Get email notification for articles from Ariel David
Follow
Apr. 4, 2021 1:30 PM
We are what we eat, goes the old saying, and new research has revealed one of the deepest and oldest secrets of who we are as a species. Humans are natural born killers: super-predators designed by evolution to subsist mainly on the meat and fat of large animals, and genetically hardwired to hunt our prey into extinction, says a new study on the eating habits of prehistoric hominins going back 2 million years.
This meta-analysis collated information from some 400 previous studies, conducted over decades by unconnected scientists, and providing biological, genetic, archaeological and molecular data on the diet of our Stone Age ancestors.
“There is evidence that large fauna was abundant when early humans evolved, anthropologist Miki Ben-Dor, who recently published a study in
Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, told SYFY WIRE. At some stage very large species were replaced by smaller (though still large) species with a decline in the richness of species. I believe that humans preference for large prey was responsible for their demise.”
There are other primates which are technically omnivores but spend most of their days hanging from trees and feeding. For humans, that was too much effort for too little energy, so they hunted. Ben-Dor and Barkai argue that brain size actually began to decline near the end of the Pleistocene as people started eating more plants and let some of the meat they had previously been after run away from their spears. They also believe that human brain size was at its height when when our own many-times-great-grandparents and other Homo species were consuming things that had more fu
Shutterstock / Gorodenkoff
Our ancestors’ diets changed dramatically over the course of the past 2.5 million years, and one research team thinks that profoundly affected our evolution.
According to a team including Miki Ben-Dor and Ran Barkai at Tel Aviv University in Israel, hominin diets were once so dominated by meat from massive animals that the hunters caused some of those species to go extinct. This, in turn, forced our ancestors to develop more sophisticated hunting techniques to bring down smaller, more elusive prey, leading to greater intelligence and the … Continue reading Subscribe now for unlimited access
App + Web
Contentious Hypothesis Posits Humans Brains Grew Larger as We Hunted Smaller Prey
STEPHANIE PAPPAS, LIVE SCIENCE
12 MARCH 2021
Over the course of the Pleistocene epoch, between 2.6 million years ago and 11,700 years ago, the brains of humans and their relatives grew.
Now, scientists from Tel Aviv University have a new hypothesis as to why: As the largest animals on the landscape disappeared, the scientists propose, human brains had to grow to enable the hunting of smaller, swifter prey.
This hypothesis argues that early humans specialized in taking down the largest animals, such as elephants, which would have provided ample fatty meals. When these animals numbers declined, humans with bigger brains, who presumably had more brainpower, were better at adapting and capturing smaller prey, which led to better survival for the brainiacs.
How Less Or Zero Big Prey Sparked Human Brain Development
According to the scientists’ thesis , when early humans hunted the large animals they depended on for food into extinction, it toppled the first evolutionary domino.
At the time humans first appear in the fossil record (circa two million BC), the average size of land mammals was approximately 1100 pounds (500 kilograms). The earth was overrun with hulking creatures that were slow and easy to find, which meant the first human hunters didn’t have to travel very far or work very hard to keep their social groups well-fed.
Unfortunately for proto-man, the hunting was a little