An upright, ape-like creature known as Paranthropus robustus (skull shown above) that lived alongside ancestral humans in Africa more than a million years ago had a far more diverse diet than once believed. A chemical analysis of four Paranthropus teeth by CU researcher Matt Sponheimer indicates Paranthropus had a diverse diet ranging from fruits and nuts to sedges, grasses, seeds and perhaps even animals.
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Us modern, and older, bachelor's aren't picky eaters either...
Yeah....maybe we are neanderthals at that!
Helen Thomas pic posted in 3...2...1...
This human relative sacrificed brain power for muscle power.
This was an evolutionary dead-end in that bipedal apes were never going to win the race based on brawn. Every other animal beats us hands down on basic speed, power and dental characteristics.
We won the race when our brains caught up to our bipedal arms, hands and speech capabilities.
Cultural and social aspects of this creature are indeed fascinating. I suspect that real advancement can be made if they focus their research in these areas. The evidence for their cultural and social traditions is a million years old, but with the right sized grant, I think it can be thoroughly documented.
Courtly paleoanthropologist Yves Coppens of the Collège de France in Paris--who co-discovered Lucy's species--politely demurred with Johanson's view at the meeting. Coppens maintains that two species of hominids lived at Hadar--and that neither led to modern humans.[snip]
If Orrorin was more modern than Lucy, it must have given rise to the Homo lineage that led to modern humans, Senut and Pickford say. That would bump most of the fossils found by the other teams in the room, including Lucy, off the line leading to Homo.[snip]
Johanson applied a little spin control. "Every person here has a slightly different idea how to draw the [human family] tree," he told a group of French science teachers invited to the last session. "But you should not let this distract you that there is probably more consensus about human origins today than ever before." For example, although researchers argue over which early fossil was even a hominid, much less the first, each of the competing teams has independently concluded that their primate lived in the forest, not the savanna.Sounds more like a "brag fest" than true science. Each person wants to be the guy who discovered the earliest hominid ancestor.
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