Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - Our Ancesters Were Vegetarian, 3 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

'Little Foot' from the Sterkfontein Cave, South Africa

Witwatersrand University

Three million years ago, our ancestors were vegetarian - Wits University

The Australopithecus genus is widely regarded as the immediate ancestor of the Homo genus that includes modern humans, Homo sapiens, but, from new evidence revealed by a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, it appears that meat did not become part of our immediate ancestors' diet until after Homo species emerged.

The evidence comes from an isotope analysis of the enamel from the fossilised teeth of seven Australopithecus individuals is strongly indicative of a vegetarian diet with little or no meat consumption.

How they discovered this is the subject of a paper in Science and a new item from Witwatersrand University. Creationists should note that the isotopes of nitrogen on which this analysis is based are stable, so the traditional excuse that radioactive decay rates have changes over time is not relevant here. Besides, they are not the basis of dating these fossils, but of working out where in the food chain these Australopithecines were:

A recent nitrogen isotope analysis of the tooth enamel of seven Australopithecine found in the Sterkfontein Cave, South Africa suggests little or no meat in their diet* How does an analysis of nitrogen isotopes show this? Nitrogen isotope analysis provides insights into the diet of ancient organisms by examining the ratio of two nitrogen isotopes, nitrogen-15 (¹⁵N) and nitrogen-14 (¹⁴N), in biological tissues such as tooth enamel, bone, or collagen. Here's how it works:

Nitrogen Isotope Ratios in Food Chains:

As you move up the food chain, the ratio of ¹⁵N to ¹⁴N in an organism's tissues increases. This is because ¹⁵N, the heavier isotope, accumulates more in tissues relative to ¹⁴N during metabolism and excretion.
Herbivores, which consume plants, have lower ¹⁵N levels compared to carnivores, which consume other animals.

Analyzing Ancient Diets:

By measuring the ¹⁵N/¹⁴N ratio in the tooth enamel of Australopithecines, scientists can infer their trophic level—whether they were primarily plant-eaters (herbivores), omnivores, or meat-eaters (carnivores).
A low ¹⁵N ratio suggests a diet dominated by plants, while a higher ratio indicates significant meat consumption or reliance on animal-derived foods.

Australopithecine Findings:

The nitrogen isotope analysis of the Australopithecines from Sterkfontein Cave revealed low ¹⁵N levels, consistent with a diet that included little or no meat.
This suggests they primarily consumed plant-based foods, such as fruits, leaves, seeds, and possibly tubers, rather than being regular meat-eaters like later hominins.

In summary, nitrogen isotope analysis is a powerful tool for reconstructing ancient diets, with the ¹⁵N/¹⁴N ratio serving as a marker of dietary protein source and trophic level. The findings for the Sterkfontein Australopithecines align with other evidence suggesting they were primarily herbivorous.

Three million years ago, our ancestors were vegetarian
Nitrogen isotopes in tooth enamel show no evidence of meat consumption in Australopithecus.
Human ancestors like Australopithecus – which lived around 3.5 million years ago in southern Africa – ate very little to no meat, according to new research published in the scientific journal Science. This conclusion comes from an analysis of nitrogen isotope isotopes in the fossilized tooth enamel of seven Australopithecus individuals. The data revealed that these early hominins primarily relied on plant-based diets, with little to no evidence of meat consumption.

The consumption of animal resources, especially meat, is considered a crucial turning point in human evolution. This protein-rich food has been linked to the increase in brain volume and the ability to develop tools. However, direct evidence of when meat emerged among our early ancestors, and of how its consumption developed though time, has been elusive. A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa (Wits University) now provide evidence that human ancestors of the genus Australopithecus that lived in southern Africa between 3.7 and 3.3 million years ago subsisted mostly on plants.

The research team analysed stable isotope data from tooth enamel of Australopithecus individuals found in the Sterkfontein cave near Johannesburg, part of South Africa’s “Cradle of Humankind”, an area known for its rich collection of early hominins fossils. They compared the isotopic data of Australopithecus with that from tooth samples of coexisting animals, including monkeys, antelopes, and large predators such as hyenas, jackals, and big cats.

Tooth enamel preserved dietary signatures

Tooth enamel is the hardest tissue of the mammalian body and can preserve the isotopic fingerprint of an animal's diet for millions of years.

Lüdecke, lead author
Department of Climate Geochemistry
Max Planck Institute for Chemistry
Mainz, Germany.

