Can anyone help with a querry from an AS student (It's a bit long winded, so bear with me...)
Having spent today's lesson looking at Oldowan tools and the tool making ability of chimps, one of my students asked how many calories there is in bone marrow, as all the emphasis is on its high fat and protein content.
I managed to find a figure of 786 calories for 100g of caribou marrow, and we then worked out that to get the equivalent amount of calories that the chimps were getting from the nuts that they were eating in the article we were reading, Homo habilis would have to eat 380g of marrow.
So the question is, how much bone would Hh have to process to get 380g of marrow? I know the figures are only going to be approximate (and I'm well aware that Homo habilis weren't eating caribou (so if anyone has any figures for gazelle or something similar, that'd be good), but we were just curious to see how much effort was involved in procuring the same amount of calories
Thanks
Charlie
|