Did Meat-Eating Make Us Human?

• Position: EVOLUTION

Quintessential human traits such as large brains first appear in Homo erectus nearly 2,000,000 years ago. This evolutionary transition towards human-like traits often is linked to a major dietary shift involving greater meat consumption.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of 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 Homo erectus, the study authors argue that this increase largely can be explained by greater research attention on this time period, effectively skewing the evidence in favor of the "meat made us human" hypothesis.

"Generations of paleoanthropologists have gone to famously well-preserved sites in places like Olduvai Gorge looking for--and finding--breathtaking direct evidence of early humans eating meat, furthering this viewpoint that there was an explosion of meat-eating after 2,000,000 years ago," says lead author W. Andrew Barr, assistant professor of anthropology at George Washington University.

Adds J. Tyler Faith, curator of archaeology at the Natural History Museum of Utah and associate professor of anthropology at the University of...