1 minute read
Research
Dr. John Rowan, an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department, recently published on research related to the role of meat eating during human evolution.
What are some of the main objectives of your project?
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Our team assessed the evidence for increased meat-eating during a particular time period in human evolution. The species Homo erectus shows up in the African fossil record around two million years ago, and is characterized by a larger brain and a number of other modern-human like traits. At the same time, we find more cut-marked animal bones in the archaeological record. These two events—the appearance of large-brained Homo erectus alongside an increase in zooarchaeological evidence for meat eating—have long been linked together, with many arguing meat-eating was critical for the evolution of traits that are found in all living humans.
What made you interested in researching this topic?
All fossil records have periods of time that are better represented than others. We suspected that the sudden increase in the number of cut-marked bones around two million years ago might just reflect a better-sampled record, so we set out to test that.
What were the main outcomes of the project?
Our analyses show that, when we control for the quality of the record (e.g., how many fossil sites we have per time period), there is no sustained increase in cut-marked bones through time, or at least no increase that cannot be explained by a better-sampled record alone. This means the zooarchaeological record, currently, cannot be used to argue for a cause-and-effect link between meat-eating and the evolution of larger brains and other human-like traits in our ancestors.
Is there anything else you want students to know about this research?
Human evolution spans nearly seven million years of time, and human adaptation can be very fast. For example, within the last 10,000 years (a short span of time in an evolutionary sense) many human populations have evolved to digest lactose into adulthood following the rise of agriculture and livestock. So be skeptical of ‘paleo’ fad diets—what our ancestors were (or were not) eating million years ago should have little bearing on how we construct our diets today.
