Eats bark, fruit and leaves

[questionmark]

"We are, effectively, looking back 2 million years and watching our ancestors chew their food," says Lee Berger.

A palaeontologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, he shot to scientific stardom in 2010 when he discovered Australopithecus sediba, one of the most remarkable fossils of the hominin lineage known to date.

Now he, Amanda Henry of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a team of collaborators have discovered what A. sediba ate. On the menu: bark.

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[Old Man Waffles]

[lightly]

The inner "cambium" layer of bark of many trees is edible and nutritious ..and bitter! White birch is even slightly sweet.

The Lapps used to collect it and dry it in case food ran short. They would make a sort of bread out of it. If they didn't need to eat it they fed it to their animals. Native Americans also used it. New englanders used to eat candied white pine shoots, a recipe probably learned from the natives.

[Englishgent]

The bark of the Willow tree is good if you have a headache

[Delovely5150]

Hmm.... that's interesting. I should recommend that Orang-utan diet to some of my friends, lol.

[Grandpa Greenman]

I bet it is very filling. Lots of good fiber.

[hetrodoxly]

I thought " eats shoots and leaves" was a description many women use for a visit from their boyfriends.