Once you put my meat in your mouth you’re going to want to swallow SHirt
Thank you, saber-toothed tigers.Primitive stone hand tools are fine for carving up carcasses or smashing open large bones, but they are lousy for hunting live prey. This is why zooarchaeologists believe our meat-eating human ancestors living more than a million years ago were scavengers, not hunters.One theory for why so many butchered animal bones enter the archaeological record around 1.8 million years ago is that while early humans were lousy hunters, they were living among some of the most efficient killers to ever roam the earth: saber-toothed cats.Briana Pobiner, who studies the origins of human meat-eating, wrote that “Between one- and two-million years ago the large carnivore communities of the African savanna consisted not only of lions, hyenas, leopards, cheetahs and wild dogs, as we see today, but also at least three species of saber-toothed cats, including one that was significantly larger than the largest male African lions. These cats may have hunted larger prey, leaving even more leftovers for early humans to scavenge.”
Once you put my meat in your mouth you’re going to want to swallow SHirt
It’s unclear if humans “actively” scavenged by waiting for the big cats to kill their prey and then scaring them off by throwing stones or making loud noises, or if they “passively” scavenged what was left when the saber-toothed hunters abandoned their kill. Active scavenging would preserve more fresh meat, but carries some serious risks.READ MORE: Discovery of Oldest Human Fossil Fills Evolutionary GapA reconstruction of a pre-historic cave man, at the Chicago Field Museum, eating meat.A reconstruction of a pre-historic cave man, at the Chicago Field Museum, eating meat.Henry Guttmann Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
