Margaret J. Schoeninger 

Professor Margaret J. Schoeninger received her B.A. from the University of Florida, her M.A. from the University of Cincinnati, and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She has held positions in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles, in the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and in the Departments of Anthropology at Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin.

"How Food Fueled Human Evolution"

Humans dominate our planet thanks largely to our unique abilities to extract calories and protein from all kinds of animal and plant material.  This lecture reviews how we changed physically from an ape-like ancestor to modern humans in concert with important dietary changes.  Our ancestral cuisine changed from the basic primate diet of fruit with leaves and/or insects to include fat- and protein-rich hard-shelled nuts, which in turn allowed a significant dietary shift toward eating the flesh of large mammals, such as today’s African antelopes. The domestication of plants and animals within the last 10,000 years has resulted in the present-day dependence on cereals, root crops, and, more recently, on fatty meat and simple carbohydrates. Skeletal, genomic, and demographic data attest to the implications of these later changes for our modern situation.