I have been fighting with the idea for this post for the last couple of weeks ever since I read this paper on the human amylase gene. Part of the reason for the delay in writing about the amylase paper is that I have come down with what I suspect is lateral epicondylitis and typing seems to aggravate it. Worse yet, the more I thought about the subject the longer and more complicated the post became. At this point I have decided to break it into a series of posts.
There are a number of ways that paleoanthropologists can learn about the diet of our hominin ancestors. In a previous post I looked at some basic research on teeth. In that post I pointed out what we can learn from enamel thickness and from microwear analysis. Specifically, I pointed out that enamel thickness can tell us something about how hard or soft the food being chewed was, and what kind of masticatory stress was being placed on the teeth. I also looked at what pitting and striations could tells us about diet. In the next post I will look at this in a little more detail. I will also look at what we can learn about paleodiets from archaeology.