2010 for a different interpretation of hominin behavior at FLKN 1-2). But what was the frequency and quantity of nutrients obtained by hominins from animal tissues versus other foods? Hominins at sites FLK 22 and FLKN 1-2, Olduvai Gorge, broke long bones of small to medium-large mammals in direct proportion to their estimated gross caloric yield from marrow fat (Blumenschine & Madrigal 1993 - but see Bunn et al. Increasing the consumption of animal foods could have allowed hominins to increase their body size without losing mobility, agility, or sociality (Milton 1999). Meat and marrow are calorie-dense resources with essential amino acids and micronutrients (Milton 1999), and aquatic fauna offer resources rich in nutrients needed for brain growth (e.g., Broadhurst et al. "Why" questions are notoriously difficult to answer about the past, but we can examine some of the benefits that meat and marrow provide. This shift marks an encroachment of a primate onto the larger carnivore guild, which would have challenged hominins with entirely new selective pressures (Brantingham 1999 Pobiner & Blumenschine 2003 Werdelin & Lewis 2005). 2013) but an increase in large (grazing) animal resources would have been useful for any species that could procure and digest them (Plummer 2004). Hominins would likely not have been able to directly exploit grass as grassland expanded habitats across Africa - (though see Sponheimer et al. How this novel source of food was first recognized by hominins remains unknown. Mitani and Watts 2001), but meat is a small proportion of their diet and they rarely scavenge (Watts 2008), most likely because they cannot efficiently digest carrion (Ragir et al. Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, routinely hunt, capture by hand, and eat meat from colobus or other smaller monkeys (e.g. ![]() The carnivory of hominins is unique among primates in three ways: (1) use of flaked stone tools to access animal resources (2) acquisition of resources from animals much larger than the hominins themselves (Figure 3) and (3) procurement of animal resources by scavenging. Perhaps this signals a shift toward intentional specialization of activities, such as animal butchery and stone tool making, in different areas across the landscape. Three sites at Koobi Fora, Kenya, preserve evidence of several butchered mammals from about 1.5 Ma but are not found in association with any stone tools (Pobiner et al. 2007 Blumenschine & Pobiner 2006 and references therein). Multiple localities at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, dating to 1.8 Ma also show evidence of in situ butchered mammal remains, ranging in size from hedgehogs to elephants these are also associated with large numbers of stone tools (Domínguez-Rodrigo et al. In addition to terrestrial animals, evidence from one site at Koobi Fora shows that hominins began to incorporate aquatic foods like turtles, crocodiles, and fish into their diets by about 1.95 Ma (Braun et al. The earliest well documented evidence of persistent hominin carnivory from in situ excavated fossil fauna occurring in association with large concentrations of stone tools is at about 2.0 Ma at Kanjera, Kenya (Ferraro et al. 2010), where Australopithecus afarensis remains have been found, but this evidence consists of only a few bone specimens and has been disputed (Domínguez-Rodrigo et al. There may be evidence of hominin-butchered bones at 3.4 Ma at Dikika, Ethiopia (McPherron et al. ![]() Probably not coincidentally, it's also around this time that we start to see the first evidence of archaeologically visible accumulations of stone tools (Semaw et al. The earliest well-accepted evidence for this novel dietary behavior comes from about 2.6 Ma at the site of Gona, Ethiopia (Domínguez-Rodrigo et al. Only those fossilized bones with butchery marks can confidently be tied to hominin diet (Blumenschine & Pobiner 2006).
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