Study Suggests Early Humans Ate Meat 1.5 Million Years Ago

Close examination of a 1.5 million-year-old skull fragment orginally discovered at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania reveals features that indicate anemia, a nutrional deficiency caused by the lack of vitamin B, a vitamin commonly acquired through the consumption of meat.

The discovery was made by an international team of researchers led by Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo from Complutense University, Madrid, and it suggests that early human ancestors ate meat earlier in history than previously thought. The skull fragment, dated to approximately 1.5 million years B.P. and identified as belonging to a child aged less than two, shows bone lesions that commonly result from a lack of B-vitamins in the diet.

Previous studies have indicated that early hominids may have consumed meat, but it was uncertain if they ate meat on a regular basis, or only occasionally. The lesions in the bone fragment suggests, according to the study authors, that meat-eating was common enough that not consuming it could lead to anemia.

The child likely could have acquired vitamins associated with meat through the mother’s milk before weaning. Nutritional deficiencies such as anemia are most common at weaning, when a child’s diet commonly changes. The researchers suggest that the child may have died after starting to eat solid foods lacking meat or, if the child was still breastfeeding, the mother may have been nutritionally deficient because of the lack of meat in her diet.

Based on the study results, “early humans were hunters, and had a physiology adapted to regular meat consumption at least 1.5 million years ago”, according to the researchers.

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A fragment of a child’s skull discovered at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, shows the oldest known evidence of anemia caused by a nutritional deficiency.  From Dominguez-Rodrigo M, Pickering TR, Diez-Martin F, Mabulla A, Musiba C, et al. (2012) Earliest Porotic Hyperostosis on a 1.5-Million-Year-Old Hominin, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. PLoS ONE 7(10): e46414. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0046414

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The report of the study is published in PLoS ONE as “Dominguez-Rodrigo M, Pickering TR, Diez-Martin F, Mabulla A, Musiba C, et al. (2012) Earliest Porotic Hyperostosis on a 1.5-Million-Year-Old Hominin, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. PLoS ONE 7(10): e46414. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0046414″ at  http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0046414.

*Republished with permission from Popular Archaeology