Starch4Sapiens

The Starch Food Niche: Human Adaptation, Genes, and Culture Principal coordinator: S Condemi ( AMU); partners: A. Carbone (SU) and L. Longo (UniVe-IT) Today Homo sapiens (HS) is the only human species on earth. This has not always been the case: 40,000 years ago, HS shared the planet with at least four other human hominins (Neanderthals, Denisovans, Flores and Luzonensis). HS not only supplanted these other Eurasian archaic humans (EAHs), with a constant demographic growth, but became adapted to nearly all latitudes and climates. This "success" is often linked to the switch from an economy based on foraging and collecting (Paleolithic hunter-gatherers-fishers) to one of production (Neolithic breeders and farmers, starting circa 12.000 years ago). HS's spectacular population growth was made possible due to a regular and starch-rich diet following crop domestication. Starch4Sapiens is devoted to understanding the origins of the starch-rich diet. Our purpose is to establish the timing for the emergence of the Starch Food Niche (SFN) by comparing changes between EAHs and early HS prior the Neolithic in (i) biology (i. e. anatomical variations), (ii) genetics (genes CNV) expressing enzymes related to starch metabolization and (iii) task-specific behavior in foraging and processing dietary carbohydrates. The originality and novelty of our approach lies in its complementary and interrelated analysis. Our objective is to seek and confront data to demonstrate changes in dietary behavior from EAHs to early HS and until today. We aim to read the history of genotypic changes from genomes, which are also noticeable in fossil remains and cultural behavior, in order to determine the extent to which these changes were introduced by regular starch-rich food consumption well before the Neolithic transition. If this hypothesis is correct, starch food processing and the efficient metabolization of dietary carbohydrates was the key to the appropriation of a different nutriotope allowing HS to enhance its fitness.