HUMAN EVOLUTION 



baboons of South Africa feed principally upon fruits, roots, 

 tubers, and bulbs, although they eat insects, scorpions, lizards, 

 bird eggs, and such small or young mammals as they are able 

 to capture. It would seem, from the ecology of its habitat, that 

 Proconsul probably was a vegetarian-omnivore like the living 

 baboons (Chesters, 1957). 



Fortunately we have good historical evidence on the diet of 

 the extinct hominids. The fossilized bones of small or young 

 animals were found at Olduvai in association with the tools, 

 skull, and tibia of Zinjanthropus. Since these animal bones 

 (from rats, mice, frogs, lizards, birds, fish, snakes, tortoises, 

 young pigs, antelopes, and ostriches) were in all cases broken 

 apart, whereas the hominid skull and tibia were intact, Leakey 

 infers the animals were part of the local australopithecine food 

 supply. The flora and fauna associated with the South African 

 near-men connote that they lived in open grassland or parkland 

 much like the landscape of the Transvaal today (Brain, 1958). 

 Dart has assembled a large amount of evidence that the aus- 

 tralopithecines were hunters of baboons, antelope, and other 

 mammals of fair size (Dart and Craig, 1959). 



By Middle Pleistocene times, the Pithecanthropus of China 

 was a hunter of large mammals as well as a gatherer of plant 

 food. The excavations at Choukoutien tell us much about the 

 food habits of Peiping man (Chaney, 1935). He, or she, is the 

 first known hominid cook. Abundant fragments of charred 

 bones in the Choukoutien deposits reveal Peiping man roasted 

 cuts of horse, bison, rhinoceros, and other game animals which 

 no longer live in northeastern China. Thousands of shell frag- 

 ments of the hackberry are associated in the Choukoutien breccia 

 with quartz tools and bone fragments. The modern hackberry 

 (Celtis) occurs as a small tree or bush in the semiarid regions of 

 Asia and North America. Its fruit was used extensively by the 

 Indians of the American Southwest. We may suppose Peiping 

 woman gathered the berries from bushes in the Western Hills 

 and stream borders near Choukoutien, took them home, and 

 mashed the shells in preparation for her family meals. 



The change to a partially carnivorous diet supplied by large 

 animals had extremely important implications for the social 

 organization of the early hominids. We must assume the early 



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