10 Theories Backing Our Plant-Based Roots

The zoologist Jordi Casamitjana lays out 10 hypotheses that help to support the notion that early humans had a predominantly plant-based diet.

Palaeoanthropology is a tricky science.

I should know, because during my studies for my degree in zoology, which I undertook in Catalonia before I emigrated to the UK, I chose Palaeoanthropology as one of the subjects for the last year of this five-year degree (back there in the 1980s many science degrees were longer than they are today, so we could study a wider range of subjects). For the uninitiated, Palaeoanthropology is the science that studies the extinct species of the human family, mostly from the study of fossils of human (or hominid) remains. It’s a specialised branch of Palaeontology, which studies all extinct species, not only those of primates close to modern humans.

There are three reasons why palaeoanthropology is tricky. Firstly, because by studying ourselves (the “anthropology” part of the word) we are likely to be biased, and attribute elements of modern humans to previous species of hominids. Secondly, it is based on studying fossils (the “paleo” part of the word) and these are rare and often fragmented and distorted. Thirdly, because, contrary to other branches of palaeontology, we only have one species of human left, so we don’t have the luxury of making the type of comparative analysis we can make with the study of prehistoric bees, for instance, or prehistoric crocodiles.

So, when we want to answer the question about what the diet of our hominid ancestors was, based on their anatomical and physiological adaptations, we find that many of the potential hypotheses are difficult to prove with a convincing level of certainty. There is little doubt that most of our ancestry had a mostly plant-based diet (our last 32 million years or so, anyway) as we are a type of ape and all apes are mostly plant-based, but there have been disagreements regarding our ancestors’ diets in the latest stages of our evolution, in the last 3 million years or so.

In recent years, though, advances in the ability to study fossil DNA, as well as progress in understanding genetics, physiology, and metabolism, have been providing more information that is gradually allowing us to reduce the uncertainty that caused the disagreements. One of the things we have been realising in the last few decades is that the old-fashioned simplistic idea that early humans had a prominently meat-eating diet is likely to be wrong. More and more scientists (including me) are now convinced that the main diet of most early humans, especially those in our direct lineage, was plant-based.

However, Palaeoanthropology being what it is, with all the inherited baggage this tricky scientific discipline carries, a consensus among its scientists has not been achieved yet, so many hypotheses remain just that, hypotheses, which regardless of how promising and exciting they may be, have not yet been proven.

In this article, I will introduce 10 of these promising hypotheses that support the notion that early humans had a predominantly plant-based diet, some of which already with data to back them up, while others still being just an idea that needs further study (and some of these may even be initial ideas that occurred to me when replying to some comments from people who had read a previous article I wrote on this subject).

1. Endurance running evolved to avoid predators

We belong to the sub-species Homo sapiens sapiens of the species Homo sapiens, but although this is the only species left of hominid, there were many other species in the past (more than 20 discovered so far), some directly part of our ancestry, while others from dead-end branches not directly connected to us.

The first Hominids that we know of did not even belong to the same genus as us (the genus Homo) but to the genus Ardipithecus. They appeared between 6 and 4 million years ago, and we do not know much about them as we have found very few fossils. It seems, though, that Ardipithecus has many features close to the bonobos (our closest living relatives who used to be called pygmy chimpanzees) and still lived mostly on the trees, and therefore it is likely they still were a frugivore species like them. Between 5 and 3 million years ago, Ardipithecus evolved into another group of Hominids of the genus Australopithecus (all the species of which are commonly known as the Australopithecines), and the first species of the genus Homo evolved from some of their species, so they are in our direct lineage. It is believed the Australopithecines were the first hominids who moved from the trees to live mostly on the ground, in this case, the African savannah, and the first to walk mostly on two legs.

There have been studies that suggest that many of the anatomical and physiological adaptations of the Australopithecines are an adaptation to exhaustion hunting (or endurance hunting), which means running for long distances chasing animals until the pray cannot run anymore due to exhaustion), and this has been used to support the idea that they shifted from plant-eating to meat-eating (and it explains why we are still good marathon runners).

