News Anthropology

Ancient primates’ unchipped teeth hint that they ate mostly fruit

Just 21 of more than 400 teeth had fractures, suggesting early primates had soft-food diets

A fossilized jawbone fragment with six teeth

An analysis of hundreds of teeth from roughly 30-million-year-old fossils, including this Propliopithecus chirobates specimen, suggests early primates ate mostly soft foods such as fruit.

I. Towle et al/American Journal of Biological Anthropology 2023

By Erin Garcia de Jesús

Soft fruits may have been the main dish on some ancient primate menus.

An analysis of hundreds of fossilized primate teeth from the Fayum Depression, a desert basin in Egypt, shows just a handful were fractured, researchers report December 13 in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology.