by Deek Jackson
May 18, 2013

from YouTube Website
 

Until recently the oldest, unchallenged evidence of human hunting came from a 400,000-year-old site in Germany the evidence came from marks left by spears on horse bones - horses were clearly being speared and their flesh eaten.

But new Evidence from ancient butchery site in Tanzania shows early man used complex hunting techniques to ambush and kill antelopes, gazelles, wildebeest and other large animals at least two million years ago.

The discovery - by anthropologist Professor Henry Bunn of Wisconsin University - pushes back the definitive date for the beginning of systematic human hunting by hundreds of thousands of years.

Two million years ago, our human ancestors were small-brained ape-men.

Previously many scientists assumed the meat they butchered and ate had been gathered from animals that had died from natural causes or had been left behind by lions, leopards and other carnivores.

"We know that humans ate meat two million years ago," said Bunn, speaking at the European Society for the study of Human Evolution (ESHE).

 

"What was not clear was the source of that meat. However, we have compared the type of prey killed by lions and leopards today with the type of prey selected by humans in those days. This has shown that men and women could not have been taking kill from other animals or eating those that had died of natural causes.

 

They were selecting and killing what they wanted."

Once our species got a taste for meat, it was provided with a dense, protein-rich source of energy.

We no longer needed to invest internal resources on huge digestive tracts that were previously required to process vegetation and fruit, which are more difficult to digest.

This new, energy-rich resource was then diverted inside our bodies and used to fuel our growing brains.

Over the next two million years our crania grew, producing species of humans with increasingly large brains.