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Isotopic Evidence for the Diet of an Early Hominid, Australopithecus africanus
Abstract
Current consensus holds that the 3-million-year-old hominid Australopithecus africanus subsisted on fruits and leaves, much as the modern chimpanzee does. Stable carbon isotope analysis of A. africanus from Makapansgat Limeworks, South Africa, demonstrates that this early hominid ate not only fruits and leaves but also large quantities of carbon-13–enriched foods such as grasses and sedges or animals that ate these plants, or both. The results suggest that early hominids regularly exploited relatively open environments such as woodlands or grasslands for food. They may also suggest that hominids consumed high-quality animal foods before the development of stone tools and the origin of the genus Homo .
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Cites
The expensive-tissue hypothesis: The brain and the digestive system in human and primate evolution
Aiello, L. C., & Wheeler, P. (1995) · Current Anthropology · doi:10.1086/204350 · Cited by 2,291
Social Organization of Hamadryas Baboons: A Field Study
Kummer, H. (1967) · Bibliotheca Primatologica · doi:10.1159/isbn.978-3-8055-0286-3 · Cited by 763
Cited by
An Evolutionary Perspective on Food and Human Taste
Breslin, P. A. S. (2013) · Current Biology · doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.04.010 · Cited by 508
Diet and the evolution of the earliest human ancestors
Teaford, M. F., & Ungar, P. S. (2000) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.260368897 · Cited by 490
Stable Isotope Analysis: A Tool for Studying Past Diet, Demography, and Life History
Katzenberg, M. A. (2008) · Biological Anthropology of the Human Skeleton · doi:10.1002/9780470245842.ch13 · Cited by 477
Stable Isotope Compositions of Biological Apatite
Kohn, M. J., & Cerling, T. E. (2002) · Reviews in Mineralogy and Geochemistry · doi:10.2138/rmg.2002.48.12 · Cited by 477
Laden, G., & Wrangham, R. (2005) · Journal of Human Evolution · doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2005.05.007 · Cited by 326
Metadata
- Authors
- Sponheimer, M., & Lee-Thorp, J. A.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 1999-01-15
- Volume
- 283
- Issue
- 5400
- Pages
- 368-370
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W2081962176
- Cited by
- 328
- References
- 2
- FWCI
- 52.85
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Sponheimer, M., & Lee-Thorp, J. A. (1999). Isotopic Evidence for the Diet of an Early Hominid, Australopithecus africanus. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.283.5400.368
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
