You said: Oh my!
Oh my! Big news item! They've discovered early humans and Australpithicines were omnivores!
Claude responded: This actually isn't new — it's been the scientific consensus for quite some time that early humans and australopithecines were omnivores.
This actually isn't new — it's been the scientific consensus for quite some time that early humans and australopithecines were omnivores.
The evidence has been building for decades:
Australopithecines (like A. africanus and A. afarensis, 2–4 million years ago) show dental and isotopic evidence of a mixed diet — primarily plant-based, but with some animal protein. Their teeth show traits intermediate between frugivores and more committed omnivores.
Early Homo (like H. habilis and H. erectus) show even stronger evidence of meat-eating — stone tools associated with butchered animal bones, cut marks on fossils, and stable isotope analysis all point to significant animal protein consumption, including marrow extraction.
The debate in paleoanthropology has never really been "were they omnivores?" but rather more nuanced questions like:
- How much meat vs. plants at different times and places?
- Was meat obtained primarily through hunting or scavenging?
- What role did cooking (controlled fire) play in expanding dietary range?
- How did diet vary seasonally and regionally?
It's possible the news item you saw is reporting on a specific new finding — perhaps a new fossil site, a refined isotopic analysis, or evidence pushing the timeline of meat-eating back further. That would be genuinely interesting! But the broad omnivore conclusion itself isn't a new discovery.
Do you have a link or more details about the specific study? I'd be happy to look it up and tell you what's actually new about it.
You said: I was being sarcastic, hence the exclamation points.
I was being sarcastic, hence the exclamation points. I think, especially if you include insects, that apes are generally omnivores too. Not much change. One can imagine larger animals from scavanging and the occasional mouse on our own.
Claude responded: Ha, sorry — sarcasm didn't land on me there!
Ha, sorry — sarcasm didn't land on me there! You're absolutely right on all counts.
Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, are already quite omnivorous. They eat fruit, leaves, nuts, insects, eggs, and actively hunt smaller primates like colobus monkeys — sometimes cooperatively. Gorillas and orangutans lean more herbivorous but will opportunistically eat insects and small animals. If you include insects, the line between "herbivore" and "omnivore" gets very blurry across the whole primate order.
Your scavenging point is well-taken too. The romantic image of early hominins as mighty hunters is probably overblown, at least initially. A more realistic picture is likely:
- Insects and grubs as a reliable, easy protein source
- Small animals — lizards, rodents, birds' eggs — grabbed opportunistically
- Scavenging larger carcasses, probably after big cats and vultures had their fill, cracking bones for marrow (which is calorie-dense and often overlooked by other scavengers)
- Actual big game hunting coming much later, likely with H. erectus and better tools and coordination
So the dietary continuity from ape to australopithecine to early Homo is probably much smoother than dramatic headlines suggest. It's more of a gradual dial being turned — more meat, more reliable access to it, more efficient processing — rather than any sudden shift.
The really interesting question is probably how cooking changed everything, since it dramatically increases calorie extraction from both meat and tubers.
You said: I would imagine a group of australopithecines could deal with the vultures easily enough.
I would imagine a group of australopithecines could deal with the vultures easily enough.
Claude responded: Good point!
Good point! Vultures are pretty easily intimidated — even today, a group of people waving and shouting will drive them off a carcass. A band of australopithecines, even though they were smaller than modern humans, were still social primates capable of coordinated group behavior. Vultures aren't going to pick a fight with a dozen angry bipedal apes throwing rocks and sticks.
The trickier competition would have been:
- Hyenas — highly social, aggressive, and very persistent. A spotted hyena clan is a serious threat even to lions. This would have been genuinely dangerous.
- Jackals — less threatening but persistent and numerous
- Lions and leopards — if still present at the kill, that's a different situation entirely. Discretion would be the better part of valor there.
The likely strategy was probably timing and opportunism — waiting until the big predators had moved on, then moving in boldly to chase off the vultures and jackals, grab what they could quickly, and retreat. Smash bones for marrow on the spot or carry pieces off.
