SCIENCE: Research reveals ancient humans were apex predators for 2 million years

A study of the diets of our Pleis­tocene ances­tors reveals that Pale­olith­ic cui­sine was not lean and green.

Two mil­lion years ago, Homo sapi­ens and their ances­tors ditched sal­ads and ate more meat, ris­ing to the top of the food chain.

Paleo isn’t the bal­anced diet of berries, grains, and meats you might imagine.

But mod­ern hunter-gath­er­ers seem to have the wrong impres­sion of what we once ate, accord­ing to a study last year by anthro­pol­o­gists from Tel Aviv Uni­ver­si­ty (Israel) and Min­ho Uni­ver­si­ty (Por­tu­gal).

“How­ev­er, this com­par­i­son is mean­ing­ful because hunter-gath­er­er soci­eties two mil­lion years ago were able to hunt and con­sume large ani­mals such as ele­phants, where­as today’s hunter-gath­er­er soci­eties do not have access to such an abun­dance of ani­mals. No,” explained Miki Ben­dor, a researcher at Tel Aviv Uni­ver­si­ty in Israel, in 2021.

A review of hun­dreds of pre­vi­ous stud­ies, from mod­ern human anato­my and phys­i­ol­o­gy to iso­tope mea­sure­ments inside ancient human bones and teeth, sug­gests that until about 12,000 years ago, we were pri­mar­i­ly apex preda­tors. It has been sug­gest­ed that

Recon­struct­ing a 2.5‑million-year-old human food list is more dif­fi­cult because plant remains, like ani­mal bones, teeth and shells, can­not be preserved.

There are also stud­ies that have local­ly dis­cov­ered diets high in plant mat­ter by chem­i­cal­ly ana­lyz­ing bone and tooth enam­el. But extrap­o­lat­ing this to human­i­ty as a whole is not so easy.

Much evi­dence of hunt­ing can be found in the fos­sil record, but to deter­mine what was col­lect­ed, anthro­pol­o­gists have tra­di­tion­al­ly relied on mod­ern ethno­gra­phies, assum­ing lit­tle has changed.

Accord­ing to Ben-Dor et al., this is a big mistake.

“Whole ecosys­tems are chang­ing and you can’t com­pare con­di­tions,” says Ben-Dor.

The Pleis­tocene was a turn­ing point in Earth­’s his­to­ry for us humans. As a result, we’ve marched to every cor­ner of the globe and out­lived every oth­er hominid on our fam­i­ly tree.

Much of present-day Europe and North Amer­i­ca was affect­ed by the last great ice age and was buried in thick glaciers.

Ecosys­tems around the world were very dif­fer­ent than they are today because much of the water was trapped in the form of ice. Mam­moths, mastodons, giant sloths, and oth­er large ani­mals roamed about that were far larg­er than they are today.

Of course, we all know that Homo sapi­ens hunt­ed giant ani­mals with inge­nu­ity and tremen­dous phys­i­cal strength. But it’s not so easy to tell how often these her­bi­vores were eaten.

Rather than rely­ing sole­ly on the fos­sil record or mak­ing nuanced com­par­isons to pre-agri­cul­tur­al cul­tures, researchers look to the evi­dence embed­ded in our own bod­ies, look­ing at our clos­est cousins ​​and their clos­est cousins.

“To recon­struct the diet of Stone Age humans, we decid­ed to use oth­er meth­ods: look­ing at the mem­o­ry, metab­o­lism, genet­ics and physique stored in our own bod­ies.” says Bendall.

“Human behav­ior changes rapid­ly, but evo­lu­tion is slow. The body remembers.

For exam­ple, our bod­ies require more ener­gy per unit vol­ume when com­pared to oth­er pri­mates. Espe­cial­ly the brain needs a lot of ener­gy. Social time, such as par­ent­ing, also lim­its the time avail­able for foraging.

We store more fat and can quick­ly con­vert it to ketones for use when need­ed. While oth­er omni­vores have few but large fat cells, our fat cells are small and numer­ous like carnivores.

Also, our diges­tive sys­tem is sim­i­lar to that of ani­mals high­er up the food chain. The unusu­al­ly strong stom­ach acid may be nec­es­sary to break down pro­teins and kill harm­ful bac­te­ria, such as those found in a week-old mam­moth fillet.