Rowndhead, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs.
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Their analysis revealed that somewhere between 75 to 95 percent of the Andeans’ diets were made up of plants, and the rest land animals. Based on a closer look at the fragments of plants left behind at the sites and patterns of tooth wear, researchers think that most of the plants the Andeans ate were probably root tubers like potatoes.Haas has several theories about why these ancient peoples might have been more plant-based. One is that they hunted local animals to near-extinction by 9,000 years ago. Another is that early humans just didn’t hunt as much as we previously thought. Other studies have suggested that hunter-gatherer diet preferences can be dictated not just by food availability, but also culture.
Archeologists’ overall understanding of early human diets is based on a principle called optimal foraging—basically, people want to maximize the amount of calories they get for the effort they put into getting it. Under that assumption, eating meat makes sense if there are plenty of animals around. Once animal numbers start to dwindle, people will slowly incorporate more plants. “That’s still a reasonable way to think about it,” says Haas, but he and other scholars thought that this transition from more-meat to more-plants happened over thousands of years. “These findings suggest to me that if this transition happened, then it happened very quickly.” He goes further to say that the study makes them question their fundamental understanding of how these agrarian cultures evolved. “These humble foragers, beginning 9,000 years ago, started the process of domesticating a few resources that would eventually become the foundation for state economies, and eventually they would become food products that are some of the most important food products in the global economy today.”Haas says that while it’s not possible to generalize this particular finding to all early human populations around the world, “it allows us to reject any sense that early human diets were categorically and broadly meat-based everywhere around the world.”It’s true that researchers generally agree there’s no ‘one paleo-diet fits all’ but Haas believes the overall pervasiveness of the idea that paleo diets are predominantly meat-based may have more to do with popular culture than actual science. He hopes this study may make a dent in that narrative too. “I do this work because I think it can inform or have some implications for understanding humanity today.”Haas predicts that future researchers may turn up similar, plant-focused findings. “Because those other archeologists in other parts of the world are working with the same kinds of biases that I’m working with, they will find that plants played a more prominent role in early human diets.”