A study of 780,000-year-old food remains has shed light on the diets of prehistoric human hunter-gatherers.
The research has revealed that hominins—a group containing modern humans plus our closest extinct ancestors and relatives—who once lived in what is now Israel likely consumed a wide range of plant-based foods, particularly starchy ones. These included acorns, cereals, legumes and aquatic plants.
The findings challenge a popular belief that the diet of early humans was focused primarily or solely on animal protein.
Plant foods have often been overlooked in the discussion of prehistoric diets, in part because their remains are less visible in the archaeological record. This is because they are preserved less frequently than animal remains, which appear in the form of bones at archaeological sites.
But in the latest study, a team of researchers report the discovery of "starch grains" from diverse plant sources on basalt tools found at the archaeological site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, located along the Jordan River in what is now Israel.
Starch grains are microscopic particles of starch produced by plants that can be preserved in soils and sediments, as well as on the surfaces of tools, pottery and other artifacts. They can be a powerful tool in archaeology, providing direct evidence of prehistoric plant use, diets and agricultural practices.
An analysis of the starch grains on the tools from Gesher Benot Ya'aqov—where fossilized animal remains have also been found—demonstrated that hominins who used the site processed a wide variety of plant foods at least 780,000 years ago, long before the emergence of modern humans.
The starch grains originate from various plant sources, such as acorns, grass grains, water chestnuts, yellow water lily rhizomes (a type of underground plant stem) and legume seeds. These starchy tubers, nuts and roots are rich in carbohydrates, thus, would have been an important source of energy for the prehistoric humans who consumed them.
The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also reveals the sophisticated methods that early humans used to process plant materials. The basalt tools include mace-type objects and anvils, which would have been utilized to crack and crush plant foods.
"The diverse plant foods vary in ecological niches, seasonality, and gathering and processing modes," the authors wrote in the study.
"In contrast to animal foods, wild plants often require long, multi-step processing techniques that involve significant cognitive skills and advanced toolkits to perform. These costs are thought to have hindered how hominins used these foods and delayed their adoption into our diets."
The results are a further demonstration of the advanced cognitive abilities our early ancestors possessed. These include the abilities to collect plants from varying distances and from a wide range of habitats, as well as to mechanically process them using percussive tools.
"Our results further confirm the importance of plant foods in our evolutionary history and highlight the development of complex food-related behaviors," the authors wrote.
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Reference
Ahituv, H., Henry, A. G., Melamed, Y., Goren-Inbar, N., Bakels, C., Shumilovskikh, L., Cabanes, D., Stone, J. R., Rowe, W. F., & Alperson-Afil, N. (2025). Starch-rich plant foods 780,000 y ago: Evidence from Acheulian percussive stone tools. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(3). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2418661121
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