Early meat-eating humans outlived their vegetarian counterparts

Want an excuse to eat nothing but raw, bloody meat and shut up your kale-loving vegetarian friends? A study published yesterday in Nature suggests early meat-eating humans may have thrived while their vegetarian counterparts died out. Researchers with the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon assessed tooth enamel from the fossils of three early human lines -- Australopithecus africanus, Paranthropus robustus and early Homo specimens to determine the diet of each. They found the group that ate mainly plants – Paranthropus -- was the same species that died out about 1 million years ago, while the omnivores (Australopithecus) and carnivores (early Homo) lived to eat another day. [Source]

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