At a fossil site in northern Koobi Fora, researchers kept finding animal bones dating back 1.6 million years that had the limbs removed at the exact same points, with leg bones cracked open in the same ways. Clearly, these ancient humans weren’t so primitive that they were randomly chopping up animals and devouring whatever meat they saw. They had a system, one that they used to dissect animals into discrete bits, not unlike a modern meat butcher.
A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed more than 1,100 fossils from the FwJj 80 site and found that early members of the genus Homo had established a repeatable and reliable approach to prepping their food. First, they targeted specific prey, mostly antelope and other animals with hooves. They then focused their butchery on the limbs with the most meat, before finally breaking the bones to extract the marrow. All of the skeletal evidence compiled suggests that the cuts were consistently made along where the largest muscle groups would have been.
In other words, these guys knew where the good meat was, and they developed a system for efficiently and consistently carving it out every single time.
Humans Were Foodies Long Before 5-Star Restaurants Existed
Consistent is the keyword here. Across hundreds of thousands of years, the same patterns kept showing up. Previous theories held that early human diets were constantly shifting, based on whatever was around and prepared by any means necessary. That may not have been the case, as these early humans seem to have been more discerning with their meat cuts, proving themselves to be not just early humans but some of the earliest examples of a foodie on record.
Another interesting detail that cropped up in the fossils was a lack of competition. Not many of the bones had signs of carnivore teeth, meaning that early humans got to these carcasses first, or at least early enough to get what they wanted. Whether they hunted them or just swooped in and scared off a predator to take its kill for their own is unclear, but either way it’s pretty obvious to the researchers that early humans had priority access to high-quality, expertly butchered meat, also proving that early humans were quite good at securing reservations at the hottest new eating spots.
The findings also strongly suggest that this particular set of early humans had way more food than they knew what to do with, so they likely shared it amongst themselves to use up as much of it as they could before moving on. Sharing is a cooperative act, which leads to the building of social structure, which leads to a kind of behavioral stability that builds societies, and all while sharing a meal with your buds. There’s nothing more modern human than that.
The post Humans Have Been Obsessed With the Best Cuts of Meat for 1.6 Million Years appeared first on VICE.
