Plant use in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic: Food, medicine, and raw materials Karen Hardy article info Article history: Received 16 October 2017 Received in revised form 10 April 2018 Accepted 26 April 2018 Keywords: Pleistocene Palaeolithic Plants Diet Medicine Raw materials abstract There is little surviving evidence for plant use in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic periods yet the evidence there is, clearly indicates the importance of plants in the diet, as medicines and as raw ma- terials. Here, the current evidence for plants is summarised, and the way this can be used to enrich perceptions of the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic are explored. The evidence for plant food fits well with basic nutritional requirements while the presence of medicinal plants correlates with plant-based self- medication by animals. Many plant-based technologies are likely to have developed early in the Palae- olithic. Though investigating this is challenging due to a lack of evidence, the extensive evidence for use of plant materials as tools by chimpanzees provides a broad backdrop. The ecological knowledge carried by all hominins would have provided a safety net when moving into new regions, while varying levels of neophobia would have enabled adaptation to new environments as hominin populations moved and climates changed. Recent plant use among traditional societies in high latitudes shows that even in locations with reduced biodiversity, plant resources can fulfil essential dietary requirements. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Plants were an integral and essential part of everyday life in the Palaeolithic, just as they are today. They provided nutrients, including essential carbohydrates (Hardy et al., 2015a), raw mate- rials, medicines and, once fire had developed, fuel. The importance of plants in human evolution is such that Australopithecine species are in part defined on the physical and isotopic evidence for the differences in their plant-based diets (e.g. Lee Thorp et al., 1994, 2010; Strait et al., 2009). The earliest appearance of cut marked bones indicating animal butchery is 3.4 million years (McPherron et al., 2010) while the earliest evidence for flaked stone tools dates to 3.5 million years (Harmand et al., 2015). The implications of meat eating and stone tool manufacture are considered so signifi- cant in terms of behaviour and brain development that this, together with the limited evidence for plants in the early Palae- olithic, has meant that the roles of plants in the diet and technology has been largely eclipsed in these early periods. Wide-ranging theories on Palaeolithic hominin behaviour and brain development have focused almost exclusively on the need for protein (e.g. Kaplan et al., 2000; Morgan et al., 2015; Richards and Trinkaus, 2009; Snodgrass et al., 2009; Snodgrass and Leonard, 2009). The technologies and use of plant-based raw materials have received little attention, while the link between cognition and technological innovation has focused primarily on lithic raw material acquisition patterns and stone tool technolo- gies (e.g. de Beaune, 2004; Stout and Chaminade 2012; Toth and Schick 2018). Yet it is impossible from the dietary (Hardy et al., 2015a), un- likely from the medicinal (Huffman, 2016) and unrealistic from the technological perspectives, that plants were not a fundamental part of all aspects of Palaeolithic life. There is widespread acknowl- edgement that plants were eaten, and used in technology, throughout the Palaeolithic (e.g. Klein, 2009; Tyldesley and Bahn, 1983), identification of a profound problem of ‘missing’ data on the early use of plants (Ambrose, 2001), and the recognition that the vast majority of innovations have probably been lost (Reader, 2004). In archaeological contexts with exceptional survival of plant materials, fibre artefacts outnumber stone tools by a factor of 20 to 1, while in anaerobic conditions 95% of all recovered artefacts are either made from wood or fibre (Adovasio et al., 2007). This largely corresponds with chimpanzee tool use, in which tools made from organic materials/vegetation is far in excess of use of stone for tools, with proportions ranging from 11 to 18% for stone, against 78e83% for plant based materials (Reader, 2004). Most of the technological items used by chimpanzees today would not enter the archaeological record (McGrew, 2010a). E-mail address: khardy@icrea.cat. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Quaternary Science Reviews journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/quascirev https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2018.04.028 0277-3791/© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Quaternary Science Reviews 191 (2018) 393e405