Diet of the first hominids

The oldest period in hauman evolution is called Paleolithic (paleos – means old, lithos – stone) – or old stone age. About 2.6 million years ago, the Australopithecus used the hand axe as their first tool.  Most of the oldest tools made from stone are found in Kenya and Ethiopia.

The first humans were predominantly hunters and gatherers. Today’s  knowledge of past cultures, peoples, lifestyles, customs,… is based on archaeological finds and stories written in those layers, all interpreted by archaeologists.

We retrospectively conclude about the way of life in a time without written sources from the life of people who still live on the same level as hunter-gatherer societies today.

By analyzing the tooth enamel of a 1.2 million year old hominid from Spain, it was found that at that time man ate only raw food (meat, insects and grass). Man hunted wild animals for meat and bone marrow, and collected food, firewood, and materials for his tools, clothes, or shelters. Homo erectus (“Upright Man”) was the first to use fire for cooking. In today’s Europe, this is estimated to be somewhere between 400,000 and 300,000 years ago. The use of fire reduced human mortality, it protected them from predators, provided heating, and also cooked food.

The Paleolithic diet consisted of meat from wild animals (deer, wild boar, bear, etc.), fish, leafy vegetables, flowers, leaves, fruits, nuts, seeds, roots, tubers, insects, as well as shells and seaweed of those  near the sea. They baked on stone slabs or stones, or directly in embers. They could cook in shallow pits (the invention of clay dishes came quite late). One way of cooking: on a layer of moist green leaves, which were arranged on the stones, they added meat with herbs, vegetables, nuts, etc., and covered that with a new layer of moist leaves and soil. Layers of moist plants protected the food from dirt and provided moisture for steam.

Sometimes they put water or skin in the pit, filled it with water, and put heated stones in it to make the water boil. Then they added the meat and cooked it that way. Roasting animals on a spit was also common.

(Sources: http://cookit.e2bn.org/historycookbook/29-329-prehistoric-Food-facts.html; Pobiner, B. (2013) Evidence for Meat-Eating by Early Humans. Nature Education Knowledge 4 (6) : 1 – https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/evidence-for-meat-eating-by-early-humans-103874273/)