Recent work on modern hunter-gatherers challenges long-standing assumptions about the role of key dietary components in human evolution. While paleoanthropologists have focused on men and meat, quantitative ethnographic data show the reliance of young children on the plant foods gathered by mothers and grandmothers. These observations support the grandmother hypothesis which combines juvenile foraging capacities, local resource opportunities, and mother-child food sharing to link the use of certain kinds of plant foods to the evolution of the long post-menopausal lifespans, long childhoods, and high fertilities that distinguish modern human life histories.