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Meat was main dish for early humans

Now, they can confirm that it was indeed a regular staple of the diet at least one-and-a-half million years ago. Dominguez-Rodrigo says it tells a lot about the social habits of early humans and much more.

“Getting meat in a Savannah ecosystem, in a Savannah environment, is not something simple for a primate. It is something that requires planning. Something that requires cooperation. Something that requires a complex social organization. We were not sure how these early humans behaved in that regard. It is important because this is happening pretty much at the same time period as we see that the brain starts developing, starts growing, compared to previous hominids. And brain growth has important nutritional requirements and some of them are the vitamins that are associated with meat eating,” said Dominguez-Rodrigo.

He’s talking about B vitamins and that’s where the skull fragments come in. Scientists know from studying the remains of humans over the centuries that dietary deficiencies leave traces in bone. The fragments belonging to a one or two year old child had bone lesions commonly associated with a lack of B vitamins. In other words, the lesions indicate the child was anemic from not eating enough meat.

“We don’t find these pathologies commonly in populations that live on hunting and gathering, because the diet of hunter / gatherers is actually more beneficial for human metabolism than the diet of producers. So our surprise was to find that this pathology typical of sedentary populations actually was found in a prehistoric hunter-gatherer individual that was 1.5-million years old,” he said.