Were our ancestors vegan?

How much choice did early humans have over their lunch?
15 October 2024

Interview with 

Peter Ungar, University of Arkansas

CAVEMAN

Early human ancestor

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The term "veganism" is a modern one. It was first coined in 1944 by Donald Watson who would go on to found the Vegan Society. But did our ancestors also choose to reject the consumption of animal products as many people do in the 21st century? Chris Smith spoke with Peter Unger, a paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Arkansas. He is also the editor of Human Diet: Its Origins and Evolution…

Peter - Well, there's actually a limited amount of information that we have on the diets of our ancestors. Most of that information comes from direct evidence, like the teeth of the ancestors themselves or indirect evidence like the context, the bones, and the plant materials that are found alongside them in the fossil record.

Chris - What clues can we get from teeth, then?

Peter - You can look at the wear patterns on the teeth, both gross and microscopic, to say something about what animals actually ate in a moment in time in the past. You can look at the shapes of the teeth to say something about what the animals had evolved to eat, what their ancestors were selected to eat. You can look at the chemistry of the teeth and say something about the properties of the foods that were used to build those teeth. What it tells us is that we're not very specialised. We don't have the specialised teeth of carnivores, animals that chew and slice through tough meat and sinew. We don't have the flat teeth with the parallel ridges of enamel for grinding tough vegetation. We have very generalised teeth that basically suggest that we evolved for a fairly broad diet. Of course, it's very difficult when you ask what our ancestors evolved to eat because the question that I always come up with is, what ancestors, right? Are we talking about ones that lived 500,000 years ago, a million years ago, 5 million years ago? Also, where? Human ancestors and our near cousins living in different parts of the world likely ate different foods depending upon the environments they lived in.

Chris - What does eating meat do for your evolution? What does it drive or what does it enable you to unlock that, were you to forgo meat eating, your evolution might take a different path?

Peter - As our ancestors developed an increasingly broad diet, they began to consume meat as part of that broadening diet. Is meat necessary? Absolutely not. But when it's the easiest to obtain high calorie resource, then of course they would take advantage of it. Ultimately, humans are dependent on grass, whether we're talking about corn and wheat and rice, or we're talking about consuming animals that consume grass, there's just too many of us to not have to take advantage of this wonderful approach that nature has taken to generating energy from the sun. Rather than consuming the grass directly or consuming plants, some of our ancestors were probably forced to take these large mammals.

Chris - Is there any possibility or is there any evidence that some cave men and women were vegetarians or even vegans?

Peter - There is not a lot of evidence either way, to be honest with you. Researchers are beginning to develop tools that we hope will allow us - in terms of bone and tooth chemistry - to come up with numbers for the amount of meat consumption, but those are still in the works and on the ground level. We do have some evidence from more recent human relatives like Neanderthals and the amount of nitrogen in their teeth, which gives you an idea of whether animals are eating animals or eating plants, the position in the food pyramid, and it appears that Neanderthals in some places consumed mostly plant material and Neanderthals in other places consumed mostly meat. But I think the point is that, again, humans are so broad in the diets they eat. We are the broadest spread species on the planet, and the reason for that is we can find something to eat no matter where we roam.

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