There's actually an interesting hypothesis that early hominins may have used throwing as a key advantage — even crude throwing is something most other animals can't do, and it's a remarkably effective threat display and actual deterrent. A group pelting hyenas with rocks is a meaningful threat.
So yes — vultures specifically, probably not much of an obstacle at all.
You said: They were diurnal, so that cuts the competition.
They were diurnal, so that cuts the competition.
Claude responded: Great point.
Great point. Lions and leopards do a lot of their hunting at dawn and dusk or nocturnally, so by midday a carcass might be relatively unguarded beyond the vultures and maybe some jackals — much more manageable competition.
And hyenas, while not strictly nocturnal, are far more active at night. Their reputation as pure scavengers is actually backwards — they do most of their own hunting, and lions frequently steal from them rather than the other way around. But during the heat of the day they're largely resting.
So a band of australopithecines working in the middle of the day would have had a fairly clear window — the big dangerous predators are in the shade somewhere, and the remaining competition is birds and small canids that can be driven off easily. It's almost like a shift system, with different species exploiting the same resources at different times.
This is actually one of the interesting proposed advantages of bipedalism and the move into open savanna — walking upright is a terrible way to sprint, but it's a very efficient way to cover long distances in the heat, when quadrupeds are struggling with overheating. Early hominins may have been able to range widely during the hottest part of the day precisely when predator pressure was lowest.
Combined with relatively good heat dissipation through sweating and reduced body hair, midday on the savanna may have been something close to a safe niche for them — uncomfortably hot for most predators, but manageable for hominins.
You said: When would exhaustion hunting have taken over?
When would exhaustion hunting have taken over?
Claude responded: That's a really interesting question of timing.
That's a really interesting question of timing. Exhaustion hunting — persistence hunting, where you run an animal to heat exhaustion over hours — requires a pretty specific package of traits:
Physical prerequisites:
- Efficient long-distance bipedal running gait — probably well developed by H. erectus around 1.8 million years ago
- Highly effective sweating and thermoregulation
- Reduced body hair
- The nuchal ligament for head stabilization while running — present in H. erectus, absent in australopithecines
- Achilles tendon and arched foot for energy-efficient running — again H. erectus
So australopithecines were probably not capable of it. They were bipedal but likely still fairly inefficient runners, with body proportions still partly adapted for tree climbing.
Cognitive prerequisites:
- Ability to track an animal over hours and terrain changes
- Mental map of the landscape
- Group coordination over a long chase
H. erectus is the most likely first practitioner, so roughly 1.5–2 million years ago perhaps, though it's very hard to pin down archaeologically since the behavior leaves almost no direct trace.
There's also a question of whether it was ever a primary strategy versus a seasonal or opportunistic one — even modern persistence hunters use it selectively rather than as their default approach.
You said: I suspect the main diet was always stuff the women got together, with an occasional bonus of a successful hunt.
I suspect the main diet was always stuff the women got together, with an occasional bonus of a successful hunt.
Claude responded: That matches the anthropological evidence pretty well, and the ethnographic evidence from modern hunter-gatherers strongly supports it.
That matches the anthropological evidence pretty well, and the ethnographic evidence from modern hunter-gatherers strongly supports it. Studies of groups like the !Kung San show that gathered food — roots, tubers, berries, nuts, insects — provides the reliable caloric backbone, while hunting is exciting, celebrated, but actually quite unreliable day to day.
There's a kind of cultural bias that probably inflated the importance of hunting in earlier reconstructions — archaeology preserves bones and stone tools beautifully, while gathered plant foods leave almost no trace. So the record looks more meat-heavy than reality probably was.
The social division also makes intuitive sense:
- Gathering is compatible with childcare — you can carry an infant and dig up tubers
- Hunting, especially persistence hunting, really isn't
- Women's collective knowledge of plant resources — what's edible, seasonal, where to find it — would have been enormously valuable and accumulated over generations
The prestige economy around hunting is interesting too. In many hunter-gatherer societies meat is shared widely and hunters gain social status from it disproportionate to its actual caloric contribution. Which suggests the social role of hunting may have always been partly about status and bonding as much as nutrition.
