Starch-rich plant foods 780,000 y ago: Evidence from Acheulian percussive stone tools
Abstract
In contrast to animal foods, wild plants often require long, multistep processing techniques that involve significant cognitive skills and advanced toolkits to perform. These costs are thought to have hindered how hominins used these foods and delayed their adoption into our diets. Through the analysis of starch grains preserved on basalt anvils and percussors, we demonstrate that a wide variety of plants were processed by Middle Pleistocene hominins at the site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel (33° 00’ 30” N, 35° 37’ 30” E), at least 780,000 y ago. These results further indicate the advanced cognitive abilities of our early ancestors, including their ability to collect plants from varying distances and from a wide range of habitats and to mechanically process them using percussive tools.
Article Details
Journal Info
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
National Academy of Sciences
Authors (10)
Hadar Ahituv
The Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, Bar-Ilan University
Amanda G. Henry
Department of Archaeological Sciences, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University
Yoel Melamed
The Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences & The Archaeobotanical Laboratory, Institute of Archaeology, Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology, Bar-Ilan University
Naama Goren-Inbar
Institute of Archaeology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus
Corrie Bakels
Department of Archaeological Sciences, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University
Lyudmila Shumilovskikh
Department of Palynology and Climate Dynamics, Georg-August-University of Göttingen
Dan Cabanes
Center for Human Evolutionary Studies, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey
Jeffery R. Stone
Department of Earth and Environmental Systems, Indiana State University
Walter F. Rowe
Department of Forensic Sciences, The George Washington University
Nira Alperson-Afil
The Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, Bar-Ilan University