Achievement

Working with faculty in paleobotany (Piperno) and archaeology (Brooks), IGERT student Amanda Henry has documented the first definitive evidence of human consumption of cooked barley and other plant foods, based on recovery of starch grains and phytoliths from the dental calculus on Neanderthal fossil teeth. She also recovered direct evidence of plant consumption from 100,000+ year old fossils from South Africa, the first and oldest starch grains recovered from Pleistocene contexts on that continent. The South African study was accorded a highly competitive oral presentation slot at the Annual Meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society, March 31-April 1 2009 in Chicago.