- Fragments of a 1.5 million year old child's skull found in Tanzania showed evidence of anemia caused by a nutritional deficiency, suggesting the child had a meat-poor diet. This implies that regular meat consumption was important to early hominids in this time period. - The discovery provides further evidence that eating meat, which is rich in vitamins B9 and B12, played a key role in the evolution of large human brains and the development of intelligence. However, some causes of the bone lesions besides malnutrition cannot be ruled out. - The finding adds to debates around when early humans transitioned to regularly hunting and eating meat, which would have required hunting strategies, rather than just occasional scavenging

1. Food and evolution
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Eating Meat Made Us Human, Suggests New Skull Fossil
Fragments of a 1.5-million-year-old skull from a child recently found in Tanzania suggest early hominids weren't just
occasional carnivores but regular meat eaters, researchers say.
The finding helps build the case that meat-eating helped the human lineage evolve large brains, scientists added.
"I know this will sound awful to vegetarians, but meat made us human," said researcher Manuel Domínguez-
Rodrigo, an archaeologist at Complutense University in Madrid.
Past research suggested prehuman hominids such as australopithecines may have eaten some meat. However, it is
the regular consumption of meat that often is thought to have triggered major changes in the human lineage, the
genus Homo, with this high-energy food supporting large human brains.
Given its importance to human evolution, scientists want to learn when eating flesh became a regular activity. Stone
tools dating back about 2.6 million years to Gona in Ethiopia are often considered the earliest signs of the human
lineage butchering meat, and contentious evidence suggests butchery may have existed at least 3.4 million years
ago. "Despite this ample evidence, some archaeologists still argue that meat was eaten sporadically and played a
minor role in the diet of those hominins," Domínguez-Rodrigo said. (Hominins include humans and their relatives
after they split from the chimpanzee lineage.)
A fragment of a child's skull discovered at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, shows the oldest known evidence of anemia
caused by a nutritional deficiency.
Credit: Dominguez-Rodrigo M. et al., PLoS ONE 7(10): e46414. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0046414
Now shards of a child's skull found in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania suggest the infant suffered from a form of
malnutrition seen in meat-poor diets. This hints that meat-eating was normally a regular part of the human diet at the
time.
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2. The skull fragment is thought to belong to a child somewhat younger than 2. It remains unclear what hominin it
belonged to — likely candidates include extinct human species such as Homo habilis or Homo erectus, or perhaps
the "Nutcracker Man" Paranthropus boisei.
The kind of bone lesions the researchers saw in this fossil are known as porotic hyperostosis, which typically results
from a lack of vitamins B9 and B12 in the diet. This kind of nutritional deficiency is most common at weaning, when
children switch to solid foods. The researchers suggested this particular infant died because of lack of meat, which
is rich in B-vitamins. Alternatively, if the child still depended on the mother for milk, it may have been the mother who
lacked meat.
These findings suggest that "human brain development could not have existed without a diet based on regular
consumption of meat," Domínguez-Rodrigo said. "Regular consumption of meat at that time implied that humans
were hunters by then. Scavenging only rarely provides access to meat and is only feasible in African savannas on a
seasonal basis."
However, there are other potential causes for porotic hyperostosis besides malnourishment, such as malaria or
parasites. "Basically, anything that correlates with low red-cell count — either due to an infection of the blood or
blood loss, or nutritional insufficiency — can cause the marrow of the skull to ramp up its production massively,
causing the hyperostosis," said paleoanthropologist John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin, who did not take
part in this study.
Without animal fat and protein, our brains would never have reached such a volume, and intelligence would have
remained at the level of the Apes
Still, Hawks noted that Domínguez-Rodrigo and his colleagues took alternative explanations for these bone lesions
into account and were reasonably cautious in their interpretation of this data. "This is an interesting addition to what
we know," Hawks told LiveScience.
Now, Domínguez-Rodrigo said, "research should try to find out how humans were acquiring meat regularly. What
hunting strategies were used?"
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