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

On 20.1.2025. 7:04, Primum Sapienti wrote:

Mario Petrinovic wrote:

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.

 This is not agriculture nor even a precursor to
it. It's still about gathering.
  "We suggest that the characteristics of the
starches and their association with the
percussive tools provide direct evidence for
plant food processing. The variety of targeted
plants shed light on other issues related to
hominin evolution and behavior, including
seasonal round, diet, and the development of
technologies related to the gathering and
processing of plant foods."
 If hominids at 2mya were just as smart as humans
today then they would have had cities and such

Not 2 million years ago, but 500 kya for sure. I mean, you will not say that people in Africa are less smart than normal people, and they still don't have cities, they live in tribes, with villages. Aborigines in Australia also. See what happened in Tasmania.
When you gather food, you don't process it, you eat it immediately. You think that they would gather apples, and not eat them? Why would they do that? If they are hungry, they would go and eat the apples, and leave the rest of it on trees. If you pick up apples and you don't eat them, they will rotten. If you collect food, you have to have means to store it. Woven plant basket would do, but you cannot transport this, you have to have sedentary lifestyle for that. If you have sedentary lifestyle, you have villages. Cities are different beasts, they are for trade. We, definitely, traded for salt, that's true, whether this needs cities, I am not sure? But, by 300 kya we definitely had very developed societies, with abundant hematite going around. For this you need to have mines. You don't open a mine if you already don't have rich market for hematite. And all this was in place by 300 kya, which made Homo sapiens. And sickles appear 500 kya, so this is a logical gradual progression, developed seed agriculture by 500 kya, hematite (hence, metal) market by 300 kya.
And not only that, but we had people living in the north (Europe) 800 kya. What are people doing there? Well, take a look at recent past, we had people strolling over Canada, north of the USA. For what? For fur trade, for god's sake. For fur trade you also need to have developed market, and you need to have trading posts.
How you are imagining people lived 2 mya, going on around like flies without a head, completely stupid and unaware of anything? This is completely unrealistic view. Yes, they had brains, you now. And the fact that those brains were small doesn't prove that they were stupid, you should learn that by now (H.naledi, H.floresiensis).