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Science 15 January 1999:
Vol. 283. no. 5400, p. 303
DOI: 10.1126/science.283.5400.303
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News of the Week

PALEOANTHROPOLOGY:
Did Early African Hominids Eat Meat?

Gretchen Vogel

Anthropologists have thought that Australopithecus africanus, a small-brained hominid that walked upright but was probably also at home in the trees, subsisted on forest fruits and leaves, but on page 368, researchers use a clever new method based on the chemical makeup of teeth to show that it ate a varied diet, including either grassland plants or animals that themselves fed on grasses. Many theories of human origins invoke a switch to a meat-rich diet to explain the sudden swelling of brain power in our own genus, Homo; the new data raise the possibility that meat-eating is not the exclusive province of Homo but a strategy adopted by more primitive species too.

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)