Mushrooms can be controversial food for some people, but our remote relatives of the Primat will have a different opinion on this subject. Primates who are not a person are known for their love for fruits, leaves and insects as snacks, but it is surprising that some of them are also fans of mushrooms.
New study Published in Ecology and evolution I chose mushroom trends in three types of primates in East Africa: chimpanzees, red -tailed monkeys and yellow babines. These primates were eaten for mushrooms long before they became fashionable, which could even indicate that our earliest ancestors also included them in their diets.
How primates prefer their mushrooms
Mycophagia or mushroom consumption were described in 105 types of primates. In some cases, the species can consume mushrooms as a spare food, choosing it when preferred products, such as fruits, are not available. In other cases, the consumption of mushrooms of the species has nothing to do with the presence of other products and is simply a way to supplement their diets with a large amount of nutrients.
A new study was aimed at seeing how mushrooms of priority chimpanzees, monkeys with red tails and yellow gramans living in the Issa Valley in Tanzania.
After observing the habits of primates, the researchers found that several factors that influenced how each species used mushrooms. For monkeys with red tails, mushrooms were not the main priority; As a rule, they consume mushrooms when ripe fruits became scarce, and the density of the mushrooms increased.
Babuins, however, turned out to be much more favorite mushrooms, as they were observed, looking for them, even when the availability of mushrooms was low. One potential reason for this, researchers suggestThis is that Babuins can adapt their diets to avoid competition with chimpanzees when there are not enough fruits to get around for everyone.
Read more: After thousands of years, people still find a new use of mushrooms
Entering the season
Mushrooms are about 90 percent of water, so their abundance is largely based on the amount of precipitation during the season. The study showed that the peak of mushroom consumption for three types of primates occurred during the wet season in the ISS Valley, from October to October to April, the period when the mushrooms are most common.
However, while chimpanzees and monkeys with red tails mainly used mushrooms as key dietary components in the middle of the wet substance season (from about December to January), the Babuins continued to eat them much longer, even when they began to become scarce around May again.
In general, 11 percent of observations of feeding the Babun were on mushrooms, compared with 2 percent of both chimpanzes and monkeys with red tails.
Long legacy of mushroom hunting
Since mushrooms provide protein and other trace elements, they may have used prehistoric hominins similar to the types of primates in the study. Researchers say that the Issa Valley, which is a mosaic forest habitat of forests Australopithecus And The man is at hand) I would have spent his days.
However, regardless of what they hunt these hominins for mushrooms, is only assumptions. This is due to the fact that, according to researchers, mushrooms do not eat well and leave several traces. Therefore, it is doubtful that scientists will find specific evidence that hominins eat mushrooms over 2 or more than a million years ago.
Despite Mushroom fossils It is rare, some studies associated them with the consumption of hominin in later times. For example, the nature of 2017 study He found that the diet of Neanderthals living in the El Syden cave in Spain about 48,000 years ago included edible gray mushrooms.
Having passed several millennia, the ancient people who lived during the Magdalensk culture of the Upper Paleolithic (about 18,000-12,000 years ago), possibly absorbed Run mushrooms Based on the analysis of a hardened toothache.
Nevertheless, mushrooms can still be found in kitchens around the world thousands of years later, continuing the legacy that could begin with primates.
Read more: What makes death mushrooms the most deadly in the world?
Article Sources
Our authors c Discovermagazine.com Use reviewed research and high -quality sources for our articles, and our editors are a review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. View the sources used below for this article:
