Eating Raw Meat Played an Important Role in Human Evolution, Study Suggests

A study had found that how early people eat played an important role in human evolution. Eating made room for physiological advances that helped make what humans can do today.

Paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman tried to chew a raw goat meat for him to know what challenges the first people experienced when they had to eat raw meat without utensils, as reported by Los Angeles Times.

"It's a little salty, and it's very tough," Lieberman said. "You put it in your mouth and you chew and you chew and you chew and you chew, and nothing happens."

He is the first person to discover that modern human teeth are not design to chewing chunks of uncooked meat. Human teeth are designed to crush like mortar and pestle unlike raw meat eaters like predators that can slice through elastic meat like scissors.

"It stays like a wad in your mouth," Lieberman said. "It's almost like a piece of chewing gum."

A fossil record shows that ancient human has the same teeth with us but they are already consuming meat 2.5 million years ago. The meat was probably raw at that time since cooking meat was discovered roughly 500 years later.

Due to these challenges, however, ancient people have undergone notable evolutionary changes. They acquired smaller teeth, chewing muscles and jaws. They also lose the snout possessed by their ancestors, Reuters reported.

"Shortening the snout might have been beneficial for producing articulate speech, for having a more balanced head, especially useful when running, or perhaps for other reasons," Lieberman said.

The changes, they believe, may also the reason behind the larger brain development in early human species like Homo erectus compared to Australopithecus, which are in earlier members of human lineage who has the combination of ape-like and human-like traits.Compared to plants, meat added a calorically dense food to these early human's diet as their body and brains got bigger.