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During the Stone Age, our ancestors ate only meat

During the Stone Age, our ancestors ate only meat Researchers at Tel Aviv University say only the extinction of larger animals and the decline of animal food sources led humans to consume vegetables. Photo by Usman Yousaf on Unsplash Humans were predators for about two million years, introducing vegetation into their diet only when larger animals went extinct and animal food sources declined toward the end of the Stone Age, claims a paper published in the Yearbook of the American Physical Anthropology Association by archeologists Miki Ben-Dor and Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University, with Raphael Sirtoli of the University of Minho, Portugal.

Humans were apex predators for two million years

Credit: Dr. Miki Ben Dor Researchers at Tel Aviv University were able to reconstruct the nutrition of stone age humans. In a paper published in the Yearbook of the American Physical Anthropology Association, Dr. Miki Ben-Dor and Prof. Ran Barkai of the Jacob M. Alkov Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, together with Raphael Sirtoli of Portugal, show that humans were an apex predator for about two million years. Only the extinction of larger animals (megafauna) in various parts of the world, and the decline of animal food sources toward the end of the stone age, led humans to gradually increase the vegetable element in their nutrition, until finally they had no choice but to domesticate both plants and animals - and became farmers.

For 2 million years, humans ate meat and little else -- study

Human brain development and eating habits (Dr. Miki Ben-Dor) Israeli researchers studying the nutrition of Stone Age humans say the species spent some 2 million years as hyper-carnivorous “apex predators” that ate mostly the meat of large animals. The study at Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with Portugal’s University of Minho, challenges views that prehistoric humans were omnivores and that their eating habits can be compared to those of modern humans, TAU said in a statement. “Our study addresses a very great current controversy – both scientific and non-scientific,” said Prof. Ran Barkai of TAU’s archeology department, one of the researchers. “We propose a picture that is unprecedented in its inclusiveness and breadth, which clearly shows that humans were initially apex predators, who specialized in hunting large animals.”

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