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Dental Tribune United Kingdom Edition No.1, 2017

06 Dental Tribune United Kingdom Edition | 1/2017 WORLD NEWS By DTI YORK,UK/BARCELONA,Spain:Based on their study of dental plaque from Europe’s oldest hominin, scientists have concluded that the region’s earliest humans did not use fire for cooking, but had a balanced raw diet of meat and plants. The research has once again demonstrated the potential of dental calculus to store dietary and environmental information over such a long period. Archaeologists at the Univer- sity of York and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona examined dental plaque from a 1.2-million- year-old hominin (Homo species), recovered by the Atapuerca re- search team in 2007 from the Sima del Elefante site in northern Spain. They extracted microfos- sils to find the earliest direct evi- dence of food eaten by early hu- mans. These microfossils included traces of raw animal tissue, un- cooked starch granules indicating consumption of grasses, pollen grains from a species of pine, insect fragments and remains of what might have been a tooth- pick. All detected fibres were un- charred, and there was no evidence showing inhalation of micro- charcoal—normally a clear indi- cator of proximity to fire. The timing of the earliest use of fire for cooking is hotly contested, with some researchers arguing that habitual use started around 1.8 million years ago, while others suggest it was as late as 300,000 to 400,000 years ago. Possible evidence of firemak- ing has been found at some very early sites in Africa. However, the lack of fire evidence at Sima del Elefante suggests that this knowl- edge was not carried with the ear- liest humans when they migrated from Africa. The earliest definitive evidence of the use of fire else- where is 800,000 years ago at the Spanish site of Cueva Negra and at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel a short time later. Taken together, this evidence suggests that the development of fire use occurred at some point be- tween 800,000 and 1.2 million years ago, providing a new time- line for when the earliest humans started to cook food. “This new timeline has signifi- cant implications in helping us to understand this period of human evolution—cooked food provides greater energy, and cooking may be linked to the rapid increases in brain size that occurred from 800,000 years ago onwards,” said Dr Karen Hardy, lead author and Honorary Research Associate at the University of York and a Cata- lan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies research pro- fessorattheUniversitatAutònoma de Barcelona. According to Hardy, “Obtaining evidence for any aspect of homi- nin life at this extremely early date is very challenging. Here, we have been able to demonstrate that these earliest Europeans un- derstood and exploited their for- ested environment to obtain a bal- anced diet 1.2 million years ago, by eating a range of different foods and combining starchy plant food with meat.” The findings correlate well with previous research that hypothe- sised that the timing of cooking is linked to the development of salivary amylase, which is needed to process cooked starchy food, explained Hardy. “Starchy food was an essential element in facili- tating brain development, and contrary to popular belief about the ‘Paleodiet’, the role of starchy food in the Palaeolithic diet was significant,” she said. Ancient dental plaque reveals dietary habits of early humans THERE’S MORE TO THIS... ...THAN MEETS THE EYE REGISTER FOR YOUR FREE PLACES NOW: ONLINE: THEDENTISTRYSHOW.CO.UK/DT AD

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