Eating Crocodile Helped Boost Early Human Brains?
A diet of crocodiles and other aquatic animals may have given early humans lots of "good fat," leading to bigger brains, a new study says.
The work is based on bones and artifacts from a prehistoric "kitchen" that make up the earliest evidence that humans ate aquatic animals.
Stone tools and the butchered bones of turtles, crocodiles, and fish were found at the 1.95-million-year-old site in northern Kenya. No human bones were found, but the combination of remains suggests early humans used the site specifically to prepare meals.
(See: "Oldest Human Species Found: May Have Been Cannibal?")
According to the study authors, the addition of water-based prey into early-human diets may have been what boosted brain size in certain hominins—humans plus human ancestral species and their close evolutionary relatives.
That's because reptiles and fish are particularly
