Israeli researchers studying the diet of humans from the Stone Age say the species spent about 2 million years as a hyper-carnivorous ‘vertex predator’ that mostly ate the meat of large animals.
The study at Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with the Portuguese University of Minho, disputes the view that prehistoric people were omnivores and that their eating habits could be compared to those of modern people, TAU said in a statement.
“Our study has addressed a very large current controversy – scientific as well as non-scientific,” said prof. Ran Barkai of the Department of Archeology, one of the researchers, said. “We present a picture that is unprecedented in its inclusivity and breadth, which clearly shows that humans were initially top predators that specialized in hunting large animals.”
Get the Start-Up Israel’s daily start-up by email and never miss our top stories Free signup
The results, published in the Yearbook of the American Physical Anthropology Association, have implications not only for the way we view the past, but also for our modern diets, Barkai said. He calls the fad Paleolithic diet, which assumes that prehistoric people ate vegetables, fruits, nuts, carrots and meat, making the food most natural for consumption.
Illustrative: An ancient tribal leader who eats meat. (iStock / Getty Images)
But the research suggests that only the last item on the list was on the cave dwellers menu.
“For many people today, the Paleolithic diet is a critical issue, not only regarding the past, but also about the present and future,” Barkai said. ‘It is difficult to convince a pious vegetarian that his / her ancestors were not vegetarians, and that people tend to confuse personal beliefs with scientific reality. Our study is multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. ”
The researchers combined genetics, metabolism, physiology, morphology and archeology of tool development to solve the question of whether the Stone Age people were specialized carnivores or generalist omnivores.
“So far, the attempts to reconstruct the diet of people from the Stone Age have mostly been based on comparisons with 20th-century hunter-gatherer associations,” explains TAU co-researcher Miki Ben-Dor. “However, this comparison is useless, because two million years ago, hunter-gatherers could hunt and devour elephants and other large animals – while today’s hunter-gatherers do not have access to such abundance.”
Prof. Ran Barkai (University of Tel Aviv)
The team examined the acidity of our stomach, even for predators, suggesting a meat diet in which the acid provides protection against harmful bacteria.
They also looked at the fat structure in human cells: similar to predators, human fat is stored in large amounts of small fat cells, while in omnivores it tends to be the other way around.
They call the human genome beyond proof.
“Geneticists, for example, concluded that ‘regions of the human genome were closed off to allow a high-fat diet, while the regions of the genome were opened in chimpanzees to allow a high-sugar diet,'” Ben- Dor said.
Further archaeological evidence supports their hypothesis, they argued, including the study of stable isotopes in the bones of prehistoric humans indicating the consumption of high-fat meat, probably from large animals.
“Most likely, as in modern-day predators, hunting itself was an important human activity during most of human evolution,” Ben-Dor said. “Other archaeological evidence – such as the fact that specialized tools for obtaining and processing vegetable food appeared only in the later stages of human evolution, also supports the centrality of large animals in the human diet during most of human history. . “
Illustrative: A caveman holding a spear with stones, ready to hunt animals’ prey. (iStock / Getty Images)
According to the researchers, humans only started moving 85,000 years ago to a diet that is much more plant-based, possibly due to a decline in larger animals as a food source.
‘As Darwin discovered, adapting species to obtain and digest their food is the main source of evolutionary change, and so the claim that humans were predators for most of their evolution may provide a broad basis for fundamental insights. about the biological and cultural evolution of humans, ”Barkai said.
