Ancient Humans: The Real Apex Predators for a Good 2 Million Years

PERU-ARCHAEOLOGY-DISCOVERY — The remains of a man believed to be an ancient warrior, buried lying on reeds with a club or stone mallet next to him, are seen in a street where a pre-Hispanic cemetery was discovered by gas-line laying workers in Carabayllo, Peru, on September 27, 2022. - A crew of workers excavating a street in Lima to lay gas pipes found a pre-Hispanic cemetery some 800 years old, which also contained pottery vessels and figures. "So far we have found eleven burials of adults and children who were buried in the form of funerary bundles," archaeologist Cecilia Camargo, in charge of protecting the find announced on Tuesday and which occurred a couple of days ago, told AFP. Photo by CRIS BOURONCLE/AFP via Getty Images

Prehistoric cuisine was far from lean and green. They are now at the apex of the food chain.

2 Million-Year Cuisine

According to a study of our Pleistocene ancestors' diets, Prehistoric cuisine wasn't exactly lean and green.

For nearly 2 million years, Homo sapiens as well as their predecessors eschewed salad in favor of a diet heavy on meat, propelling them to the top of the food chain. It's not the good diet of fruits, grains, and steak that we might imagine once we imagine of 'vegan' food.

According to a study published last year by archaeologists from Israel's Tel Aviv University and Portugal's University of Minho, present hunter-gatherers had already granted us the false impression of what we decided to eat.

"This contrast is futile, however, seeing as hunter-gatherer communities could hunt and ingest animals and other large mammals 2 million years ago - while today's cavemen do not have direct exposure to such bounty," Tel Aviv University researcher Miki BenDor explained in 2021.

A review of hundreds of previous research ranging from contemporary anatomy and physiology of humans to isotope measurements in primitive human bones and teeth suggests that we were mainly apex predators until about 12,000 years ago.

Plant remains do not preserve as well as bone fragments, teeth, and shells, making reassembling the shopping list of early humans who lived 2.5 million years ago more difficult.

In Science Alert research findings have used chemical tests of bone fragments and tooth enamel to identify localized examples of plant-rich diets. But trying to extrapolate this to civilization is indeed more difficult.

There is plenty of proof of game hunting in the geological record, but anthropologists have traditionally relied on modern-day ethnography to determine what we gathered, assuming that little has changed.

Also read : 67 Million-Year-Old Mummified Dinosaur Skin Revealed to have Bites from an Ancient Crocodile

Ancient Humans were Apex Predators

For humans, the Pleistocene era was a watershed moment in Earth's history. We were progressing our way through the far reaches of the globe by the end, outlasting every other life form on our family tree's branch tree. The last great ice age dominated most of what is now Europe and North America, burying it under thick glaciers on a regular basis. Given the amount of water stuck as ice, ecological systems all around world looked very different than they do now. Large beasts, such as woolly mammoth, mastodons, and giant sloths, roamed the landscape in the far increasing quantities than we see today.

It goes without saying that Homo sapiens were using their innovation and inexplicable endurance to track down such massive meal-tickets. However, determining the occurrence in which they relied on these plant eaters has proven difficult.

Rather than relying solely on the fossil evidence or making speculative comparability with which was before cultures, the researchers looked to the proof integrated in our own cells and compared it to that of our closest relatives.

We made the decision to use other methodologies to reconstruct stone-age human diets: to investigate the recollection retained in our own cells, our metabolism, genetics, and physical build, as stated by BenDor.