Are we related to cows?

Hey there. How’re you doing on this fine day? Me? Well aside from the usual aches and pains, no complaints. I’ve been reading some weird stuff about our ancestry so fill your mug and let me fill your ear…oh, and don’t forget to download one of those low-fat thing-me-bobs from the top shelf, too.

When I was in Canada, I bought several interesting magazines I hadn’t seen before…Skeptic, Mental Floss and Discover… all great reading for the eternally curious. 

Here’s a clip from Discover Magazine:

It turns out that the strong-jawed, big-toothed human relative colloquially known as “Nutcracker man” may never have tasted a nut. In a finding that questions traditional ideas of early hominid diet, researchers discovered that Paranthropus boisei, a hominid living in east Africa between 2.3 and 1.2 million years ago, mostly fed on grasses and sedges. “Frankly, we didn’t expect to find the primate equivalent of a cow dangling from a remote twig of our family tree,” said researcher Matt Sponheimer.

So how did they find this out, you ask?

Well, see, the Nutcracker Man was originally believed to have lived on mostly nuts…thus the name, eh. But researchers drilled the enamel off of teeth from 22 different specimens found in Kenya, ages ranging from 1.4 to 1.9 million years old. The carbon isotopes in the pulverized enamel allowed them to look at diet because grasses and nuts have different carbon signatures.

The carbon isotopes revealed that 77% of their diet consisted of plants like grass and papyrus, and that’s only an average percentage: The range was from 61 to 91% grasses and sedges. The Nutcracker Man’s diet is virtually the same as diets of grass-grazing animals. They were eating the same as zebras, pigs, warthogs, and hippos.

Well, hey…doesn’t that put a different spin on things now? Maybe there is a closer relationship between PMS and Mad Cow Disease that we previously thought! Ho boy…better leave that one alone if I know what’s good for me, eh!  

Whenever I’ve seen cows lying contentedly in a field of grass, it seemed to me the equivalent of humans lolling about in a huge bowl of mashed potatoes. See what image that conjures up! Visual stimulation, for you there!

Methinks I ought not to venture further into this topic…

See ya!

Bob