However, there is an alternative hypothesis that explains the evolution of endurance running without linking it to hunting and meat-eating. If evidence shows evolution made Australopithecines good long-distance runners, why conclude that running was related to hunting? It could be the opposite. It could be related to running from predators, not to prey. By moving from the trees to the open savannah, we suddenly became exposed to new predators who hunt by running, like cheetahs, lions, wolves, etc. This meant extra pressure to survive, which would only lead to a successful species if they found new ways to defend themselves from these new predators.

Those first savannah hominids did not develop spines, long sharp teeth, shells, poison, etc. The only defensive mechanism they developed that they did not have before is the ability to run. So, running could just be a new adaptation against new predators, and because speed would never be higher than the predators themselves as we only had two legs, endurance running (with the associated sweat as we did it in open hot savannahs) would be the only option that could even the predator/prey odds. It may well be that there was a particular predator who became specialised in hunting humans (like a type of sabretooth lion) but this predator gave up stalking humans after a long distance, so early hominids may have evolved the capacity to run and keep running for a long time when they spotted one of these lions, which would make the lions give up.

2. Human Teeth are adapted to plant-eating

The dentition of modern-day humans is more similar to that of anthropoid apes than any other dentition of any other animal. Anthropoid apes include the gibbon, siamang, orangutan, gorilla, chimpanzee, and bonobo, and none of these apes are carnivorous animals. All of them are either folivores (gorillas) or frugivores (the rest). This is already telling us that we are not a carnivorous species and that the likelihood of humans having a frugivore adaptation is higher than having a folivore/herbivore adaptation.

There are important differences between human teeth and those of the great apes, though. Since we split from the other apes about 7 million years ago, evolution has been changing the teeth of the hominid lineage. The extra-large, dagger-like canine teeth seen in male great apes have been missing from human ancestors for at least 4.5 million years.  As long canines in primates are more related to status than to feeding habits, this suggests that male human ancestors became less aggressive with each other around the same time, possibly because females preferred less aggressive mates.

Modern-day humans have four canines, one in each quarter jaw, and males have proportionately the smallest canines of all male great apes, but they have oversized roots, which is a remnant of the large canine of the apes. The evolution of hominoids from the Miocene to the Pliocene period (5–2.5 million years ago) saw a gradual reduction in canine length, enamel thickness of molars and cuspal heights. By 3.5 million years ago, our ancestors’ teeth were arranged in rows that were slightly wider apart at the back than at the front, and by 1.8 million years ago, our ancestors’ canines had become short and relatively blunt like ours.

Across all teeth, hominin evolution showed a reduction in both crown and root sizes, with the former probably preceding the latter. A change in diet might have reduced the functional loads on dental crowns causing a subsequent reduction in root morphology and size. However, this does not necessarily point towards hominids becoming more carnivorous (as skin, muscles and bones are tough, so you would expect an increase in root sizes), but could be towards eating softer fruits (such as berries), finding new methods to break nuts (such as with stones), or even cooking food (fire was mastered by humans from about 2 million years ago), which would give availability to new vegetable foods (such as roots and some grains).

We know that, in primates, canines have two possible functions, one is to de-husk fruits and seeds and another is for display in intraspecific antagonistic encounters, so when hominids moved out from the trees into the savannah changing both their social and reproductive dynamics as well as part of their diet, if this was really a move towards carnivorism, there would have been two opposite evolutionary forces changing canine size, one toward reducing it (less need for antagonistic displays) and another toward increasing it (to use the canines for hunting or tearing up meat), so the size of canines likely would not have changed much. However, we found a substantial reduction in canine size, suggesting that there was no “carnivore” evolutionary force to increase canine size when they changed habitat, and hominids continued being mostly plant-based.

