Re: Starch-rich plant foods 780,000 y ago: Evidence from Acheulian percussive stone tools

On 1/13/25 1:14 AM, Primum Sapienti wrote:

Abstract
In contrast to animal foods, wild plants
often require long, multistep processing
techniques that involve significant
cognitive skills and advanced toolkits to
perform. These costs are thought to have
hindered how hominins used these foods
and delayed their adoption into our diets.
Through the analysis of starch grains
preserved on basalt anvils and percussors,
we demonstrate that a wide variety of
plants were processed by Middle Pleistocene
hominins at the site of Gesher Benot
Ya’aqov in Israel, at least 780,000 y ago.
These results further indicate the advanced
cognitive abilities of our early ancestors,
including their ability to collect plants
from varying distances and from a wide range
of habitats and to mechanically process them
using percussive tools.

They also found tobacco & cocaine in ancient
Egyptian mummies:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226721575_Presence_of_drugs_in_different_tissues_of_an_egyptian_mummy
My point is that the "Findings" aren't as important
as the underlying science. In the case of the
Egyptian mummies, for example, it's ludicrous to
assume that the findings are correct. The tests
results are solid, they simply do not mean what
people insisted they meant.
Something that /May/ be true on a two month old
sample, or is /Likely/ to be true, isn't necessary
true on a 2,000 year old sample... forget about a
780,000 year old sample.
More importantly:  WHY are they doing this? This
isn't science, it's WokeTardia. We know they were
meat eaters. It looks more like politics than
science...
--
https://jtem.tumblr.com/tagged/The%20Book%20of%20JTEM/page/5