HOMO ERECTUS FOOD

Homo erectus was considerably larger than its forebears. Scientists speculate that the reason for this is that they ate more meat. There is evidence that they ate meat 2.5 million years ago, based on bones found at sites, where “Homo erectus” fossils and tools were food, but their bodies did not begin to get bigger until around 1.9 million years ago, which is when homonids are believed to invented fire.

Homo erectus had smaller teeth and less powerful jaws than the australopithecines. Richard Wrangham of Harvard wrote the journal Current Anthropology that this may have meant that “Homo erectus” cooked the vegetables that they ate and thus were able to eat a wider variety of roots and vegetables with more nutrients.

Extensive analysis of chemicals found on the teeth of a 1.8-million-year-old skull of a Paranthropus — a hominin that lived at the same time as homo erectus — found at Swartkrans in South Africa revealed the hominin ate fruits, nuts, sedges, grasses, herbs, seeds, tree leaves and potato-like tubers and roots. Meat may have been eaten but it is difficult to tell whether it was scavenged or hunted. The research, published in Science in November 2006, was carried out by team led by Matt Sponheimer of the University of Colorado. The data also seems to suggest these early hominins traveled to different places depending on the rainfall amounts and seasons and found food in grasslands, forests and scattered woods. Because teeth build over time the scientists were able to establish what was eaten over a period of months and years by examining different layers of enamel.

Chemical traces found on different layers of tooth enamel revealed that these early hominins changed their feeding month to month, which raises questions about theories that suggest these species became extinct because they were unable to adapt to environmental changes and suggests that perhaps they became extinct because they were outcompeted by more advanced homo species. Professor Thure Cerling of the University of Utah told the Times of London, “This shows the variability in human diet has been “in the family” for a very long time. Hominins were taking advantage of seasonal differences in food items in a savanna environment. We cannot tell if they were carnivores but it is possible their diet included animals . We are picking up that signal.”

Excavations all over the world shown a large variety of plants and animals were exploited for food at the time “Homo erectus” lived.Scholars believe that men may have learned what foods to eat by watching other animals, and through trial and error experimentation. Early man may have discovered early intoxicants and medicines this same way.

Alok Jha wrote in The Guardian: “The earliest evidence of controlled fire for cooking, was found last year in South Africa by scientists at the University of Boston and dated to a million years ago. It is thought that the development of cooking not only made food tastier and easier to digest, it made the extraction of energy from raw ingredients quicker and more efficient. All useful things if you want to power an over-sized, energy-hungry brain without having to spend all your time foraging and chewing food. [Source: Alok Jha, The Guardian, November 15, 2012 |=|]

Websites and Resources on Hominins and Human Origins: Smithsonian Human Origins Program humanorigins.si.edu ; Institute of Human Origins iho.asu.edu ; Becoming Human University of Arizona site becominghuman.org ; Hall of Human Origins American Museum of Natural History amnh.org/exhibitions ; The Bradshaw Foundation bradshawfoundation.com ; Britannica Human Evolution britannica.com ; Human Evolution handprint.com ; University of California Museum of Anthropology ucmp.berkeley.edu; John Hawks' Anthropology Weblog johnhawks.net/ ; New Scientist: Human Evolution newscientist.com/article-topic/human-evolution

Evidence of Meat-Eating and Protein Consumption by Homo Erectus

Archaeology magazine reported: A case of childhood anemia indicates that early humans relied on meat as part of their diets as many as 1.5 million years ago — and sometimes did not get enough. In fragments of the skull of a two-year-old hominin, researchers found evidence of porotic hyperostosis, a condition associated with nutritional deficiencies related to a lack of meat consumption. The scientists conclude that people must have been hunting at the time, as scavenging would not have yielded enough meat to make it such an essential dietary need. [Source: Samir S. Patel, Archaeology magazine, January-February 2013]

