A new study calls the claim that meat-eating was really important into question:
There’s a widespread belief that eating meat became much more common with the advent of big-brained Homo erectus, two million years ago, based on increased archaeological evidence of meat-eating from that point.
But new research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has called that belief into question, suggesting that the numbers don’t quite add up.
“Generations of paleoanthropologists have gone to famously well-preserved sites in places like Olduvai Gorge looking for — and finding — breathtaking direct evidence of early humans eating meat, furthering this viewpoint that there was an explosion of meat-eating after two million years ago,” says Dr Andrew Barr, assistant professor of anthropology at George Washington University, US, and lead author on the paper.
“However, when you quantitatively synthesise the data from numerous sites across eastern Africa to test this hypothesis, as we did here, that ‘meat made us human’ evolutionary narrative starts to unravel.”
Ellen Phiddian, “Did meat-eating really play a big role in human evolution?” at Cosmos Magazine (January 25, 2022)
The dates examined range from 1.2 million years ago to 2.6 million years ago.
The paper is closed access but here’s the Significance statement:
Significance
Many quintessential human traits (e.g., larger brains) first appear in Homo erectus. The evolution of these traits is commonly linked to a major dietary shift involving increased consumption of animal tissues. Early archaeological sites preserving evidence of carnivory predate the appearance of H. erectus, but larger, well-preserved sites only appear after the arrival of H. erectus. This qualitative pattern is a key tenet of the “meat made us human” viewpoint, but data from sites across eastern Africa have not been quantitatively synthesized to test this hypothesis. Our analysis shows no sustained increase in the relative amount of evidence for carnivory after the appearance of H. erectus, calling into question the primacy of carnivory in shaping its evolutionary history.
On the whole, lots of things are easier to get hold of than meat (eggs and fish come to mind).
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