Kerri Waldron
Fad diet fans may be disappointed to hear that the real ‘Paleo diet’ was a far cry from the meat-heavy version touted by celebrities and influencers because it was mainly plant-based, at least in North Africa, according to international researchers. They analysed animal and human remains dating back to the Later Stone Age from Morocco to investigate the proportions of meat, fish and plants in these hunter-gatherers’ diets at the time. They found that although they did eat some meat, they mainly ate plants, probably starchy nuts and cereals, which the researchers speculate may have been stored to ensure food supplies during leaner times. The findings suggest our Stone Age ancestors in Morocco enjoyed a mainly plant-based diet thousands of years before the introduction of agriculture in the region.
Journal/conference: Nature Ecology & Evolution
Link to research (DOI): 10.1038/s41559-024-02382-z
Organisation/s: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany
Funder: This study was funded by the Max Planck Society and the ERC starting
grant ARCHEIS (no. 803676). J.M. and N.B. thank the DFG for salary support (project nos 505905610 and 378496604, respectively).
V.S.-M. was supported by a Fyssen Foundation postdoctoral fellowship
(2023–2025).
Media release
From: Springer Nature
North African hunter-gatherers had plant-based diets
Hunter-gatherers from the Later Stone Age site of Taforalt in present-day Morocco mostly ate plants, well before agriculture spread to the region, according to a new paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The findings challenge conventional models for the origin of agriculture and confirm the importance of plants to hunter-gatherer diets.
The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture revolutionized the human diet; however, scientific understanding of the development of agriculture comes largely from western Asia. In this region, towards the end of the Pleistocene (around 14,000 to 11,000 years ago) Natufian hunter-gatherers exploited wild plants to such an extent that they began to cultivate, and eventually domesticate, them. By contrast, agriculture arrived in North Africa from the Near East at about 7,600 years ago, during the Neolithic; local Iberomaurusian hunter gatherers — who were contemporaneous with and genetically related to the Near Eastern Natufians — were not thought to have exploited wild plants to any great extent.
Zineb Moubtahij and colleagues sampled animal and human remains, dating to between 15,077 to 13,892 BP (Before Present, during the Later Stone Age), from the large Iberomaurusian burial site of Taforalt in Morocco. They used isotopic approaches to analyse the proportions of meat, fish and plants in their diets. They found that although these people (including weaned infants) did consume animal protein, they predominantly ate plants (probably starchy nuts and cereals), which they may have stored year-round to ensure consistent food supplies. This community’s reliance on plants pre-dates the entrance of agriculture into the region by several thousand years.
Unlike in the Near East, the intense reliance on plant foods at Taforalt did not lead to the development of plant cultivation, which the authors suggest shows that agriculture is not a necessary consequence of wild plant exploitation. Moubtahij and colleagues propose that creating a stable supply of plant foods may have buffered the Taforalt population against seasonal shortages of animal foods and enabled a degree of sedentism.
Source: scimex.org
Add comment