Protein and fat in the bones and skulls of prey are excellent food sources for growing stronger bodies and larger brains. Some scientists argue that running helped our ancestors reach food sources to scavenge and this helped them acquire the protein and fat needed to grow the kind of brain that makes us human. Daniel Lieberman of Harvard University told the Harvard Gazette: “Imagine what life was like for our ancestors on the plains of Africa some 2-3 million years ago“How would you obtain a high protein meal without any weapons?” William J. Cromie wrote in the Harvard News: “He describes a scenario of H. erectus “shopping.” Seeing vultures in the sky tips him off that there’s meat and marrow nearby. If he walks to the kill, hyenas and other scavengers will get what meat, marrow, and brains the big hunters like lions have left. You’ve got to run, and the faster, the better. [Source: William J. Cromie, Harvard News, November 18, 2004 ^=^]

Earliest Evidence of Hominin Hunting and Scavenging

1 million-year-old Oldowon ax

Beginning around two million years ago, early stone tool-making humans, known scientifically as Oldowan hominin, started to exhibit a number of physiological and ecological adaptations that required greater daily energy expenditures, including an increase in brain and body size, heavier investment in their offspring and significant home-range expansion. Demonstrating how these early humans acquired the extra energy they needed to sustain these shifts has been the subject of much debate among researchers. A recent study led by Joseph Ferraro, Ph.D., assistant professor of anthropology at Baylor, offers new insight in this debate with a wealth of archaeological evidence from the two million-year-old site of Kanjera South (KJS), Kenya. The study’s findings were recently published in PLOS One.

According to Past Horizons: “Considered in total, this study provides important early archaeological evidence for meat eating, hunting and scavenging behaviour -cornerstone adaptations that likely facilitated brain expansion in human evolution, movement of hominins out of Africa and into Eurasia, as well as important shifts in our social behaviour, anatomy and physiology,” Ferraro said. Located on the shores of Lake Victoria, KJS contains “three large, well-preserved, stratified” layers of animal remains. The research team worked at the site for more than a decade, recovering thousands of animal bones and rudimentary stone tools. [Source:Past Horizons, May 10, 2013 ^^]

“According to researchers, hominins at KJS met their new energy requirements through an increased reliance on meat eating. Specifically, the archaeological record at KJS shows that hominins acquired an abundance of nutritious animal remains through a combination of both hunting and scavenging behaviours. The KJS site is the earliest known archaeological evidence of these behaviours. Our study helps inform the ‘hunting vs. scavenging’ debate in Palaeolithic archaeology. The record at KJS shows that it isn’t a case of either/or for Oldowan hominins two million years ago. Rather hominins at KJS were clearly doing both,” Ferraro said. ^^

“The fossil evidence for hominin hunting is particularly compelling. The record shows that Oldowan hominins acquired and butchered numerous small antelope carcasses. These animals are well represented at the site by most or all of their bones from the tops of their head to the tips of their hooves, indicating to researchers that they were transported to the site as whole carcasses. Many of the bones also show evidence of cut marks made when hominins used simple stone tools to remove animal flesh. Some bones also bear evidence that hominins used fist-sized stones to break them open to acquire bone marrow. In addition, modern studies in the Serengeti–an environment similar to KJS two million years ago–have also shown that predators completely devour antelopes of this size within minutes of their deaths. As a result, hominins could only have acquired these valuable remains on the savanna through active hunting. ^^ “The site also contains a large number of isolated heads of wildebeest-sized antelopes. In contrast to small antelope carcasses, the heads of these somewhat larger individuals are able to be consumed several days after death and could be scavenged, as even the largest African predators like lions and hyenas were unable to break them open to access their nutrient-rich brains. “Tool-wielding hominins at KJS, on the other hand, could access this tissue and likely did so by scavenging these heads after the initial non-human hunters had consumed the rest of the carcass,” Ferraro said. “KJS hominins not only scavenged these head remains, they also transported them some distance to the archaeological site before breaking them open and consuming the brains. This is important because it provides the earliest archaeological evidence of this type of resource transport behaviour in the human lineage.”“ ^^

