the teeth record what was eaten in the last few days. What this means is that we can tell what those particular individuals were eating before they died. There is marked seasonality in diets of chimps for example and significant differences in diet between chimps in different areas. What this means is that we should probably avoid generalizing about the diet of A. sediba or any other fossil hominim.

which explains why they were eating wood.

Coprolith analysis is a little more reliable, since some of it can be assumed to have come from more robust people, not those near death. What little I've managed to read on the subject suggests that the paleo diet was anything that didn't poison them and much that did, including insects, grubs, leaves, grasses, bark (likely for the sweet sap on the surface), and any seeds they could find in fruit or topping grasses or in pods. Most of the diet was vegetable and most of it was high bulk, low nutritional value stuff.

They were regular, if nothing else. They also mostly died by the age of 40.

You are right about them eating almost anything, I think. One of the most interesting things about prople and our bio-cultural evolution is that we have found ways to process foods before eating in such a way as to make them edible. Manioc and acorns for example cannot generally be eaten w/o fairly extensive processing. I think this sort of behavior may have begun fairly early in our evolutionary history.

An eerie story from Grandmom Murphy educating us on the "troubles."..

Look for that (delicious) Chocolate Bark.

And it even comes ground up for those with dentures.

And there is a load of difference between grains harvested and used with minimal processing, as opposed to the whole-scale extraction of nutrients that is done to grains today.

And if one is to consider the use of grains - i.e. domestication of grains - that goes hand-in-hand in the domestication of cattle, sheep, etc.

There were some groups of people at that time that relied more on meat than grains, and others more on grains than meat.

The Masai for example live largely on the products of their cattle.

March 9, 2011 By Lisa M. Krieger
A team of Stanford University scientists, using the largest-ever genetic analysis of remote tribal people, have determined that the human family tree is rooted in one of the world's most marginal and primitive people - the Bushmen of southern Africa.

But Feldman, who led the team with geneticist Brenna Henn, went on to say, "But they are total geniuses in the bush." Further, he explained, "over tens of thousands of years, we lost the skills they have, that they teach their children. We developed a totally different set of values - with evolution through agriculture - that bypassed these people."

http://phys.org/news/2011-03-genetic-analysis-modern-humans-evolved.html

Here is the diet of the Bushmen:

It's the difference between

Proto-humans
||

Bushmen

|| ||

Bushmen others

and

Proto-humans

|| ||

Bushmen others

It'll come down to how you define "Bushmen" historically. It's like saying Friesian is descended from Dutch. If you define the dialect area before they diverged as "Dutch," sure; if you give it a different name--after all, it wasn't modern Dutch and the dialect was as Friesian as it was Dutch--then it wasn't.

As soon as you start talking culture, though, I always think the definition's being blurred because a researcher has decided to either advocate or blue-sky.

Some linguists have tried to allow the claim that the typologically odd Khoei-san phonological systems are somehow evidence of great time depth for the group as a specific group. But linguistic systems can change quickly, esp. in isolation. There's also a possible counterclaim: You get lots of genetic diversity (and linguistic diversity) not just where a stable population has been allowed to diversify over a long time period but also where a lot of populations are forced together. The Bushmen have essentially been the victim of a millennial campaign of genocide by Bantu-speakers and are left not where they're most comfortable but where the Bantu-speakers let them be.