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

On 13.1.2025. 7:14, Primum Sapienti wrote:

 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2418661121
 Significance
Despite their potential implications for
hominin diet, cognition, and behavior,
only rarely have plants been considered
as drivers of human evolution, in part
because they are less archaeologically
visible. We report the discovery of
diverse taxa of starch grains, extracted
from basalt percussive tools found at the
early Middle Pleistocene site of Gesher
Benot Ya’aqov. These include acorns,
grass grains, water chestnuts, yellow
water lily rhizomes, and legume seeds. The
diverse plant foods vary in ecological
niches, seasonality, and gathering and
processing modes. Our results further
confirm the importance of plant foods in
our evolutionary history and highlight the
development of complex food-related
behaviors.
 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.

So, agriculture is only 10,000 years old? Bloody idiots.
Yes, 2 million years ago humans were just as smart as today's humans. What made today's civilization is predominantly ground stone technology, which allowed for hotter fire (because with stone axes you could cut tree trunks. No, it wasn't the "divine spark", or any similar idea that comes out of Vatican.