Evidence of Hominin Hunting from 2 Million Years Ago

Evidence from an ancient butchery site in Tanzania shows that hominins was capable of ambushing herds of large animals about 2 million years ago, 1.6 million years earlier than previously thought. Robin McKie wrote in The Guardian: “Ancient humans used complex hunting techniques to ambush and kill antelopes, gazelles, wildebeest and other large animals at least two million years ago. The discovery – made by anthropologist Professor Henry Bunn of Wisconsin University – pushes back the definitive date for the beginning of systematic human hunting by hundreds of thousands of years.[Source: Robin McKie, The Guardian, September 23, 2012 |=|]

“Two million years ago, our human ancestors were small-brained apemen and in the past many scientists have assumed the meat they ate had been gathered from animals that had died from natural causes or had been left behind by lions, leopards and other carnivores. But Bunn argues that our apemen ancestors, although primitive and fairly puny, were capable of ambushing herds of large animals after carefully selecting individuals for slaughter. The appearance of this skill so early in our evolutionary past has key implications for the development of human intellect. “We know that humans ate meat two million years ago,” said Bunn, who was speaking in Bordeaux at the annual meeting of the European Society for the study of Human Evolution (ESHE). “What was not clear was the source of that meat. However, we have compared the type of prey killed by lions and leopards today with the type of prey selected by humans in those days. This has shown that men and women could not have been taking kill from other animals or eating those that had died of natural causes. They were selecting and killing what they wanted.” |=|

“Bunn believes these early humans probably sat in trees and waited until herds of antelopes or gazelles passed below, then speared them at point-blank range. This skill, developed far earlier than suspected, was to have profound implications. Once our species got a taste for meat, it was provided with a dense, protein-rich source of energy. We no longer needed to invest internal resources on huge digestive tracts that were previously required to process vegetation and fruit, which are more difficult to digest. Freed from that task by meat, the new, energy-rich resources were then diverted inside our bodies and used to fuel our growing brains.” |As a result, over the next two million years our crania grew, producing species of humans with increasingly large brains – until this carnivorous predilection produced Homo sapiens.” |=|

2-Million-Year-Old Hominin Hunters: Picked Strong Animals Not the Weak and Old

Robin McKie wrote in The Guardian: “ In his study, Bunn and his colleagues looked at a huge butchery site in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The carcasses of wildebeest, antelopes and gazelles were brought there by ancient humans, most probably members of the species Homo habilis, more than 1.8 million years ago. The meat was then stripped from the animals’ bones and eaten. [Source: Robin McKie, The Guardian, September 23, 2012 |=|]

“We decided to look at the ages of the animals that had been dragged there,” said Benn. “By studying the teeth in the skulls that were left, we could get a very precise indication of what type of meat these early humans were consuming. Were they bringing back creatures that were in their prime or were old or young? Then we compared our results with the kinds of animals killed by lions and leopards.”

The results for several species of large antelope Bunn analysed showed that humans preferred only adult animals in their prime, for example. Lions and leopards killed old, young and adults indiscriminately. For small antelope species, the picture was slightly different. Humans preferred only older animals, while lions and leopards had a fancy only for adults in their prime.

“For all the animals we looked at, we found a completely different pattern of meat preference between ancient humans and other carnivores, indicating that we were not just scavenging from lions and leopards and taking their leftovers. We were picking what we wanted and were killing it ourselves.”

2-Million-Year-Old Hunting: Does That Mean We Are Prone to Violence?

That finding that hominin hunting dates back to 2 million years ago rather than a few hundred thousand years ago has major implications. Bunn said: “Until now the oldest, unambiguous evidence of human hunting has come from a 400,000-year-old site in Germany where horses were clearly being speared and their flesh eaten. We have now pushed that date back to around two million years ago.” [Source: Robin McKie, The Guardian, September 23, 2012 |=|]

Robin McKie wrote in The Guardian: “The hunting instinct of early humans is a controversial subject. In the first half of the 20th century, many scientists argued that our ancestors’ urge to hunt and kill drove us to develop spears and axes and to evolve bigger and bigger brains in order to handle these increasingly complex weapons. Extreme violence is in our nature, it was argued by fossil experts such as Raymond Dart and writers like Robert Ardrey, whose book African Genesis on the subject was particularly influential.