So a successful hunt was probably a genuine community celebration — a protein bonanza and a social event — against a background of steady reliable female-organized gathering. The hunters get the glory, the gatherers keep everyone alive.
You said: Before cooking, was there any sort of thing that could be done to the meat to help our teeth?
Before cooking, was there any sort of thing that could be done to the meat to help our teeth?
Claude responded: Great question.
Great question. Pre-cooking meat processing is actually an underexplored area. A few possibilities:
Mechanical processing:
- Bashing and pounding with stones — breaking down tough muscle fibers and connective tissue, essentially external pre-chewing
- Scraping meat off bones with flakes would produce thin strips easier to chew and tear
- Simply tearing meat into smaller pieces manually
Fermentation — probably accidental at first:
- Leaving meat to partially rot actually breaks down proteins and makes it easier to chew and digest
- Many traditional cultures deliberately age or ferment meat
- A carcass left in the sun for a day becomes significantly softer
- The bacteria do some of the digestive work externally
- Our stomach acid is remarkably strong compared to most primates — possibly an adaptation to eating somewhat spoiled meat regularly
Drying:
- Thin strips dried in the sun become brittle and easier to break down than raw tough muscle
The stone tool connection is interesting here — the Oldowan toolkit of early Homo around 2.6 million years ago may have been as important for meat processing as for anything else. Sharp flakes produce thin manageable strips rather than tough chunks.
The fermentation angle is perhaps the most intriguing — our surprisingly robust stomach acid and relatively good tolerance for pathogens might be a lasting legacy of ancestors who regularly ate meat that was well past its best.
You said: Well I've had Montezuma's revenge a few times, so it isn't perfect.
Well I've had Montezuma's revenge a few times, so it isn't perfect.
Claude responded: Ha!
Ha! Fair point — the system has its limits. Though arguably Montezuma's revenge is more about encountering unfamiliar local bacterial strains rather than a failure of general pathogen resistance. Your gut microbiome is tuned to your local environment, and foreign bacteria can overwhelm it even if you'd handle your local equivalents fine.
It's also worth noting that our ancestors probably had some advantages we've lost:
- Continuous low-level exposure to a wide range of pathogens from childhood, building broad immunity
- A gut microbiome vastly more diverse than modern humans, especially those from industrialized societies — we've lost a lot of that diversity through clean water, antibiotics, and processed food
- Possibly behaviorally — they may have learned which carcasses were safe and which weren't, discarding anything that smelled wrong even by pre-cooking standards
Though of course the downside was enormous infant and child mortality from gut pathogens. The adults walking around were the survivors of a brutal filtering process. Natural selection is a harsh way to optimize a digestive system.
So the ancestral gut was probably genuinely more robust in some ways, but it came at a terrible demographic cost — and even then Australopithecus probably had plenty of bad days crouched behind a bush too. Some things are apparently timeless.
You said: Did cooking come first or smoking?
Did cooking come first or smoking?
Claude responded: That's a really interesting question to untangle.
That's a really interesting question to untangle. Almost certainly cooking came first, by a very long margin.
Cooking via direct fire — throwing meat in or near flames, or onto hot coals — is almost accidental in its simplicity. You can stumble into it. Natural wildfires would have occasionally cooked animals, and early hominins scavenging after a grassfire would have encountered cooked meat long before they controlled fire themselves. So the discovery was probably made repeatedly and passively before it was intentional.
Smoking is considerably more sophisticated because it requires:
- Sustained controlled fire over a long period
- Understanding that the goal is preservation rather than immediate cooking
- Enough food surplus that preservation is even worth bothering with
- Some grasp of delayed gratification — processing food now for future benefit
That last point is actually cognitively quite demanding. It implies planning for future scarcity in a fairly abstract way.
Smoking is also most valuable in contexts where you have more meat than you can immediately eat — a large kill for instance — which itself implies more sophisticated hunting than early scavenging.
So smoking probably came much later, likely with anatomically modern humans and the broader package of advanced planning and food storage behaviors, perhaps 100,000 years ago or less, though it's almost impossible to find direct archaeological evidence for it.
