The first Australian plant foods at Madjedbebe, 65,000–53,000 years ago
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Fairbairn, AS
Nango, M
Djandjomerr, D
Marwick, B
Fullagar, R
Smith, M
Wallis, LA
Clarkson, C
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Abstract
There is little evidence for the role of plant foods in the dispersal of early modern humans into new habitats globally. Researchers have hypothesised that early movements of human populations through Island Southeast Asia and into Sahul were driven by the lure of high-calorie, low-handling-cost foods, and that the use of plant foods requiring processing was not common in Sahul until the Holocene. Here we present the analysis of charred plant food remains from Madjedbebe rockshelter in northern Australia, dated to between 65 kya and 53 kya. We demonstrate that Australia’s earliest known human population exploited a range of plant foods, including those requiring processing. Our finds predate existing evidence for such subsistence practices in Sahul by at least 23ky. These results suggest that dietary breadth underpinned the success of early modern human populations in this region, with the expenditure of labour on the processing of plants guaranteeing reliable access to nutrients in new environments.
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Nature Communications
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11
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1
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© The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Archaeological science
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander archaeology
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Florin, SA; Fairbairn, AS; Nango, M; Djandjomerr, D; Marwick, B; Fullagar, R; Smith, M; Wallis, LA; Clarkson, C, The first Australian plant foods at Madjedbebe, 65,000–53,000 years ago, Nature Communications, 2020, 11 (1), pp. 924:1-924:8