Early Humans Were Hunters and Ate Meat

A latest discovery indicates meat eating by early humans and it dates back to much earlier in history than previously believed.  Based on the research into a fragment of a child's skull the scientists arrived at this conclusion and also suggest anemia due to nutritional deficiency in the child.

"I know this will sound awful to vegetarians, but meat made us human," researcher Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo, an archaeologist at Complutense University in Madrid was quoted by LiveScience.

The skull fragment found at the Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania is believed to belong to a child younger than two and shows bone lesions that mostly occur due to lack of vitamin B in the diet.

Previous reports highlighted that early hominids ate meat. But there was no strong evidence to specify clearly whether it was a regular part of the diet or only consumed periodically.

The authors suggest that the bone lesions in the child's skull fragment prove that meat-eating was common enough that not consuming it could lead to anemia.

According to LiveScience, this kind of bone lesions are known as porotic hyperostosis, which typically results from a lack of vitamins B9 and B12 in the diet. Nutritional deficiencies such as anemia are most common at weaning, when children's diets change drastically.

The authors predict that the child may have died when he/she was starting to eat solid foods that did not include meat. Or if the child was still depending on mother's milk and the mother might have been nutritionally deficient due to lack of meat consumption.

These findings suggest that "human brain development could not have existed without a diet based on regular consumption of meat," said Dominguez-Rodrigo. "Regular consumption of meat at that time implied that humans were hunters by then. Scavenging only rarely provides access to meat and is only feasible in African savannas on a seasonal basis."

Both cases imply that "early humans were hunters, and had a physiology adapted to regular meat consumption at least 1.5 million years ago," say the authors.