SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- University of Utah scientists have shown that early humans varied their diets with the seasons 1.8 million years ago.
Their testing of fossilized teeth indicated the ancient human diet included leaves, fruit, seeds and roots.
"By analyzing tooth enamel, we found that they ate lots of different things, and what they ate changed during the year," said Utah geology doctoral student Ben Passey, a co-author of the study in the Friday issue of the journal Science.
"We wanted to know if they had variability in their diets on the time scale of a few months to a few years," he said. "The new method showed that their diets were extremely variable."
One possibility is that they were migrating seasonally between more forested habitats and more open areas, he said.
