Iceman

[Norman Albers]

Remember the 'Ice Man' they pulled out of one of your glaciers? That was an amazing snapshot of the past (when was he dated?) . I do think I read that autopsy found something like fifty - 50! - different kinds of seeds in his gut. This gives me a pretty clear answer to the question, what did we used to eat? Answer: everything we could. Seems to me that grass fields were being gathered and threshed. Is this how we approached agriculture?

[Norman Albers]

Actually that is obvious but I am looking backward in time. It must have been so for tens of millenia that we gathered food and maybe stored it. These things fascinate me.

[Norman Albers]

The other bracket of this discussion is well voiced in Sci. Am., Feb06, Food for Thought. The "robust australopithecines" had giant molars and greater chewing power clearly, to a bony crest atop the head for anchoring these muscles. Critically the era of coexistence with early Homo groups was "a global drying trend that replaced food-rich forests with grasslands." We hunted, and they ground up what we have supposed were mostly seeds, nuts, fruits and tubers. Lately, though, carbon 13 ratios (to 12) suggest shellfish. It is not hard to see that lake and ocean shores offered hard-shelled invertebrates, and often a nice region to stay with water (inland) and moderated temperatures. We talked elsewhere about fishing. So maybe we all enjoyed crabs and mollusks. Robustus ran the crabshack, and Homo developed the omelettes.