What Can Fossils Tell Us about Early Human Diets? Briana Pobiner October 17, 2018 We may never know the intricate details of early human diets—and sometimes, di)erent lines of evidence can seem contradictory. Happy National Fossil Day! Fossils are among the most thrill-inducing traces of the past to discover. These preserved remains of once-living organisms, usually more than 10,000 years old, are a primary source of evidence about the past. For a paleoanthropologist like me who is interested in reconstructing the diets of ancient humans, fossils are invaluable clues to that help piece together a puzzle that is inevitably incomplete. I will outline four kinds of fossil-based techniques that use di)erent kinds of evidence to shed on the diets of various early human species—some of which yielded surprising and seemingly contradictory results. Fossil morphology The fossil remains of early humans (hominins) themselves can shed light on di)erent aspects of early human diets. On a basic level, the morphology (size and shape) of early human teeth and skulls can reveal something fundamental about what kinds of foods those early humans ate. Some early human species—mainly those in the genus Paranthropus—have very large teeth, particularly their molar teeth. The explanation for this adaptation has commonly been that these large teeth have more surface area to process large amounts of foods that are either lower in quality of mechanically challenging—foods that are tough, hard, or abrasive ( Ungar 2012).