Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains

The prevailing view, supported by a confluence of fossil evidence from sites in Ethiopia, is that the emergence of flaked tool use and meat consumption led to the cerebral expansion that kickstarted human evolution more than 2 million years ago. Thompson and her colleagues disagree: Rather than using sharpened stones to hunt and scrape meat from animals, they suggest, earlier hominins may have first bashed bones to harvest fatty nutrients from marrow and brains. Homo may have emerged earlier than scientists suspected—a theory that would need more fossil evidence to support it—or another hominin, such as Australopithecus, may have created tools before Homo.

Source: www.scientificamerican.com