The gap between first cooking and first smoking might be over a million years.
You said: I always kinda imagined smoking was among the skills needed to invade climates that have winter.
I always kinda imagined smoking was among the skills needed to invade climates that have winter.
Claude responded: That's a really elegant insight and it makes a lot of sense as a package.
That's a really elegant insight and it makes a lot of sense as a package. Moving into cold seasonal environments requires solving a specific problem — how do you eat in winter when fresh food essentially disappears? You need to be able to capture a surplus in good times and carry it forward.
The whole winter-survival toolkit probably came together as a bundle:
- Smoking and drying meat and fish for storage
- Caching — storing food in cool locations
- Clothing and shelter sophisticated enough for real cold
- Fat accumulation — hunting large fatty animals like mammoths specifically for caloric density
- Planning and resource mapping across seasons
None of these work in isolation very well. You need most of them together to actually survive a northern winter, which suggests the cognitive leap required was substantial and may explain why it took so long for hominins to push into genuinely cold climates despite being physically capable of it.
It also puts fish in an interesting light — smoking and drying fish is perhaps even more valuable than meat, fish are often available in enormous seasonal abundances like salmon runs, and rivers and coasts may have been the highways into northern Europe and Asia. Following coastlines and river systems gives you both the food source and the preservation method in the same package.
So your intuition probably captures something real — smoking wasn't just a cooking technique, it may have been a key that unlocked entire continents.
You said: Oh yea!
Oh yea! Smoked salmon!
Claude responded: A classic for very good reasons!
A classic for very good reasons! And salmon runs would have been almost miraculous from a prehistoric perspective — suddenly the river is absolutely choked with large fatty fish, almost jumping into your hands, for a few weeks a year. The challenge is entirely about capture and preservation rather than finding food at all.
It's such a reliable and dense food source that it arguably allowed semi-sedentary lifestyles in the Pacific Northwest among Native Americans well before agriculture — which is a really unusual situation. Normally that level of social complexity and settlement requires farming, but smoked and dried salmon essentially functioned as a stored grain equivalent.
And salmon are particularly good for this because:
- Very high fat content — critical for cold climate caloric needs
- They essentially deliver themselves predictably year after year
- They can be dried and smoked relatively easily
- They keep well enough to last through winter
There's something deeply satisfying about the fact that one of the most refined and celebrated delicacies in modern cuisine — smoked salmon on a blini with cream cheese, or cold smoked Scottish salmon — is essentially a direct continuation of a prehistoric preservation technique that may have helped our ancestors survive their first northern winters.
The technique is probably tens of thousands of years old and we still do it for essentially the same reasons — it just tastes absolutely wonderful as a bonus.
You said: So now you have all the food you need for months, what do you do?
So now you have all the food you need for months, what do you do? Evolve rituals.
Claude responded: Yes!
Yes! This is such a compelling connection. Suddenly you have something genuinely rare in the prehistoric world — leisure time. Not just survival, but surplus and security, at least temporarily.
And what fills that space universally across human cultures:
- Story and myth — long winter nights around the fire are perfect for elaborating narrative traditions
- Music and dance — percussion and rhythm around a fire, almost irresistible socially
- Art — the great cave paintings of Europe cluster in exactly this period and region
- Ceremony and ritual around the salmon run itself — gratitude, supplication, ensuring the fish return next year
- Social hierarchy and politics — who controls the smoking racks, who distributes the surplus, becomes enormously important
- Trade — surplus smoked salmon is also a trade good, connecting communities
The salmon run itself almost demands ritual because it's so dramatic and so critical. It appears, it's overwhelming, and then it's gone. That cycle of abundance and absence, with survival hanging on it, is almost perfectly designed to generate religious thinking — propitiation, taboo, ceremony to ensure the return.
And there's a broader point here that surplus food and ritual complexity seem to go together almost everywhere you look anthropologically. Civilization in a meaningful sense might owe as much to the smoking rack as to the plough.
The fish comes back every year. You better thank something.
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