3. Omega-3 fatty acids were obtained from non-animal sources

There have been theories that suggest that early humans ate lots of fishes and other aquatic animals, and even that some of our morphology may have evolved from aquatic adaptations to fishing (such as our lack of body hair and the presence of subcutaneous fat). The British marine biologist Alister Hardy first proposed this “Aquatic Ape” hypothesis in the 1960s. He wrote, “My thesis is that a branch of this primitive ape-stock was forced by competition from life in the trees to feed on the seashores and to hunt for food, shellfish, sea urchins etc., in the shallow waters off the coast.”

While the hypothesis has some popularity with the lay public, it has been generally ignored or classified as pseudoscience by paleoanthropologists. However, there is still a fact that is used to support it, or at the very least to support the idea that our early ancestors ate so many aquatic animals that our physiology changed because of it: our need to consume Omega-3 fatty acids.

Many doctors recommend their patients eat fishes because they say modern humans need to obtain these crucial fats from food, and aquatic animals are the best sources. They also advise vegans to take some Omega 3 supplements, as many believe that they may end up being deficient if they don’t eat seafood. The inability to directly synthesise some Omega 3 acids has therefore been used to claim we are not a plant-based species because it seems we need to eat fishes to obtain it.

However, this is incorrect. We can obtain Omega-3 from plant sources too. Omegas are essential fats and include Omega-6 and Omega-3. There are three types of Omega-3s: a shorter molecule called alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), a long molecule named docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), and an intermediate molecule called eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). DHA is made from EPA, and EPA is made from ALA. ALA is found in flaxseeds, chia seeds and walnuts, and is present in plant oils, such as flaxseed, soybean and rapeseed oils, and it is easily obtainable by vegans if they consume these in food. However, DHA and EPA are difficult to obtain as the body has a very difficult time converting ALA into them (on average, only 1 to 10% of ALA is converted into EPA and 0.5 to 5% into DHA), and this is why some doctors (even vegan doctors) recommend vegans to take supplements with DHA.

So, if it seems difficult to get enough long-chained Omega-3s if it is not from consuming aquatic animals or taking supplements, does this suggest that early humans were not predominantly plant-based, but perhaps pescatarians?

Not necessarily. An alternative hypothesis is that non-animal sources of long-chained Omega-3 were more available in our ancestors’ diet. Firstly, particular seeds that contain Omega-3s may have been more abundant in our diet in the past. Today, we only eat a very limited variety of plants compared with what our ancestors may have eaten because we have limited them to the ones we can easily cultivate. It is possible we ate many more Omega 3-rich seeds then because they were abundant in the savannah, so we were able to synthesise enough DHA because we ate lots of ALA.

Secondly, the only reason why eating aquatic animals provides many long-chained Omega-3s is that such animals eat algae, which are the organisms which synthesise DHA. In fact, the Omega-3 supplements vegans take (including me) come directly from the algae cultivated in tanks. It is then possible that early humans also ate more algae than we do, and if they ventured into shores this may not necessarily mean that they were after animals there, but they may have been after algae — as they did not have fishing gear, It would have been extremely difficult for early hominids to catch fish, but very easy to pick up algae.

4. Plant-based carbs drove human brain evolution

For some time, it was believed that when Australopithecus evolved into the early species of the genus Homo (Homo rudolfensis and Homo habilis) around 2.8 million years ago, the diet rapidly shifted towards meat-eating as the new stone tools they manufactured made it possible to cut meat, but recent studies involving carbon isotopes suggest there was no such shift then, but much later — the earliest evidence of large vertebrate meat-eating in hominins dates to about 2.6 million years ago. In any event, we could say that it is around this time that the “meat experiment” begins in human ancestry, starting to incorporate more food from bigger animals.

