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Palaeoanthropology

The ancestral dinner table

Nature volume 487, pages 42–43 (2012)Cite this article

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A Correction to this article was published on 25 July 2012

Fossils from a new South African site show that some human ancestors ate fruits and leaves, as do most primates today. The finding challenges ideas of why and how the human lineage split from the ancestors of extant apes. See Letter p.90

In 1871, Charles Darwin proposed1 that our earliest ancestors lived in Africa alongside the ancestors of today's gorillas and chimpanzees, and ate a diet of fruit, leaves, seeds and nuts, similar to that of these extant primates. More recently, however, an alternative hypothesis2 has taken precedence — that the human lineage split from the apes in part as a result of our ancestors' ability to obtain foods in open habitats, such as grasslands and savannah woodlands, that emerged in Africa following climatic changes during the Late Miocene epoch approximately 7 million years ago2. These foods included grasses, sedge plants, grass-eating insects and small animals. On page 90 of this issue, Henry et al.3 present evidence that our early relatives had a more diverse diet, and ate items such as fruits, leaves and bark. The findings will trigger a rethink of the selective pressures that resulted in the separation of the ape and human lineages, and the traits we now consider to be unique to each.

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Figure 1: Dietary detective work.

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  1. Margaret J. Schoeninger is in the Department of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA.,

    Margaret J. Schoeninger

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  1. Margaret J. Schoeninger
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Correspondence to Margaret J. Schoeninger.

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Schoeninger, M. The ancestral dinner table. Nature 487, 42–43 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/487042a

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