Joel Kontinen
Evolution would be boring without a never-ending stream of new just so stories that often contradict each other, but they do keep on making headlines across the popular media.
Long before human ancestors began hunting large mammals for meat, a fatty diet provided them with the nutrition to develop bigger brains, posits a new paper in the journal Current Anthropology.
"Our human ancestors were likely awkward creatures," the paper’s lead author Jessica Thompson, an anthropologist at Yale University says. "They weren't good in trees, like chimpanzees are, but they weren't necessarily all that good on the ground either. So, what did the first upright walking apes in our lineage do to make them so successful? At this stage, there was already a small increase in the size of the brains. How were they feeding that?"
The easy way to do this was to eat up, so that they’d become less awkward and brainy.
Source:
Yale University. 2019. A taste for fat may have made us human. Science Daily (5 February 2019).
Posts