However, paleoanthropologists do not believe that these early species of Homo were hunters. It is thought H. habilis was still eating mainly plant-based food but gradually becoming more of a scavenger rather than a hunter, and stealing kills from smaller predators such as jackals or cheetahs. Fruit was likely still an important dietary component of these hominids, as the dental erosion consistent with repetitive exposure to acidity from fruits suggests. Based on dental microwear-texture analysis, early Homo was somewhere between tough-food eaters and leaf eaters.

What happened after these early Homo species is what has divided scientists. We know that subsequent species of Homo leading to us got increasingly larger brains and became bigger, but there are two hypotheses to explain this. On one side, some believe that the increase in meat consumption allowed the large and calorie-expensive gut to decrease in size allowing this energy to be diverted to brain growth. On the other side, others believe that a drying climate with scarcer food options made them rely primarily on underground plant storage organs (such as tubers and roots rich in starches) and food sharing, which facilitated social bonding among both male and female group members — which in turn led to bigger communicative brains that were fuelled by the glucose provided by the starches.

There is no doubt the human brain needs glucose to function. It may also need protein and fat to grow, but once the brain is formed in a juvenile, then it needs glucose, not protein. Breastfeeding may have provided all the fat needed to develop brains (likely human babies breastfed for much longer than modern humans), but then the brain would have needed lots of constant glucose input for the entire lives of the individuals. Therefore, the staple food must have been carbon-hydrate-rich fruit, grains, tubers and roots, not animals.

5. Mastering fire increased access to roots and grains

The most important driving force on diet-related evolutionary changes in early Homo species was likely the mastering of fire and the subsequent cooking of food. However, this does not only mean cooking meat, but could also mean cooking vegetables.

There have been discoveries that suggest that after Homo habilis there were other early species of Homo, such as Homo ergater, Homo ancestor, and Homo naledi, but it was Homo erectus, who first showed up around 2 million years ago, who stole the show as it was the first who left Africa toward Eurasia and mastered fire, starting eating cooked food as early as 1.9 million years ago. In consequence, many fossils and archaeological artefacts have been found of Homo erectus in many countries, and for many years scientists have suggested that this species ate much more meat than the previous species, making a clear shift away from our plant-based past. Well, it turns out they were wrong.

A 2022 study of archaeological sites in Africa suggested that the theory that Homo erectus ate more meat than the immediate hominids they evolved from could be false as it may be the result of a problem in evidence collection.

Rather than access to more meat, the ability to cook may have given Homo erectus access to tubers and roots otherwise not edible. They probably evolved the ability to digest starch better, as these hominids were the first to venture into the temperate latitudes of the planet where plants produce more starch (to store energy in habitats with less sun and rain). Enzymes called amylases aid in breaking starch into glucose with the help of water, and modern humans produce them in the saliva. Chimpanzees have only two copies of the salivary amylase gene while humans have an average of six. Perhaps this difference began with Australopithecus when they started to eat grains and became more pronounced with Homo erectus when they moved into starch-rich Eurasia.

6. Meat-eating humans became extinct

Of all the species and sub-species of hominids that existed, we are the only ones left. Traditionally, this has been interpreted as humans being directly responsible for their extinction. As we have been responsible for the extinction of so many species, this is a logical assumption.

However, what if the main reason for all but us getting extinct is that many moved into meat-eating, and only the ones who reverted to plant-eating survive? We know the descendants of plant-eating relatives we share our ancestry with before we moved into the savannah are still around (the other apes, such as bonobos, chimps, and gorillas), but all those who came after them became extinct (except for us). Perhaps this is because they shifted their diet incorporating more animal products, and this was a bad idea because their body was not designed for those. Perhaps only we survived because we reverted to plant-eating, and despite the fact many humans are eating meat today, this is a very recent phenomenon, and most of the diet of anatomically modern humans from prehistory was plant-based.

