Re: Nutcracker Man is back

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/548648/
"Instead, the team suggests that A.africanus likely used their
large premolars and structurally reinforced face to crack open
and ingest large, hard nuts and seeds.

Early hominoids had hard-shelled foods (nuts, shells...) in their diet (cf.
thick enamel & tool use), but no seeds, of course: seeds leave a different
kind of enamel micro-wear (eg, google "aquarboreal").

These early humans
may have relied on these critical resources during times of
scarcity when their preferred foods were unavailable."

Everything "may have" happened: there's no evidence that hard-shelled foods
were only eaten during times of scarcity. More likely they were basic
foods.

The above study calls into question A africanus abilities as a tool
user;

A.africanus, like all apes, regularly used tools, but less than Homo.

Some netloon inserted here some blabla:
This collaborates Sponheimer and Lee-Thorp's studies on C4 grass
and puts the final nail in the coffin on this paper's speculations:

The team's just-so opinion corroborates nothing: it's wishful thinking à la
kudu running.

"More probable is a diet of sedges
and other marshland plants supplemented with
fruits and animals (e.g. tools attributed to A.robustus
now suggest termite-eating [30])."

Yes, well-said: as recent papers confirm, marshland plants were the basic
foods of fossil apiths-apes, eg, papyrus for A.boisei:

RB Owen cs 2004 "Swamps, springs and diatoms: wetlands of the semi-arid
Bogoria-Baringo Rift, Kenya" Hydrobiologia 518:59-78

CR Peters & JC Vogel 2005 "Africa's wild C4 plant foods and possible early
hominid diets" JHE 48:219-236

NJ van der Merwe, FT Masao & MK Bamford 2008 "Isotopic evidence for
contrasting diets of early hominins Homo habilis and Australopithecus boisei
of Tanzania" SAJS 104:153-5

R Wrangham 2005 "The Delta Hypothesis: Hominoid ecology and hominin origins"
in D Lieberman cs eds "Interpreting the Past: Essays on Human, Primate and
Mammal Evolution in Honor of David Pilbeam" Brill AP Boston:231-242

.

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