Humanity comes from the mountain forests?

The nearest ancestor of a human lineage may have lived through the day by eating leaves, berries and bark of mountain forests instead of a grass-based menu as other extinct relatives of humankind.

According to experts at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany), food is a major environmental impact that shapes human lines, perhaps affecting key moments, such as when ancestors Humans begin to stand upright, for example, and new research results help reveal the complex evolutionary paths that these ancestors experienced when reacting to the world around them.

These findings are based on the fossils of the extinct hominin hominin Australopithecus sediba discovered by chance in the ruins of a cave in South Africa. These fossils were two million years old.

Australopithecus sediba - (Photo: Live Science)

Hominins are descendants including humans and many other relatives after they split from chimpanzee relatives.

Australopithecus means southern baboon and is a group consisting of Lucy, the world famous fossil skeleton, and sediba means spring source in Sotho language in South Africa.

Chimpanzees, relatives live closest to humans, prefer to eat fruit and leaves, even when the grass is abundant. In contrast, humans and australopith primates have become more extinct to eat grass or herbivores.

Scientists can assess what our ancestors ate by studying their teeth, especially the traces and remnants of food left in their teeth. They can also study fossil carbon isotopes.

By analyzing two fossil samples, the researchers found that the Australopithecus sediba diet was fundamentally different from the diet of most other extinct strains of hominin studied so far.

The carbon isotopes from the remnants show that the lineage of Australopithecus sediba was eaten almost entirely by the forest domain, comparable to those of mountain forest animals such as giraffes.

In addition, small plant tissues, including bark and wood, are also found in the teeth of one of the Australopithecus sediba descendants.

Research results have been published in the latest issue of Nature.