Two million years ago, a dish turned hominids into humans?

New research, based on evidence from the other human canyon Olduvai, shows that dietary changes made the evolutionary leap that helped humanity escape hominid and become the real humans Homo erectus is a witness.

The food that suddenly increased in the human diet 2 million years ago was meat, the SciTech Daily newspaper cited research.

The team, led by Associate Professor Andrew Barr from George Washington University, lead author of the study, says they have linked two phenomena:

1. The first is the large brain that first appeared in Homo erectus 2 million years ago.
2. The second is the evidence that this is the species in which the amount of meat in the diet increases dramatically.

As is well known, the first humans of the genus Homo were skilled hunters, consuming a lot of meat, unlike the hominids of earlier times.

Humans have escaped the hominid life from a breakthrough change in diet, which entails a rich source of nutrients for the brain and requires a lot of hunting and processing skills.

This continues to our species, only Homo sapiens has a more diversified diet, eating more fish and food crops, which is also what makes us survive when the global environment changes, Hunting becomes more difficult.

The new study pooled data from 59 sites dating from 2.6 to 1.2 million years old across East Africa to test this hypothesis and gathered a huge collection of traced animal bones. cut - a sign that it is human food. In particular, sites of this type increased significantly when Homo erectus appeared.

According to Associate Professor Andrew Barr, animal food sources not only provide important energy for the brain to grow in size and complexity, but also indirectly promote other skills for human evolution. .

For example, brain development requires nutrient-rich foods, and it is possible that this is what inspired people to invent fire, because cooked meat often provides better nutrition. Efforts to improve hunting tools, hunting skills, and division of labor to store and process a more complex food source than plant food also gave early humans the opportunity to train, from which Skills are becoming more complex.