hypercarnivory
As “Hypercarnivores", Humans Were Apex Predators For 2 Million Years | IFLSciencehttps://www.iflscience.com/as-hypercarnivores-humans-were-apex-predators-for-2-million-years-59296new research suggests that our ancestors obtained the majority of their nutrition from meat, and only diversified their food intake to include more plants at the very end of the Stone Age. Published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, the new study indicates that humans were apex predators for around 2 million years, with numerous species within the Homo lineage engaging in “hypercarnivory”.
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Determining the trophic level – or position within the food web – of ancient humans is tricky, as we can’t directly observe the feeding behaviors of our early ancestors. Most attempts to do so have therefore focused on present-day hunter-gatherer groups, assuming that the practices of such cultures reflect those of primitive humans.
However, the authors of this latest study explain that such comparisons are highly problematic, as changes to the ecological landscape will inevitably have forced humans to alter their hunting and gathering preferences over time. For instance, the loss of megafauna like mammoths and other large animals produced a major shift in human diets.
The researchers therefore attempted to reconstruct the diet of ancient humans and determine the trophic level of our ancestors throughout the Pleistocene, which began 2.5 million years ago and ended around the time of the agricultural revolution, some 11,000 years ago. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the team examined over 400 scientific studies covering areas such as genetics, metabolism, morphology, archaeology, and paleontology in order to determine whether early humans were specialized carnivores or more general omnivores.
2021 The evolution of the human trophic level during the Pleistocene
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24247The evidence shows that the trophic level of the Homo lineage that most probably led to modern humans evolved from a low base to a high, carnivorous position during the Pleistocene, beginning with Homo habilis and peaking in Homo erectus. A reversal of that trend appears in the Upper Paleolithic, strengthening in the Mesolithic/Epipaleolithic and Neolithic, and culminating with the advent of agriculture. We conclude that it is possible to reach a credible reconstruction of the HTL without relying on a simple analogy with recent hunter-gatherers' diets. The memory of an adaptation to a trophic level that is embedded in modern humans' biology in the form of genetics, metabolism, and morphology is a fruitful line of investigation of past HTLs, whose potential we have only started to explore.