Hominid diet

Ambrose, S.H. 1998 Prospects for stable isotopic analysis of Later Pleistocene hominid diets in West Asia and Europe. In Akazawa, T., Aoki, K. and Bar-Yosef, O., eds.. Neanderthals and Modem Humans in West Asia. New York, Plenum Press 277-289. 

Lee-Thoq5, J.A. 1989 Stable carbon isotopes in deep time. The diets of fossil fauna and hominids. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Cape Town, South Africa, 174 pp. 

Lee-Thorp, J.A. 1989 Stable Carbon Isotopes in Deep Time. The Diets of Fossil Fauna and Hominids. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. University of Cape Town. 

The roots of pharmacology extend backward in time to our earliest Pleistocene hominid ancestors on the African savanna, approximately five to ten million years ago. These primitive forebearers grubbed for existence in the brush, where berries, shoots, leaves, tubers, flowers, seeds, nuts, and roots were plentiful. Our predecessors became specialized vegetarians who only later acquired an appetite for meat. It was their vegetarian diet that served to join gastronomic needs with pharmacological discovery. 

Sebastian, A., L.A. Frassetto, D.E. Sellmeyer, R.L. Merriam, and C. Morris, Jr. Estimation of the Net Acid Load of the Diet of Ancestral Preagricultural Homo Sapiens and Their Hominid Ancestors. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 76, no. 6 (December 2002) 803-4. 

Sponheimer, Matt, Julia Lee-Thorp. 1999. Isotopic evidence for the diet of an early hominid, Australopithecus africanus. Science 283 368-370. 

Sebastian, A., et al.. Estimation of the net acid load of the diet of ancestral preagri-cultural Homo sapiens and their hominid ancestors. Am. J. Clin. Nutr., 76,1308,2002. Frassetto, L., et al.. Diet, evolution and aging — the pathophysiologic effects of the post-agricultural inversion of the potassium-to-sodium and base-to-chloride ratios in the human diet, Eur. J. Nutr., 40, 200, 2001. 

Further biological fractionation takes place in animals and the measurement of the animals isotopic ratios can be used to study animal ecology (Rundel et al. 1988). Finally, the isotopic composition of humans may reflect the composition of their diets and the principle we are what we eat can be used in archeological research to reconstruct the diet of prehistoric humans (Chen and Orna 1996) and hominids that predate the genus Homo (Sponheimer and Lee-Thorp 1999). 

Hard biological structures, such as bones, teeth (in which both the hard but relatively brittle enamel of the outer coating and the much softer dentine within consist of inorganic crystals interleaved with layers of protein), and mollusc shells, are all composites and function in the same way. Teeth, in fact, are finely adapted to the diet of the species. Palaeontologists have found that the enamel of teeth belonging to the early hominids is thicker than that in chimpanzees. They infer from this that when our ancestors left the trees some 2 million years ago and took up residence in... 

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