For instance, look at the Neanderthals. Homo neanderthalensis (or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis), the now-extinct archaic humans who lived in Eurasia from 100,000 years ago until about 40,000 years ago, clearly hunted big vertebrates and ate meat, with some steppe-dwelling communities in colder latitudes possibly subsisting primarily on meat. However, it is not known whether the early Homo sapiens sapiens, our species which appeared around 300,000 years ago and came to Eurasia from Africa again (our second diaspora out of Africa) coexisting with Neanderthals for a while, ate as much meat as was previously thought. Research from Eaton and Konner in 1985 and Cordain et al. in 2000 estimated that about 65% of the diets of pre-agricultural Palaeolithic humans may still have come from plants. Interestingly, anatomically modern humans are believed to have more copies of the starch-digesting genes than the Neanderthals and the Denisovans (another extinct species or subspecies of archaic human who ranged across Asia during the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic), suggesting that the ability to digest starch has been a continuous driver through human evolution as much as walking upright, having big brains and articulate speech.

Now we know that, although there was some interbreeding, the more meat-eating Neanderthal lineage from the cold North became extinct, and those humans who survive, our direct ancestors, the anatomically modern humans Homo sapiens sapiens (aka Early Modern Human or EMH) from the South, likely still ate mostly plants (at least more than the Neanderthals did).

There were other ancient human species contemporary of H.sapiens sapiens who also became extinct, such as Homo floresiensis, who lived on the island of Flores, Indonesia, from about one million years ago to the arrival of modern humans about 50,000 years ago, and the Denisovans already mentioned (still, there is no agreement on whether to name them H. denisova or H. altaiensis, or H.s.denisova), who might have become extinct as late as 15,000 years ago in New Guinea, but they all have been discovered in the last 20 years and there is not enough evidence to know about their diet as of yet. However, I wonder if, as direct descendants of H. erectus, these species might have eaten more meat, and this might have put them at a disadvantage with the H.s.sapiens who ended up displacing them. Perhaps this African hominid (us) was healthier for being more plant-based, and had become better at exploiting vegetation (perhaps digesting starches even better), ate more carbs that fed the brain and made them cleverer, and cooked more pulses that otherwise would not have been edible.

So, perhaps the hominid “meat experiment” failed as all the species of Homo that tried it the most became extinct, and perhaps the only species that survived is the one that reverted to a more plant-based diet as had been the diet of most of its ancestry.

7. Adding roots to fruit was enough for prehistoric humans

I am not the only one with the view that after the hominid “meat experiment”, prehistoric humans’ meat-eating did not become the main diet of early modern humans, who might have maintained their earlier plant-based adaptation as they continued to eat mostly plants. In January 2024, the Guardian published an article titled “Hunter-gatherers were mostly gatherers, says archaeologist.” It refers to the study of the remains of 24 individuals from two burial sites in the Peruvian Andes dating to between 9,000 and 6,500 years ago, and it concluded that wild potatoes and other root vegetables may have been their dominant food. Dr Randy Haas from the University of Wyoming and senior author of the study said, “Conventional wisdom holds that early human economies focused on hunting — an idea that has led to a number of high-protein dietary fads such as the paleo diet. Our analysis shows that the diets were composed of 80% plant matter and 20% meat…If you were to talk to me before this study I would’ve guessed meat comprised 80% of the diet. It is a fairly widespread assumption that human diets were dominated by meat.”

Research has also confirmed that there would be enough edible plants in Europe to sustain humans before agriculture without the need to rely on meat. A 2022 study by Rosie R. Bishop on the role of carbohydrates in past hunter-gatherer diets in temperate Europe concluded that the carbohydrate and energy content of wild roots/rhizomes can be higher than in cultivated potatoes, showing that they could have provided a major carbohydrate and energy source for hunter-gatherers in Mesolithic Europe (between 8,800 BCE to 4,500 BCE). This conclusion has been supported by more recent studies that found remains of some of the 90 European plants with edible roots and tubers in a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer site on Harris, in the Western Isles of Scotland. Many of these plant foods would likely be underrepresented in archaeological excavations as they are fragile and would be difficult to preserve.

