Palaeontology 🦖

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Paleontology, also spelled palaeontology[a] or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). It includes the study of fossils to classify organisms and study their interactions with each other and their environments (their /c/paleoecology. Read more...

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Smithsonian's Paleobiology website
University of California Museum of Paleontology
The Paleontological Society
The Palaeontological Association
The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology
The Paleontology Portal
"Geology, Paleontology & Theories of the Earth" – a collection of more than 100 digitised landmark and early books on Earth sciences at the Linda Hall Library

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Ape-Like Human Ancestors Were Largely Vegetarian 3.3 Million Years Ago in South Africa, Fossil Teeth Reveal (www.smithsonianmag.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The buried lede is:

“Meat likely played a significant role in the expansion of cranial capacity—larger brain development—during human evolution.
...
Lüdecke and her colleagues’ recent work, however, suggests the transition to meat-eating did not happen during the lifetimes of the seven studied Australopithecus individuals
...
“These are still fairly ape-like, small-brained hominins, that already walked upright but had a more ape-like walk,” Lüdecke tells NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce. “Here, for the first time, we have actual numbers to put on there to say, ‘Ok, not much meat was consumed for these small-brained hominins.’”

So, yeah. They've confirmed that we were still small-brained hominids when we were still mostly vegetarian.