traces of bug exoskeletons. When you fi nd a huge pile of bones
of a particular species that are burned, broken, and discarded in a
heap, it’s good evidence that it was a regular part of the diet and
that hunters brought back their kill to a central place to butcher it
and probably shared it communally. Wall paintings, such as those in Lascaux in France and Altamira
in Spain, reveal which species were hunted—some of which are
now extinct, including woolly mammoths, or no longer live in the
region because they were overhunted, or the climate changed so
dramatically that they couldn’t survive or feed themselves. Anthropologists also infer information about prehistoric diets and
cooking methods by comparing modern-day peoples still living
in traditional ways, including Amazonian tribes and aboriginal
Australians, and drawing inferences about prehistoric peoples
from them.Human Evolution
There have been a lot of recent discoveries in paleontology
regarding human evolution. The story of how we became human
is all about food: hunting, processing ingredients, and cooking.
The story of human evolution itself is largely a story of changes
triggered by different modes of food processing.
The last common ancestor of humans and apes seems to have lived
between 5 and 10 million years ago. Both were omnivores, but a
parting of the ways in the quest for food, in a sense, made us what
we are. Ardipithecus ramidus, discovered in 1994, is the oldest
hominid. Ardipithecus ramidus lived about 5 million years ago, was
about four feet tall, walked upright, and lived in forests. Bipedalism, the fact that hominids walk on two feet, is thought
to be the result of the need to move faster and see farther when
hominids began to move onto the plains and catch larger animals or
escape from predators. In other words, how we ate (on the plains)
directly drove evolution. Shorter hominids that walked with their