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Humans

Early humans may have turned to small game after wiping out big beasts

By Michael Marshall

15 March 2021

ancient hunter

The way ancient humans hunted may have influenced their evolution

Shutterstock / Gorodenkoff

Our ancestors’ diets changed dramatically over the course of the past 2.5 million years, and one research team thinks that profoundly affected our evolution.

According to a team including Miki Ben-Dor and Ran Barkai at Tel Aviv University in Israel, hominin diets were once so dominated by meat from massive animals that the hunters caused some of those species to go extinct. This, in turn, forced our ancestors to develop more sophisticated hunting techniques to bring down smaller, more elusive prey, …

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