Importance of Meat Eating in Shaping Human Evolution

Quintessential human traits such as large brains first appeared in Homo erectus nearly 2 million years ago. This evolutionary transition toward human-like traits is often linked to a major dietary shift involving greater meat consumption. A new study led by a George Washington University researcher in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, however, calls into question the primacy of meat eating in early human evolution.

While the archaeological evidence for meat eating increases dramatically after the appearance of H. erectus, a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argues this increase can largely be explained by greater research attention on this time period—effectively skewing the evidence in favor of the “meat made us human” hypothesis.

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