Saliva and its ‘mouth watering’ role in evolution
Our saliva may have played an important role in establishing world domination for humans.
Research from the University of California has shown that humans have been found to carry many more copies of the salivary amylase gene than our ape relatives. Amylase is an enzyme that digests starch.
The findings add weight to the idea that starch from vegetables was a crucial addition to the diet of early man after cooking was discovered.
Penny Harrington
b5 media Health and Genetics correspondent
I absolutely can’t stand when people just say University of California like all the schools within the University of California system are the same. This researcher was from University of California at Santa Cruz, which is different than University of California at Los Angeles or University of California at Berkeley.
Thanks ML for pointing this out – I’ll make sure future blogs make this clear.