Study provides insights into diets of early primates

Turns out our love of sweet food goes back—way back—to our early primate ancestors, a University of Otago-led study has found.

The work sheds light on the dietary habits of early anthropoids, which includes fossil monkeys and apes, through analysis of tooth-chipping patterns and cavities.

Published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, the study used fossils from the Fayum Depression in Egypt, an invaluable source for understanding anthropoid evolution spanning from the late Eocene to the early Oligocene period, or 40 to 29 million-years-ago.