A study claims Stone Age humans were 'hypercarnivores', but what does that mean for our food choices today?
According to a new study by researchers at Tel Aviv University, humans were hypercarnivores that hunted megafauna for around two million years. Only as large animals like mammoths and aurochs began to die out towards the end of the Stone Age, with humans as possible culprits, were our ancestors forced to diversify their diets to include more plants.
One of the arguments made in favour of eating animal flesh today is that it is ‘natural’ because humans evolved as meat-eaters. But equally, some vegan and vegetarian proponents like animal charity PETA claim that we are physically more suited to plant-based diets. Some will no doubt take the new study as evidence that the meat-eaters are correct. But what bearing should our evolutionary history have on our present-day food choices?
The new study does not reveal new evidence for the diets of our Stone Age ancestors but is a meta-analysis of around 400 previous studies to see what position our ancestors occupied in the food chain. The authors found physiological evidence in modern humans that indicates our ancestors, mainly Homo erectus, were hypercarnivores, including high levels of stomach acidity useful for killing off bacteria growing in large animal carcasses that would have taken days or weeks to consume. The researchers theorised that the need for fat and protein of Homo erectus may have led them to hunt animals in their prime reproductive years, causing populations to die out. It was at this point tens of thousands of years ago - when megafauna numbers began dwindling - that our ancestors, now including Homo sapiens, became more omnivorous.
Even if the theories are correct, does this make a meat-free diet a bad idea today? Palaeoanthropologist Darren Curnoe explored this issue in 2016 in the Conversation. “There is a danger in taking our evolutionary history as fate,” he wrote. “We are no longer hunter-gatherers and our lifestyle is about as far removed from that of our ancestors as can be imagined.”
The question here is, why do we need to eat like our distant ancestors if we do not also live as they did? Most likely, hunting was - as one of the study’s authors Dr Miki Ben-Dor puts it - “a focal human activity throughout most of human evolution.” A lot of human lives no longer revolve around obtaining food, nor do we have to survive on unrefrigerated animal flesh for days at a time. Our physical needs have changed.
From a health perspective, our evolutionary history as presented by the study may explain part, but not all, of what foods we do well on, or not. Ben-Dor suggests it could be the reason for modern intolerances to dairy and gluten, which are now commonplace but are quite recent additions to our diets. We have only been consuming milk from cows for around 10,000 years, for example. This may not have been enough time for our bodies to adapt to consuming such foods. But apparently being descendants of carnivores has not stopped red meat from being a risk to us for heart disease, bowel cancer, diabetes and other diseases. Meanwhile, many people can and do live healthily on vegan diets.
Some scientists think that if we want to decide what food to eat based on the diets of ancestors, we might want to look at those from whom we are more recently descended. In 2012, biologist Rob Dunn argued in Scientific American that the rise of agriculture probably has more to do with what food we can and can’t tolerate than what our Stone Age ancestors ate. “With agriculture, human bodies changed so as to cope with new foods,” he wrote. “Our bodies bear the marks of many histories. As a result, if you want to eat what your body “evolved to eat” you need to eat something different depending on who your recent ancestors were.” Indeed, there is research that shows some of the ways our genetics have evolved just in the last tens of thousands of years.
We should also acknowledge that there may be some bias in the new study describing a flesh-heavy diet of Stone Age humans as “embedded in modern humans' biology” thereby creating an evolutionary precedent to justify our present-day consumption of animals. The second author, Raphael Sirtoli, is listed as a speaker at The Meat-ing, a ‘carnivore conference’ that is scheduled to take place in August in Sweden with the aim of rescuing the failing reputation of red meat. He is also the co‐founder of Nutrita, a food-tracking app that promotes a ketogenic diet, and a freelance writer for ThePaleoDiet.com. Both keto and paleo diets insist on animal flesh as an essential source of healthy fats and nutrients.
But if Ben-Dor and Sirtoli are right about our hypercarnivorous past, then a worrying implication, according to Ben-Dor, is that those instincts may be to blame for our destructive impact on the environment. He suggests that humans are “built” to exhaust a food resource and move on to the next one. “Humans are not a good caretaker of the environment,” he told Haaretz. “We need a lot of cultural influence and constructs to overcome that.”
Though we are no longer in danger of causing our main sources of flesh to go extinct, with ever-increasing numbers of animals being crammed into intensive farms globally, the way we feed ourselves is one of the leading causes of everything else disappears. As Curnoe wrote, “We need to adapt to our changing circumstances and find a diet that healthily supports it, as we have always done as a species.”
Our ancestors may have been forced to change their diets to survive conditions they helped to create in hunting megafauna to extinction; now we have created conditions that are hostile to so much life on earth, we must change our diets accordingly once more.
Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.
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