Chufa and primordial man

In 2014, Oxford University published a study showing that one of our distant ancestors lived mainly on tiger nuts, or chufas or ground almonds.

The species in question is 'Paranthropus boisei' who lived in East Africa about 2.4 to 1.4 million years ago. What about all those primordial humans?

A nice and clear diagram with background information can be found on the site of the 'Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History'. On the far right is P. boisei.

Nickname: 'Nutcracker'

In 1959, Mr Charles Boise funded an excavation in Tanzania. In 1959, when archaeologist Mary Leakey was walking through an excavation site with her Dalmatians, she saw something sticking out above the ground. It later turned out to be the first fossil of Paranthropus boisei.

The genus Paranthropus consists of 3 species in total and are also called the robust species. Robust in this case has to do not with the size of the body but with the mouth. Huge jaws, space in the skull for strong jaw muscles, thick tooth enamel and molars that were as much as 4 times larger than today's human molars.

Oxford research

Since the excavation, researchers have been working to find out what the P. boisei ate. Its front teeth seemed particularly suited to soft foods, while the molars were for hard foods such as nuts. Bone studies revealed that the P. boisei must have mainly eaten grasses. However, fibrous grasses do not provide enough nutritional value to sustain a humanoid of medium size and relatively large brain.

The solution then came Dr Gabriele Macho from Oxford University visited the original habitat of the P. boisei in Kenya in 2014. There, she saw baboons eating large quantities of tiger nuts which do contain enough starch, vitamins, minerals and fatty acids for the brain.

Raw tiger nuts straight from the ground have an abrasive effect on the teeth which again explained the marks found on fossils of P. boisei. To digest the starch, it was necessary to chew the tiger nuts for a long time to let the saliva do its job.

She concluded that 80% of the daily energy requirement of 2000 Kcal should be easily found by spending 2.5 to 3 hours a day looking for tiger nuts. The bone study that showed that the P. boisei must have eaten grasses was consistent with this. In that they ate parts of the grass plant, only the tuber which grew between the roots.

Later, P. boisei was nicknamed 'Nutcracker Man' or 'Nutcracker'. Isn't it nice that in retrospect that turned out to be exactly the right description of what the P. boisei ate and how? He cracked nuts, tiger nuts!

Nutcracker Man has roamed our globe for about a million years, modern man about 120,000 years. Hopefully, we too will reach the million years mark thanks to the renewed discovery of tiger nuts. Or chufa as we call them.