Early Humans Loved to Eat Brains: Study

[Dave Bockman]

Human ancestors living in East Africa 2 million years ago weren’t a
steak-and-potatoes crowd. But they had a serious hankering for gazelle
meat and antelope brains, fossils discovered in Kenya indicate.

Three sets of butchered animal bones unearthed at Kenya’s Kanjera
South site provide the earliest evidence of both long-term hunting and
targeted scavenging by a member of the human evolutionary family,
anthropologist Joseph Ferraro of Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and
his colleagues conclude.

An early member of the Homo genus, perhaps Homo erectus, hunted small animals and scavenged predators’ leftovers of larger creatures, researchers report April 25 in PLOS ONE.
Along with hunting relatively small game such as gazelles, these
hominids scavenged the heads of antelope and wildebeests, apparently to
add a side of fatty, nutrient-rich brain tissue to their diets, the
scientists say.

Those dietary pursuits could have provided the extra energy Homo erectus needed to support large bodies, expanded brains and extensive travel across the landscape, Ferraro says.  

A few East African sites dating to as early as 3.4 million years
ago had previously produced small numbers of animal bones bearing
butchery marks made by stone tools. Scientists think those bones
indicate occasional meat eating (SN: 9/11/10, p. 8).

Now Kanjera South has yielded several thousand complete and
partial animal bones, representing at least 81 individual animals. A
known reversal of Earth’s magnetic field preserved in an excavated soil
layer allowed Ferraro’s team to determine the age of the finds, which
accumulated over a few thousand years at most.

Hominids hunted gazelles and other relatively small animals and
hauled their take back to Kanjera South, the researchers say, as
evidenced by the presence of bones from the animals’ entire bodies.
Stone tool marks indicate that prey were cut into parts before hunters
stripped flesh from the meatiest bones. The site contains no remnants of
burned wood or other signs of cooking.

Few tooth marks of lions or other predators appear on these fossils, another clue that hominids must have killed the small game.

“Hunting small animals may have been a regular behavior of
2-million-year-old human ancestors,” comments anthropologist Manuel
Domínguez-Rodrigo of Complutense University of Madrid.

Researchers also found disproportionately large numbers of skulls
and lower jaws in the excavated remains of antelope and other
comparably sized animals with considerably more heft than gazelles. The
preponderance of skulls best fits a scenario in which hominids retrieved
heads left untouched by big cats that had fed on meaty parts of
carcasses. Several brain cases and jaws display dents and fractures
created by hammering with stones to reach tissue inside, Ferraro says.

Predators tend to devour small prey quickly, so early Homo
at Kanjera South plausibly acquired gazelles via hunting, remarks
anthropologist Henry Bunn of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Further work needs to examine whether the prey animals were mainly in
the prime of their lives, which would be another clue that hunting was
practiced, Bunn says.

In 2010, Bunn and a colleague found mainly prime-age antelope and
other prey among 1.8-million-year-old butchered bones at Tanzania’s
Olduvai Gorge. Hominids with wooden spears climbed into trees and
ambushed prey walking by, a tactic that the Kanjera South crowd may have
employed even earlier, Bunn proposes.

Distinguishing between hunting and scavenging can be difficult based on fossils, he adds. Early Homo, for instance, could have occasionally driven predators away from fresh kills and carried away bodies of prime-age gazelles.

Likewise, says Domínguez-Rodrigo, the overrepresentation of
skulls could be due to selective disposal of antelope parts after a hunt
— as practiced by some hunter-gatherers today — rather than intentional
scavenging of heads.

[Wesley]

Make sense to me. As I understand it, many organ meats can be very healthy including the liver and the heart, though they generally are avoided by modern Western cultures with plentiful access to mass-produced meat.

Which in general, in a situation of hunting and starving I would eat almost anything to survive. A couple scarce hunting seasons could quickly lead a tribe to gain a taste for unconventional foods.