Eats Shoots, Leaves and Barks?

For some of our ancient relatives, that sentence should be read with eats as the verb and everything else as food items, at least according to a new paper published in Nature this week.

Actually it was fruits, leaves and bark and other forest vegetation that apparently made up the diet of a possible human ancestor known as Australopithecus sediba. Researchers reached that conclusion by examining 2 million year-old teeth.

My colleagues and I discussed this paper earlier in the week and we offered several alternative hypotheses for the presence of bark in those teeth. One person thought A. sediba was using it for toothpicks. I suggested that the bark was hallucinogenic.
In this story for the BBC, one of the researchers says this bark might have tasted like maple syrup.

Dr Louise Humphrey of the palaeontology department at London's Natural History Museum said there was debate about the position of Australopithecus sediba in the human lineage."They were eating bark and woody substances, which is quite a unique dietary mechanism; it hasn't been reported for any other human relative before."
The animal may have eaten fruit and young leaves when food was plentiful, but turned to less nutritious food like bark when times were hard.
However, syrup beneath the bark may have provided a sugary treat.
Dr Henry said: "A lot of people have turned their nose at the idea of eating bark but I always think that what they're eating is probably not the coarse outer bark but potentially the softer inner bark where the sap is. "And so if you think of maple syrup - it's the sap of maple trees - then it could have been quite a tasty substance."

Read the scienfic paper here.