A Varied Menu for Homo's Cousins

You are what you eat—or, if you’re a 2 million-year-old hominid fossil, what you ate.By analyzing the tooth enamel of Paranthropus robustus, anthropologists have discovered that these big-jawed bipeds—who shared the South African savannas with Homo erectus about two million years ago—snacked on a much wider variety of foods than researchers previously suspected. The new study, which is published in the Nov. 10 issue of the journal Science, challenges the long-held belief that Paranthropus went extinct because of its picky eating habits.Both Homo and Paranthropus descended from Australopithecus, the genus that includes the famous 3 million-year-old fossil “Lucy.”Read more at....Seed, November 2006.