Add new comment

Regarding the "where did the plants come from" question, my thoughts are that it was not a reduced supply of plant matter, but a shift in the kind of plant matter. We may have ate just as many plants in our cooked food diet, but they were certainly not the same kinds of plants that we were previously adapted to eating. Previously lush, humid, stable Africa provided plant foods in sufficient quantity that did not need to be cooked. Unstable Africa, rapidly oscillating between humid and arid, did not. There was still plenty of plant matter, but it was not traditional primate plant matter, so much of it had to be cooked in order to digest it. Living in Nisqually territory, I can absolutely understand the challenge later hominids were faced with. Most of the staple plant foods that grow here have to be cooked, or at least processed in some way. Fruits, nuts, and shoots cold sustain a person for a brief part of the year, but not well, and not for longer than that. Without the addition of marine and terrestrial life, this place would not be habitable. I think there is plenty of evidence suggesting early species of the genus homo faced similar problems when the African climate became unstable, and they began problem solving in much the same way that the indigenous people of the PNW did with camas, shorline/estuary roots, and even fern roots for tribes that had the fewest options, like the Nooksack. These were all staple foods for certain tribes, and all required cooking. There is no reason to think that a shift in climate wouldn't or couldn't have led to similar constraints in Africa.