8. The rise of human civilisation was still mainly plant-based

Around 10,000 years ago, the Agricultural Revolution started, and humans learnt that rather than moving around the environment collecting fruits and other plants, they could take the seeds from these and plant them around their dwellings. This fitted well with humans because the ecological role of frugivore primates is mainly seed dispersal, so as humans still had the frugivore adaptation, planting seeds from one place to their new dwelling in another place was right in their ecological wheelhouse. During this revolution, a handful of animals started to be domesticated and farmed, but by and large, the revolution was plant-based, as hundreds of different plants ended up being cultivated.

When the great human civilisations began a few millennia ago, we moved from prehistory to history, and many assume that this is when meat-eating took over everywhere. However, an alternative hypothesis is that human civilisation moving from prehistory to history remained mostly plant-based.

Think about it. We know that there has never been a human civilisation that was not based on plant seeds (being the seeds of grasses such as wheat, barley, oats, rye, millet or corn, or of other staple plants such as beans, cassava, or squash), and none really based on eggs, honey, milk, or the flesh of pigs, cows, or other animals. There has not been any empire that was not forged on the back of seeds (being those of the tea, coffee, cacao, nutmeg, pepper, cinnamon, or opium plants), but none forged on the back of flesh. Many animals were eaten in these empires, and domesticated species moved around from one to another, but they never became the economic and cultural drives of big civilizations their plant-based counterparts did.

In addition, there have been many communities in history that moved away from eating animal products. We know that communities such as the ancient Taoists, Phythagorians, Jains and Ajivikas; the Jewish Essenes, Therapeutae, and Nazarenes; the Hindu Brahmins and Vaishnavists; the Christian Ebionites, Bogomils, Cathars, and Adventists; and the vegan Dorrelites, Grahamites and Concordites, chose the plant-based route and turned their backs on meat eating.

When we look at all this, it seems that even human history, not just prehistory, might have been mostly plant-based. It was only after the Industrial Revolution a couple of centuries ago that the failed hominid meat experiment was revitalised, and meat and other animal products took over humanity and messed with everything.

9. No vitamin B12 deficiency in plant-based human ancestors

In modern times, vegans must take vitamin B12 in the form of supplements or fortified foods, because modern human diets are deficient in it, vegan diets even more so. This has been used to claim that humans are mostly meat-eaters, or that, at the very least, we used to be meat-eaters in our ancestry as we lost the ability to synthesise B12, and there are no plant sources of B12 — or so people used to say until water lentils were discovered recently.

However, an alternative hypothesis could be that the general lack of B12 in modern people is a modern phenomenon, and early humans did not have this problem, even if they were still mostly plant-based. The key fact that supports this theory is that animals themselves do not synthesise B12, but they get it from bacteria, which are the ones that synthesise it (and B12 supplements are created by cultivating such bacteria).

So, one theory claims that modern hygiene and the constant washing of food is what is causing the lack of B12 in human populations, as we are washing away the bacteria that make it. Our ancestors would not wash the food, so they would ingest more of these bacteria. However, several scientists who have looked into this think that it is not possible to get enough even by ingesting “dirty” roots (which is what the ancestors would be doing). They claim that somewhere along the way, we lost the ability to absorb vitamin B12 in the large intestine (where we still have bacteria that produce it but we don’t absorb it well).

Another hypothesis may be that we used to eat more aquatic plants like water lentils (aka duckweed) that happen to produce B12. In 2019, vitamin B12 was discovered in Parabel USA’s water lentil crop, which is used to produce plant protein ingredients. Independent third-party testing showed that 100g of dry water lentils contain approximately 750% of the US recommended daily value of the bioactive forms of B12. There may be more plants that produce it, which our ancestors consumed even if modern humans no longer do, and that, together with the occasional insect they would eat (on purpose or otherwise), may have produced enough B12 for them.

