![]() ![]() We know that over 6 million years, human brain size increased by 300 percent. The way that early humans obtained meat matters because access to it likely played a big role in the story of human evolution. Neanderthal's scavenging a zebra carcass for food. After observing that lions in Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy leave a large amount of their kill intact, paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner hypothesized in a 2015 paper in the Journal of Human Evolution that saber-toothed cats living there 1.8 million years ago may have killed and consumed their prey in a similar way, leaving plenty left over for hungry hominids. Still, it’s possible that scavenging alone could’ve provided enough nutrition for early humans. READ MORE: Did Homo Erectus Craft Complex Tools and Weapons? Making some prehistoric Big Macs ![]() “This is important because it provides the earliest archaeological evidence of this type of resource transport behavior in the human lineage.”įerraro and his team said the early humans who lived at Kanjera South showed signs of scavenging and hunting, meaning that picking apart an already-dead animal was not their only source of meat. “ hominins not only scavenged these head remains, they also transported them some distance to the archaeological site before breaking them open and consuming the brains,” anthropologist Joseph Ferraro, the study’s lead author, told. Given this, early humans may have been eating scraps left over from another animal’s kill. But later scholars noted that many of these tools seem more appropriate for cutting up bone and meat than for actually killing an animal. Early 20th-century archaeologists who uncovered the remains of animal bones with early human tools assumed that prehistoric people-or more specifically, prehistoric men-must have hunted these animals for food. While hunting is the act of killing animals for food, scavenging involves locating the remains of an animal that is already dead. It’s also changed how we understand the historical shift toward meat-eating-a dietary move that scholars think played an important role in human evolution. But what if most early humans were actually scavengers? The notion, first proposed by scholars in the second half of the 20th century, has since challenged the dated presumption that prehistoric men hunted food and women gathered it. Popular culture often shows cavemen as aggressive, club-wielding hunters. ![]()
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