By Bruce Bower
A jut-jawed, peg-toothed member of humans’ evolutionary family has chemically vetoed its 50-year-old nickname — Nutcracker Man.
Far from eating nuts, seeds and other hard foods seemingly suited to its viselike jaws, this now-extinct hominid mainly munched grasses and flowering plants called sedges, which include papyrus, says a team led by geochemist Thure Cerling of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Nutcracker Man, known formally as Paranthropus boisei, competed for food in swampy parts of East Africa with grazing animals such as ancestral zebras and pigs, Cerling’s team proposes in a paper published online the week of May 2 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Foods favored by its primate brethren, such as tree fruits, left P. boisei cold, the scientists suggest.