There is a better hypothesis I would like to suggest. It may be an issue of shifts in our intestinal microbiome. I think B12-producing bacteria regularly lived in our guts at the time, and entered by eating dirty roots, and also fallen fruits and nuts. I think it is quite possible that our intestinal appendixes were bigger (now we know that one of the potential uses of this intestinal feature is to maintain some bacteria in the gut when we lose too many during diarrhoea) and it is possible that in the years we experimented with meat-eating from Homo erectus to early anatomically modern humans (a period from about 1.9 million years ago to about 300,000 years ago) we messed up our microbiome and created negative evolutionary pressure to maintain a large appendix, so when we returned to a plant-based diet with Homo sapiens sapiens we never recovered the right microbiome.

Our microbiome is in a mutualistic relationship with us (meaning that we benefit each other by being together), but the bacteria also evolve, and faster than us. So, if we break our partnership for a million years, it could well be that the bacteria that used to be mutualistic with us moved on and abandoned us. As the co-evolution of humans and bacteria moves at a different pace, any separation, even if only relatively short, may have broken the partnership.

Then, the agriculture we developed about 10,000 years ago may have made it worse, because we may have selected the crops that rot less, perhaps more resistant to the bacteria that give us B12. All this combined may have changed our gut microbiome in such a way that has led to the B12 deficiency problem (which is not only a problem for vegans, but for most humanity, even meat eaters who now have to eat meat that had been grown giving B12 supplements to the farm animals).

10. Fossil record is biased toward meat-eating

Finally, the last hypothesis I want to introduce to support the idea that human ancestors ate predominantly plant-based diets is that many of the studies that suggested otherwise may have been biased toward a meat-eating paradigm that reflected the habits of the scientists, not the reality of the subjects they studied.

We already mentioned a 2022 study of archaeological sites in Africa that suggested that the theory that Homo erectus ate more meat than the hominids they immediately evolved from could be false. Palaeontologists in the past have claimed that they found more fossils of marked animal bones around fossils of Homo erectus than around fossils of previous hominids, but the new study has shown that this only happened because more effort was put into finding them in Homo erectus sites, not because they are more common.

Dr W A Barr, the study’s lead author, said to the Natural History Museum: “Generations of paleoanthropologists have gone to famously well-preserved sites in places like Olduvai Gorge looking for, and finding, breath-taking direct evidence of early humans eating meat, furthering the viewpoint that there was an explosion of meat-eating after two million years ago. However, when you quantitatively synthesise the data from numerous sites across eastern Africa to test this hypothesis, as we did here, the ‘meat made us human’ evolutionary narrative starts to unravel.”

The study covered 59 sites across nine areas of eastern Africa dating between 2.6 and 1.2 million years ago and found that the sites that predated the appearance of H. Erectus were lacking, and the amount of effort put into the sampling was linked with the recovery of bones which showed evidence of meat consumption. When the number of bones was adjusted by the amount of effort put into finding them, the study found that the level of meat-eating remained broadly the same.

Then, we have the issue that animal bones are easier to preserve in fossil form than plants, so early palaeoanthropologists simply thought that early humans ate more meat because it is easier to find the remnants of an animal meal than of a plant-based meal.

Also, more fossils may have been found from the most meat-eating hominids than the most plant-eating ones. For instance, the more meat-eating Neanderthals often lived in cold areas, even during glaciations when the planet was much colder, so they relied on caves to survive (hence the term “caveman”) as the temperature inside remained more or less constant. Caves are perfect places to preserve fossils and archaeology, so we have many more remains from the more meat-eating Neanderthals than from the possibly more plant-eating humans from the south (as they would have more access to edible plants), skewing the view of what “prehistoric humans” ate (as early paleoanthropologists lumped them together).

In conclusion, not only is there plenty of evidence that suggests early humans and their ancestors were predominantly plant eaters, but many of the facts that are used to support a carnivore ancestry have alternative hypotheses that support a frugivore ancestry.

Palaeoanthropology may be tricky but still aims at the truth.

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