270
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
270 points (100.0% liked)
science
21152 readers
614 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
This is just not true in the bigger picture of human evolution. That paper focuses on humans in North Africa 15,000–13,000 years ago which is a very tiny snapshot in time and geography.
Eating meat is a major part of what separated archaic humans from other primates; it is theorized that the calories from meat is part of what helped us grow our larger brains. Homo Habilis was eating meat 2.6 million years ago, well before Homo Sapiens even existed. Homo Erectus hunted to the point of wiping out many large herbivores over a 1.5 million year time period. They are meat regularly enough for tapeworms to speciate specifically for us as hosts.
Humans and human ancestors have also been consuming large quantities of plants for far earlier than that. Here's another paper looking 780,000 years ago finding a wide amount of plants consumed
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2418661121
I am not saying that hunting didn't happen (it definitely did). I am just saying that more recent research is painting a very different picture of the level of consumption of it
If a species is straight up annihilating multiple species merely through predation, it's not statistically possible for it to be a small amount of meat. A wide variety of plants eaten, as pointed out in that paper, doesn't mean it was mostly a plant diet - if anything, that means it's likely humans primarily only ate plants while traveling during a hunt.
Or when meat was scarce!
yes, of course we ate lots of plants as well, that was never disputed. We were hunters and gatherers. The point is meat has absolutely been a significant part of our diets for millions of years (the exact ratio depending on the environment humans found themselves in). it is well documented by many direct lines of evidence as i laid out above.
it didn't just "happen" like once in a while. we are/were probably the best hunters ever seen on planet earth. we basically wiped out global megafauna over the last 1.5 million years.
what exactly do you mean by "very different picture"? that's an extremely vague statement that could mean almost anything.