Eats Shoots, Leaves and Barks?
A new study says our ancestors ate fruits, leaves and bark and the bark tasted like maple syrup.
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.
I ate the flavorful inner bark of birch trees as a boy; now I'm addicted to birch beer floats, much as my political mesmerizer Debbie Wasserman Schultz favors root beer floats.— jxxphilly- Unfortunately I would have liked to read the full article, but was unable to access, and chose not to spend the $32.00 indicated for possible access - Nonetheless, this scenario piques my interest. I imagine testing would only reveal the presence of the bark - the reason for ingestion may have to always remain a mystery. All three hypotheses suggested are plausible, but I might reject the toothpick one - the hallucinogenic idea and the "sweets" theory would be my best bets.— fineprintJK1
- Willow bark is a source of salicylic acid an anti-inflamatory and pain reliver. Was the tree bark medicinal?— FraFree
- Alternate punctuation:
Eats, shoots, leaves and barks.
Description of a canine murderer who shoots the hand that feeds him and then alerts the police to cover his tracks.— Paleo Cello
In pursuit of her stories, writer Faye Flam has weathered storms in Greenland, gotten frost nip at the South Pole, and floated weightless aboard NASA’s zero-g plane. She has a degree in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology and started her writing career with the Economist. She later took on the particle physics and cosmology beat at Science Magazine before coming to the Inquirer in 1995. Her previous science column, “Carnal Knowledge,” ran from 2005 to 2008. Her new column and blog, Planet of the Apes, explores the topic of evolution and runs here and in the Inquirer’s health section each Monday. Email Faye at fflam@phillynews.com.
Reach Planet of the at fflam@phillynews.com.
