Although people have been slowly receiving their pre-ordered books in the mail, July 17 is the official publication date of Edible Insects and Human Evolution!  It's been more than five years since its conception and now my book is finally out for the world to see.  

​Friends have been sending me pictures of my book as they receive it! <3

There has been some great online media to go along with the book release.  Each piece has something unique and I think they all work well together to fully paint the picture on what the book's about.

First, NPR covered it yesterday (in print, not audio.. you can read it here).  I had a wonderful conversation with Paul Chrisholm (who has a background in entomology!) and I think the piece turned out great.  I could have done without the photo of bugs hanging out of someone's mouth, but sensationalism is the name of the game with the media, so I can't pretend to be surprised.

Entomofago, which is based in the EU, is the first international media group to focus entirely on edible insects.  They published an interview with me on their blog (available here).  It's a nice little piece that asks a bit more about how I got interested in the topic and why I decided to write a book.

​Lastly, my publisher, University Press of Florida, asked me to write a blog post (here) to accompany the book's release.  They wanted a little bit of a "behind the scenes" feel to the post so I decided to try to show how I work with many different sources of information in order to reconstruct this part of the diet in the past.  

I have some radio interviews coming up and expect there to be some more online articles going around.  I am very pleased with the reception of the book's release.   I am working hard to push away the negative thoughts that this will all change once people have read it!  

I am just about ready to head to Gibraltar, yes the British territory south of Spain, for the Calpe Conference "Redefining Neanderthals."  I am excited to present my poster about Neanderthals eating snails as a fun conversation starter as researchers in the field begin discussing the likelihood that Neanderthals were more omnivorous than previously thought.  In some of my other work, I have discussed that Neanderthals likely did not eat many insects because of the cold climate of Pleistocene Europe.  Biodiversity is quite low in these regions, thus the available edible insects would be considerably lower here than other, more temperate regions.  However, that is not to say they did not eat any invertebrates.  It is important to remember that with the latitudinal gradient of biodiversity the variation is clinal; there are no clear-cut boundaries, only increases and decreases in frequencies.  An especially appealing insect or invertebrate might be consumed seasonally, and I think snails make a good candidate for that.  Today, snails are consumed in the highest numbers in France, Italy, and Spain.  Many of the snails are imported into the country from heliciculture farms in other regions allowing for the year-round availability of this delicacy.  In order to assess whether Neanderthals were partaking in such an exquisite food, we need to start paying more attention to the snail shells that are found at Neanderthal sites.  The problem is that snails can be present at these sites for many reasons other than Neanderthal intervention; they could have naturally wandered there or they could have been brought there by other predators such as rodents.  However, if the locale of the Neanderthal site would not be a natural place for snails to visit, or if there is no predatory damage to the shells, then maybe, just maybe, the best explanation is that the shells are refuse from a Neanderthal snack.  I believe there is a good case for this at the site of Krapina, Croatia, although I need to look more closely at the shells for rodent damage.  Better reports of snails as part of the faunal assemblages at Neanderthal sites will also help address this question, and I hope that by discussing this at the conference, this data will become more available.

At the Eating Innovation conference last month in Montreal, I presented my reconstructions of insects in the hominid diet across all of the hallmark stages of our evolution.  For instance, it is likely that Homo erectus was foraging for resources in their environment similar to how we see foragers do so today. Therefore, insects were probably utilized in their diets the same as well.  I have uploaded a pdf of my entire presentation below. 

Click below to download the pdf of the entire presentation.

Exciting things, a couple years in the making, are finally afoot! 

One, I have an article now available online at the Journal of Human Evolution*.  It will be formally published as a part of a special issue dedicated to "The Other Faunivory," an endeavor of many biological anthropologists coming together to look at human evolution's lesser credited insect food sources.  I will be posting more on this when that issue is launched.  This special issue is based on a session held at the 2012 annual meetings of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Portland, OR.  At that session I had the honor of meeting a special guest, Daniella Martin, which brings me to number two..

Two, Daniella Martin's book Edible: An Adventure into the World of Eating Insects and the Last Great Hope to Save the Planet is now available on Amazon! 

An excerpt of the book related to human evolution is available here.  Daniella does a great job summarizing some of the big points of the evolution of the human diet (and its inclusion of insects) for a broad, popular audience.  The book I am currently writing takes the ideas presented here and details them out in academic form.

For instance, Daniella quotes the exact line in Backwell and d'Errico's 2001 PNAS article that inspired my work:
"Termites are a valuable source of protein, fat, and essential amino acids, in the diets of both primates and modern humans. While rump steak yields 322 calories per 100 grams, and cod fish 74, termites provide 560 calories per 100 grams."

