Human evolution might boil down to a lot more than what Homo erectus had for dinner, but this focus on our ancestors’ diets still has a lot of sway today. Via WIREDUK
, Barr and Pobiner now argue that the link between meat-eating and human evolution might be less certain than previously thought. The apparent increase in butchered bones after the appearance of, they conclude, is actually a sampling bias. More paleontologists went looking for bones at dig sites from this era—and as a result, they found more of them.
For Barr, the new study’s results point to a gap in the paleontological record that needs to be filled in. It might be that other factors were responsible for the evolution of humanlike traits, or it might be that there was a big increase in meat-eating in an earlier period that we just haven’t been able to see yet. “At some point there is no evidence for butchery, and at some point there’s a lot of evidence.
But Thompson points out that this “species richness” metric may not be the best way to measure whether paleontologists have searched hard enough for butchered bone fragments. Not every ancient site is explored in the same way, she says. Paleoanthropologists—who study the lives of ancient humans—might search really hard for butchered bone fragments at a particular site, even if this time period hasn’t been well-studied by paleontologists who are looking for other kinds of fossils.
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