Is Eating Like Our Ancestors Good For Us?

November 10, 2012

A fragment of a child's skull discovered at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, shows the oldest known evidence of anemia caused by a nutritional deficiency. (Credit: Dominguez-Rodrigo M, Pickering TR, Diez-Martin F, Mabulla A, Musiba C)

From VOA Learning English, this is SCIENCE IN THE NEWS in Special English. I’m Christopher Cruise.

And I’m June Simms. Today we tell about evidence that early humans were meat-eaters much earlier than scientists have thought. We also tell about an ancient relative of humans that probably avoided meat. And we report on a diet that some people say copies the diet of our ancient ancestors.

At least one million five hundred thousand years ago, humans ate meat as part of their daily diet. That is big news to archeologists. The evidence was found in fossilized remains of a young child’s skull. The fossils were recovered from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.

Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo of Spain’s Complutense University has been searching for clues about early humans for twenty years. He has been digging at the Olduvai Gorge since two thousand six. He earlier studied fossils found by the famous British archeologist and anthropologist Mary Leakey.

“There was an increasing amount of evidence that early humans -- pretty much around two million years ago -- were eating meat. And archeologists over the past fifty years have been debating two main questions. One: was meat an important element in the diet of these hominins or was it just a complimentary element, like you might see in modern chimpanzees, for instance? And question number two is, whether it was important or not, how did they acquire this meat? Did they hunt the animals they were eating? Did they scavenge the animals they were eating?”