“By the 80s, the idea had run out of favour, and scientists argued that our larger brains evolved mainly to help us co-operate with each other. We developed language and other skills that helped us maintain complex societies. “I don’t disagree with this scenario,” said Bunn. “But it has led us to downplay the hunting abilities of our early ancestors. People have dismissed them as mere scavengers and I don’t think that looks right any more.”

Cooking Helped Homo Erectus Develop 2 Million Years Ago?

Chimpanzees, gorillas and other non-human primates spend nearly half their time eating. Research announced in 2011 suggested that Homo erectus learned how to cook 2 million years ago, allowing it to save time and extract more nutrients and this paved for the way for bigger brains. “In the big picture, eating cooked food has huge ramifications,” says Harvard’s Chris Organ, a coauthor of the study that presented this theory. [Source:Rachel Ehrenberg, sciencenews.org, August 22, 2011 /^]

Rachel Ehrenberg wrote in sciencenews.org: “Cooking and other food-processing techniques aren’t just time-savers; they provide a bigger nutritional punch than a raw diet. The new work is further evidence that cooking literally provided food for thought, making it easier for the body to extract calories from the diet that could then be used to grow a nice, big brain. Humans are the only animals who cook, and compared to our living primate relatives we spend very little time gathering and eating food. We also have smaller jaws and teeth. /^\

“Homo erectus also had small teeth relative to others in the human lineage, and the going idea was that hominins must have figured out how to soften up their food by the time that H. erectus evolved. But behavioral traits such as the ability to whip up a puree or barbecue ribs don’t fossilize, so a real rigorous test of the H. erectus-as-chef hypothesis was lacking. /^\

“Organ and his colleagues, including Harvard’s Richard Wrangham, an early champion of the cooking hypothesis, decided to quantify the time one would expect humans to spend eating by looking at body size and feeding time in our living primate relatives. After building a family tree of primates, the researchers found that people spend a tenth as much time eating relative to their body size compared with their evolutionary cousins — a mere 4.7 percent of daily activity rather than the expected 48 percent if humans fed like other primates. /^\

“Then the team looked at tooth size within the genus Homo. From H. erectus on down to H. sapiens, teeth are much smaller than would be predicted based on what is seen in other primates, the team reports online the week of August 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Tooth size becomes dramatically smaller than what we would expect,” says paleoanthropologist David Strait of the University at Albany in New York, who was not involved with the work. “This is really compelling indirect evidence the human lineage became adapted to and dependent on cooking their food by the time Homo erectus evolved.” /^\

Fire and Homo Erectus

Sangiran Homo erectus Diorama Homo erectus learned to control fire about one million years ago. Some scientists speculate that early hominins gathered smoldering wood from lighting-ignited fires and used it to cook meat, and perhaps kept the coals burning so they could use the fire repeatedly over a relatively long period of time.

Some scientists suggest that fire may have been tamed as early as 1.8 million years ago based on the theory that Homo erectus needed to cook food such as tough meat, tubers and roots to make them edible. Some even speculate that australopthecines were the first to tame fire. The theory suggests that climate changes around 1.9 million years forced hominins to begin eating food like tubers, which they had hadn't eaten before but started eating then because no other food was available.

Archaeologists consider the emergence of stone tool manufacturing and the control of fire as the two hallmark events in the technological evolution of early humans. While experts agree the origins of stone tools date back at least 2.5 million years in Africa, the origin of fire control has been a prolonged and heated debate.

Although scientists estimate that hominin have been using fire for over a million, it is unclear they started using it on a regular basis, such as for cooking daily meals. According to to Associated Press: “Over the years, some experts have cited evidence of fire from as long as 1.5 million years ago, and some have argued it was used even earlier, a key step toward evolution of a larger brain. It's a tricky issue. Even if you find evidence of an ancient blaze, how do you know it wasn't just a wildfire?”

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons except Wonderwerk Cave, University of Toronto and Wonderwerkcave.com and Richard Wrangham, Harvard University

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Ancient Foods ancientfoods.wordpress.com ; Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP and various books and other publications.

Last updated April 2024