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Predators, Toolmakers and A Different View of the Stone Age
We have an image of the life of Stone Age man. In that image, a group of men are coming back from a hunt. Women are digging for roots nearby. A grandmother tells a story to a group of children. An older man is knapping flint tools.
According to Dr. Miki Ben-Dor and Prof. Ran Barkai of the Jacob M. Alkov Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, we’re probably wrong.
Quite wrong.
They did evidence collection from 400 scientific papers and came to a startling conclusion:
For 2 million years, humans were hypercarnivores and apex predators.
What the Image Should Be, Then?
If Ben-Dor and Barkai are right, then our Stone Age camp looks quite a bit different. A group of young hunters are dragging back a mammoth on a sled. It’s entirely possible there’s some plant food to be used as seasoning. Most likely, these hunters aren’t all men; it takes everyone to bring down a mammoth. Younger women and women who are between children (natural weaning in humans is three years and fertility drops off while nursing, so our stone age women probably only got pregnant every 2 to 3 years, not every year until they were worn out).