Early Humans May Have Scavenged More than They Hunted

JAN 9, 2020

Why go to the trouble of tracking and killing an animal when a saber-tooth cat can do the job instead?
BECKY LITTLE

Popular culture often shows cavemen as aggressive, club-wielding hunters. But what if most early humans were actually scavengers? The notion, first proposed by scholars in the second half of the 20th century, has since challenged the dated presumption that prehistoric men hunted food and women gathered it. It’s also changed how we understand the historical shift toward meat-eating—a dietary move that scholars think played an important role in human evolution.

While hunting is the act of killing animals for food, scavenging involves locating the remains of an animal that is already dead. Early 20th-century archaeologists who uncovered the remains of animal bones with early human tools assumed that prehistoric people—or more specifically, prehistoric men—must have hunted these animals for food. But later scholars noted that many of these tools seem more appropriate for cutting up bone and meat than for actually killing an animal. Given this, early humans may have been eating scraps left over from another animal’s kill.

Cracking some skulls
Some interesting evidence for this emerged in a recent study of Kanjera South, a 2 million-year-old archaeological site in Kenya. Noticing that there were several isolated heads of “wildebeest-sized” animals at the site, researchers theorized that larger predators had trouble getting these large skulls open, making the heads available for early human scavengers to transport, crack open and gobble up the brains inside.

“[Kanjera South] 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,” anthropologist Joseph Ferraro, the study’s lead author, told Phys.org. “This is important because it provides the earliest archaeological evidence of this type of resource transport behavior in the human lineage.”

More:
https://www.history.com/news/prehistoric-human-diet-scavengers-vs-hunters