein (A. africanus) specimens. The interesting part of th...
Neandertals: gone fishin' or not?
An earlier post reviewed recent work by Bocherens and colleaugues (2005) attributing high nitrogen-15 proportions in Neandertal bones to mammoth consumption...
Neandertals noshed on mammoth meat?
In an article in the Jul 2005 issue of Journal of Human Evolution, Hervé Bocherens and colleagues contribute new isotopic values for bone collagen fr...
The origin and evolution of the Western diet
There is a very nice review paper with that title in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, by Loren Cordain and colleagues. The basic story is in the ...
Enamel thickness in Afropithecus
Tanya M. Smith and colleagues (2003) measured the enamel of two Afropithecus molars, examining both their thickness and the periodicity of enamel formation....
The life and times of Gigantopithecus
Russ Ciochon has a very nice article about Gigantopithecus up on his department webpage. The article appeared in Natural History magazine in 1991. It featu...
Tooth anatomy and diet in australopithecines and early humans
Peter Ungar (2004) investigated the dietary adaptations of A. afarensis and early Homo by looking at the three-dimensional topography of their teeth. the sh...
Chemistry and early hominid diets
The chemical analysis of bones to interpret diet rests on the observation that different foods vary in the composition of different chemical elements or iso...
Diet and mtDNA selection
Lowell and Shulman (2005) report on the possible links between the metabolic defects underlying type 2 diabetes and mitochondrial dysfunction. These links g...