When living in the same region, gorillas eat fewer figs than chimps, but gorillas do eat figs, as do orangutans. Fruit bats love figs, as do many birds and as do the other apes. Chimps are not the only animals to eat figs. Fig trees produce delicious, nutritious fruits in large numbers. How many species are in your fridge? I did a quick count and found fewer than fifty plant species in my entire local farmer’s market.Ģ- Figs-Nearly half of all of the food consumed by chimps appears to be one or another kind of figs, fruits of the Ficus trees. From the perspective of our modern human diet, eight features of the chimpanzee diet in Kibale stand out.ġ- Diversity-In Kibale chimpanzees were found to have consumed no fewer than 102 species (and perhaps many more) of plants either in the form of fruit or leaves. But what kind or how many or how? Recently, a new study by David Watts at Yale University and colleagues reconsiders the answer for chimpanzees in Kibale National Park in Uganda. So what do the modern apes-and in particular our closest relatives the chimpanzees and bonobos-eat? Plants. Yet, the common ancestor from which both modern apes and modern humans descend was probably less like us and more like them. They have changed since the time our two kinds were one. We can also look to the diets of our living relatives for more detailed insight. The elements left in in ancient teeth and bones can reveal crude measures of the diets of our ancestors or their kin. But while we can consider the evolution of our arms by looking at the fossils of ancient fins, nearly everything we know about what we once ate, we know indirectly. Your diet, of course, has antecedents too. Your lungs are the descendents of fish lungs your arms are modified fins. Your mitochondria-those whirring motors of energy in your cells-are the descendents of ancient bacteria and bear their marks. Each bit of you has antecedents, half-dry clay into which natural selection’s ruthless cleaver has carved. Evolutionarily we are all haunted by many pasts, pasts buried in each of our cells, organs or actions. In conversation we say someone is haunted by the past.
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