Those numbers came from sources published in 1971.  We have covered a lot of ground since then and I made it my job to do two things: 1) update the numbers with more recently published data, and 2) make it clear that we should take caution when broadly generalizing the nutritional contributions of "termites," a clade that contains over 280 genera and 2700 species.

My now-available article, "Termites in the hominin diet: A meta-analysis of termite genera, species and castes as a dietary supplement for South African robust australopithecines," begins to address these issues.

Here is the abstract*:

I create a model of how termites fit into the diet of our ancestors.  As of now, this is the best account of insects in the real "paleo diet."  They were valuable back then, they are still valuable for many people today, and it would be smart of the Western World to start utilizing insects more in our own diets.

*If you are interested in the full version of this article but it is behind a pay wall, please contact me here and I will gladly send you a pdf.

Although I may be the first person to make a career out of discussing the role of insects in the diets of our hominid ancestors, I am by far not the first person to think of it.  One of the pioneers is Alan Mann, Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. 

While I was in graduate school, I would see Alan at the annual meetings of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists and he was always happy to talk with me about how insects likely made an important dietary contribution to early hominids.  His big thing was always that I should dig for termite eggs.. I never dug for eggs, but the thought has never left my mind!  I can definitely say that newly hatched insects, or the larvae, offer higher amounts of fat than adult forms, so I am guessing eggs would be similar, although I have never seen any data on it.  Trust me, it is in my long-term goals to figure this out!

This April, I get to present some of my findings in a session honoring Alan's work.  Here's my abstract:

The full list of papers for the session can be found here.  I think what strikes me most about the session is the broad range of topics to which he has, in some way, contributed to our understanding.  The main thing all of this research has in common though is "the continuation of a perspective that places variation at the center of how our discipline conceptualizes human evolution."  Understanding variation is truly the primary goal of all biological studies.  For me it is in the dietary contributions of different insect species and castes, but for other biological anthropologists in this group it is in areas such as skeletal development, human/landscape interactions or survivorship across life stages, to highlight just a few.

I am looking forward to being in Calgary April 9th-12th.  I hope to see you there!  And I hope to see you at this amazing poster session!

As someone who studies the role of insects as food over the course of human evolution, I am faced with a dilemma not faced by many:  When to use 'entomophagy' and when to use 'insectivory.'

Entomophagy is defined as the practice of eating insects, usually reserved for people.  Insectivory is "feeding" on insects, usually reserved for animals.

In my dissertation and subsequent work on our hominin ancestors, specifically South African robust australopithecines, I chose to use insectivory regarding their behavior, following the vernacular of primatologists whose work was essential in creating my models.  Although the suffix -ivore is meant to imply specialization such that over half of the diet comes from that resource, primatologists discuss the degree of folivory, frugivory, insectivory, etc. across species that do not specialize on those resources, blurring the lines of the definitions.

One of my next projects, which I will be presenting at the AAA meetings in Chicago next month, investigates patterns of insects-as-food across different human populations of foragers and horticulturalists.  When referring to their insect consumption, I obviously use the word entomophagy.

I am now working on a book project that includes a theoretical reconstruction of the role of insects across all of human evolution.  In order to fill in the gap between australopithecines and people today, I am going to pay particular attention to Homo erectus and Neandertals.  I actually do not think Neandertals ate many insects due to the lack of biodiversity in northern latitudes (which is also an interesting extra piece to the puzzle as to why entomophagy is not favored in the United States and Europe..).  However, I would readily credit any insects consumed by Neandertals as entomophagy, likely due to my stance that Neandertals are are not a distinct species different from modern humans.  Neandertals are people, too!

That leaves Homo erectus, a species with hallmark increases in both brain and body size which make them seem much more human-like.  Is it the degree of insectivory or the degree of entomophagy that I am trying to reconstruct for these hominins? 

In all honesty, I dislike the term entomophagy.  It reminds me of other –phagies, such as geophagy and coprophagy, which are terms that describe the inclusion of things in the diet that would not generally be there under normal circumstances.  In this light, I believe entomophagy retains stigma.  Although insectivory reduces the practice to animal-like feeding, it is at least a normal behavior and one that is often critical for receiving adequate nutrition at that.

I have not settled on an answer for Homo erectus.   On one hand, using insectivory allows me to prolong the use of my preferred term and I do not think there is any offense to be taken through implication that Homo erectus are not people.  On the other hand, removing stigma from entomophagy, the word and the practice, is necessary in promoting insects as food, so the more it is used, the more “normal” it may seem.