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Vultures, hyenas, and various scavengers are inclined to have now not as a lot as stellar reputations. On tale of they’re drawn to the smells of decaying flesh they’re most ceaselessly associated with demise. When you look vultures circling, you might well presumably also presumably mediate that some creature is nearing its cease or has correct departed. And they’re freeloaders: They don’t work for his or her lunch as mighty because the hunters of the animal kingdom attain, they correct rob the spoils. So, whereas scavengers are main to a functioning planet, helping to comely up nature’s messes and to defend against the spread of disease, besides they are inclined to encourage disgust.
It’ll arrive as a shock, then, to be taught that early humans can also have relied heavily on scavenging, even after they’d the tools to hunt. Right here’s the finding of a sweeping explore by a physique of workers of Spanish paleontologists, archaeologists, and ecologists, who reviewed theoretical work besides to experimental observations within the discipline of carrion ecology. Their finding upends conventional wisdom on the matter, which held that for early human ancestors, the hazards of eating already dumb animals would have outweighed the advantages. The explore turned into published within the Journal of Human Evolution.
“When cumbersome terrestrial and marine mammals die, they offer a total lot with out danger accessible food, enabling many scavenger species to coexist and feed at the the same time,” acknowledged Ana Mateos, a researcher in paleophysiology and human ecology at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana in Spain and the lead writer of the explore, in a negate.
Earlier scholars belief scavenging turned into too unpredictable, and already-dumb animals too scarce, for it to be a frequent methodology to finding food for frail humans. And the hazards—of assault from a lingering predator or of catching a disease from the rotting meat—would had been too sizable.
However the new overview suggests that carrion can also had been a more genuine useful resource than previously belief, especially when plant food sources had been scarce. The scientists also imply that humans are, truly, neatly tailored to scavenge: They have defenses that would perhaps well defend against disease from carrion, reminiscent of an especially acidic belly to encourage execute off potential pathogens. And when humans learned to make use of fire to cook dinner, that can have added yet one more layer of protection. They also had the language and social skills to coordinate with every other to construct up carrion within the wild and produce it encourage home for dinner.
Proof of early human meat-eating has been surfacing since the 1960s, when archaeologists began finding stone tools and butchered animal bones relationship from more than 2 million years ago at assorted African web sites. That trigger off a debate among scholars about where the meat came from: whether our ancestors scavenged or hunted, or both, and when every prepare can have evolved.
Till now, the consensus had usually been that as soon as humans began to hunt, they abandoned carrion as a offer of meat. That line of taking into account, which posited that humans evolved in a straight line from scavenger to hunter to farmer, can also have partly developed attributable to scavengers have historically been considered as marginal or worn creatures. However this seek for of scavengers has more now not too long ago been debunked.
The brand new work suggests that scavenging persevered among humans long after hunting emerged. So whereas it has long been argued that “eating meat made us human,” says Mateos, an equally upright negate will seemingly be that “scavenging made us human.” 
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Kristen French
Posted on October 23, 2025
Kristen French is an affiliate editor at Nautilus. She has labored in science journalism since 2013, reporting and making improvements to aspects and news for publications reminiscent of Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, and New York magazine, among others. She studied science journalism at Columbia College. She relies mostly entirely entirely in San Diego.
