Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

Humans and Proboscideans (the taxonomic order of elephants as well as several extinct animals such as mammoth) have shared habitats across the Old and New Worlds during the past two million years, starting with the appearance of the Genus Homo in Africa and following the dispersals of humans to other continents. Proboscideans were included in the human diet starting from the Lower Paleolithic and continued until the final stages of the Pleistocene, providing humans with both meat and, especially, fat. Meat eating, large-game hunting and food-sharing appeared in Africa some two million years ago and these practices were accompanied and supported by growing social complexity and cooperation. This argument emphasizes the dependency of early humans on calories derived from mega herbivores through the hunting of large and medium-sized animals as a fundamental and very early adaptation mode of Lower Paleolithic humans, and the possible emergence of social and behavioral mechanisms that appeared at these early times