In developed societies across the world today, many are converting to vegetarianism or veganism, following diets that completely exclude meat or animal products from their consumption habits. Over the course of human history, frequent meat eating has been associated as a distinctive marker between humans and other primates. However, a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) actually shows that the human meat diet hypothesis has been overstated in early human evolution, questioning the hard-wiring of humans to be carnivores “by nature.”
Dr. W. Andrew Barr, an assistant professor of anthropology at the George Washington University, and lead author on the current study remarked:
“It’s clear that eating meat has been important for many groups of humans throughout much of human history and prehistory. But the idea that there was a sudden evolutionary event where meat eating went from being relatively unimportant to being so central that it drove the evolution of key human traits just doesn’t shake out in our analysis of the published evidence.”
Homo Erectus and the Human Meat Diet Hypothesis
The widespread belief has been that with the advent and arrival of Homo Erectus , literally, upright man, roughly 2 million years ago, and the increase in the brain size, an evolutionary transition was made towards more human-like traits, leading to a major dietary shift that increasingly was a meat diet . Popularly known as the “meat made us human” hypothesis, the authors of the new study argue that greater evidence skewed in favor of this theory has created a narrative not necessarily based on historical evidence.
Read more: Ancient Origins
