The Broad Spectrum Species: Plant Use and Processing as Deep Time Adaptations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Plants have often been considered peripheral to the human story until the relatively recent past, only starting to become significant to human diet in the Epipaleolithic when hunter-gatherers were thought to incorporate a range of previously ignored foods into their diets, including grass seeds. This was argued to have laid the groundwork for an increasingly intertwined relationship between hunter-gatherer communities and cereals, eventuating in plant domestication and agriculture. In this paper, we review the evidence for Flannery’s ‘Broad Spectrum Revolution’ and the early use of plant foods globally. We argue that broad-spectrum plant use, including complex plant processing, is a normal characteristic of early human groups and was a critical factor in the successful peopling of new environments globally, rather than a step en route to agriculture. We are a broad-spectrum species, and the ability to process a wide range of plant foods represents a key threshold in hominin evolution.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".