Our early forebears must have been a hardy lot.In the long story of human evolution, they had only recently evolved to walk on two feet, were unable to fashion stone tools or make fire, and must have found it a tough duty to gather edible food of any kind.
So just what did the hominids eat? Many fossil hunters have long surmised that they subsisted in large part on grasses and grass-like sedges, or on animals -- either scavenged or slow-moving -- that grazed on those grasses.
Now a 26-year-old graduate student at UC Santa Cruz has turned to the humble African mole rat, whose underground life is nourished by bulbs and varieties of nutritious plant roots known as corms, to explain what may have been a dietary staple of the hominids who lived 2 to 3 million years ago.
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