Exploring ancient diets
By Jon Turney.
Bones from ancient sites show that our ancestors were butchering animals long ago: bones with cut marks made before they were fossilised date back 3.5 million years.
This supports the theory that meat-eating was important for human evolution. Brains use lots of energy, and raw meat is a better energy source than plant foods. Hunting could have allowed some apes to get by with a smaller stomach - and use less energy for digestion - while evolving bigger brains. Fire for cooking, which probably came later, also helped by easing digestion.
Plant tubers were also an abundant food source that needed cooking. Stone Age peoples, tens of thousands of years ago, were grinding wild grains to make a kind of flour. Much older tools from a cave in Mozambique show traces of starch grains, which may indicate the grinding of sorghum flour as many as 100 000 years ago - although not all archaeologists agree. Nonetheless, it certainly looks as if gathering for a prepared meal goes back a long way.
Further ideas to explore
- Did cooking make us human? The author of the book reviewed here thinks so.
- Did eating fish help our brains evolve? Use this article from ‘The Economist’ as a starting point to investigate this idea.
Image: Part of a picture depicting the evolution of humans from prehistoric to modern man. Credit: Medical Art Service, Munich/Wellcome Images.
This article is part of the online content for ‘Big Picture: Food and Diet’.