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Modern-day humans eat a lot of meat. Some nutritionists say perhaps too much. But fossils in Tanzania indicate that early humans considered meat a dietary staple much earlier than first thought. What’s more, meat may have played a major role in evolution. At least one and a half million years ago, humans considered meat a main dish, not just occasional fare. That’s very big news to archeologists. The evidence is found in skull fossil fragments of a young child discovered in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge. What evidence is that? We’ll find out after we consider the mystery of meat. Professor Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo of Madrid’s Complutense University has been searching for clues about early humans for 20 years. He’s been digging around the gorge since 2006, after analyzing fossils found by the famous British archeologist and anthropologist Mary Leakey. “There was an increasing amount of evidence that early humans pretty much around two million years ago were eating meat. And archeologists over the past 50 years have been debating two main questions. One, was meat an important element in the diet of these hominids or was it just a complimentary element like you might see in modern chimpanzees, for instance? And question number two is --whether it was important or not – how did they acquire this meat. Did they hunt the animals they were eating? Did they scavenge the animals they were eating?” Archeologists know from sites in Ethiopia that human ancestors ate meat as far back at two-point-six million years ago. But there are so few bone fragments from that time with primitive knife marks on them that it’s unclear how often meat was consumed. | 