Lüdecke has led the “Emmy-Noether Junior Research Group for Hominin Meat Consumption” at the Mainz-based Max Planck Institute for Chemistry since 2021 and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She regularly travels to Africa to sample fossilized teeth for her analysis. Wits University owns the Sterkfontein Caves and is the custodian of the Australopithecus fossils.

When animals digest food, biochemical reactions favor the "light" isotope of nitrogen (¹⁴N). Consequently, the degradation products that are produced in their body contain high proportions of ¹⁴N. The excretion of these "light" nitrogen compounds in urine, feces, or sweat increases the ratio of "heavy" nitrogen (¹⁵N) to this “light" nitrogen the body in comparison to the food it eats. This means that herbivores have a higher nitrogen isotope ratio than the plants they consume, while carnivores in turn have a higher nitrogen isotope ratio than their prey. Therefore, the higher the ¹⁵N to ¹⁴N ratio in a tissue sample, the higher is the trophic position of the organism in the food web.

Nitrogen isotope ratios have long been used to study the diets of modern animals and humans in hair, claws, bones and many other organic materials. However, in fossil material, these measurements have previously been limited to samples that are only a few tens of thousands of years old due to the degradation of organic material over time. In this study, Tina Lüdecke used a novel technique developed in Alfredo Martínez-García’s laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, to measure nitrogen isotopes ratios in fossilized tooth enamel that is millions of years old.

Evidence of mostly plant-based food

The team of researchers found that the nitrogen isotope ratios in the tooth enamel of Australopithecus varied, but were consistently low, similar to those of herbivores, and much lower than those of contemporary carnivores. They conclude that the diet of these hominins was variable but consisted largely or exclusively of plant-based food. Therefore, Australopithecus did not regularly hunt large mammals like, for example, the Neanderthals did a few million years later. While the researchers cannot completely rule out the possibility of occasional consumption of animal protein sources like eggs or termites, the evidence indicates a diet that was predominantly vegetarian.

Further research on fossilized tooth enamel

Lüdecke's team plans to expand their research, collecting more data from different hominin species and time periods. They aim to examine fossils from other key sites in eastern and southern Africa as well as southeast Asia to explore when meat consumption began, how it evolved, and whether it provided an evolutionary advantage for our ancestors.

This method opens up exciting possibilities for understanding human evolution, and it has the potential to answer crucial questions, for example, when did our ancestors begin to incorporate meat in their diet? And was the onset of meat consumption linked to an increase in brain volume?

Alfredo Martínez-García, corresponding author
Department of Climate Geochemistry
Max Planck Institute for Chemistry
Mainz, Germany.

This work represents a huge step in extending our ability to better understand diets and trophic level of all animals back into the scale of millions of years. The research provides clear evidence that its diet did not contain significant amounts of meat. We are honoured that the pioneering application of this new method was spearheaded at Sterkfontein, a site that continues to make fundamental contributions to science even 89 years after the first hominin fossils were discovered there by Robert Broom.

Professor Dominic Stratford, co-author
School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies
University of the Witwatersrand
Johannesburg, South Africa.

Abstract
Incorporation of animal-based foods into early hominin diets has been hypothesized to be a major catalyst of many important evolutionary events, including brain expansion. However, direct evidence of the onset and evolution of animal resource consumption in hominins remains elusive. The nitrogen-15 to nitrogen-14 ratio of collagen provides trophic information about individuals in modern and geologically recent ecosystems (<200,000 years ago), but diagenetic loss of this organic matter precludes studies of greater age. By contrast, nitrogen in tooth enamel is preserved for millions of years. We report enamel-bound organic nitrogen and carbonate carbon isotope measurements of Sterkfontein Member 4 mammalian fauna, including seven Australopithecus specimens. Our results suggest a variable but plant-based diet (largely C3) for these hominins. Therefore, we argue that Australopithecus at Sterkfontein did not engage in regular mammalian meat consumption.

A prevailing theory of human evolution is that a partially carnivorous diet, the discovery of fire and the invention of cooking which releases more nutrients, facilitated the rapid evolution of the large hominid brain. Their predominantly vegetarian diet could explain why the early Australopithecines had brains little bigger than those of the chimpanzees from which they had diverged some 3 million years earlier.

With their hominid bipedalism and their chimpanzee-like diet and brain, these Australopithecines represent that thing creationists have nightmares over - transitional species between the common ancestor of the great apes and the Homo genus. And all 3 million years before creationists imaging Earth was magicked up out of nothing.

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