Much of the food available to early hominids was starchy, like the modern potato. It had some nutrition, but nothing in the way of excitement for the taste buds, which meant they wouldn’t send signals to the brain to provoke their appetite. The smell receptors couldn’t help much, either, given that starch offers little in the way of the volatiles of aroma. Something else needed to tell Ardi that tubers were great to eat, and that something could have been the gut. It didn’t care that they were tasteless. The stomach was on the lookout for a much more important aspect of food. It was looking
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