Counter to traditional ideas about how agriculture started, they never grew the plants they ate

By Jude Coleman

20 HOURS AGO
Unlike many of their mostly meat-eating peers, a group of late Stone Age hunter-gatherers living in what is now northeastern Morocco had a largely plant-based diet. But despite dining for millennia on local, wild plants — such as acorns, pistachios and wild oats, the Iberomaurusians never started cultivating those plants. The finding aligns with recent challenges to scientists’ theory that heavy reliance on plants ultimately leads to their domestication (SN: 11/9/21).

Before humans figured out farming, they relied on hunting and gathering to sustain themselves, with most protein coming from animals. Over time, they shifted from foraging to cultivating certain plants, eventually leading to the plants’ domestication — so goes the typical story of agriculture’s emergence. Archaeologists once assumed that the Iberomaurusians also relied mostly on animals. But data from human remains at a site in Morocco points to a predominantly plant-based diet, researchers report April 29 in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The site — called Taforalt, which is located in a cave — is a “very important site to study human evolution and understand human behavior during this time,” says Zineb Moubtahij, an archaeologist at Géosciences Environment Toulouse, a research laboratory in France. The Iberomaurusians lived around this area for a long time, starting around 23,000 years ago. They used part of the cave to bury the deceased.

To learn about the Iberomaurusians’ diets, Moubtahij and colleagues turned to teeth and bones from these remains, which date to between 15,077 and 13,892 years old. The team looked at levels of certain forms, or isotopes, of elements — including zinc, carbon and nitrogen — that were deposited from food into tissues and bones. The researchers also looked at isotopes in the remains of herbivores and carnivores from the site, such as sheep and foxes, and compared those to the human isotope levels.

More:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/stone-age-humans-gatherer-hunter

People simply adapted to what their environment provided. They didn't have the internet to tell them the latest fad diet that they simply HAD TO follow.