Humans didn’t always live on meat or vegetables — A new study reveals our ancestors ate far stranger foods

Humans can eat almost anything on this planet.

But recent studies have found that our ancestors may have eaten foods much more similar to the food we eat. Now we are certainly not saying that early humans were cooking complicated recipes straight out of a Gordon Ramsey book. But there are a few similarities.

How would you feel about your ancestors surviving on strange foods?

What we eat as humans has changed over our collective timeline

Our earliest cousins in the human family tree used to mostly survive off plants and other vegetation.

Science has found that approximately 3 million years ago, we began to add meat and marrow to our diets. A large proportion of historians and scientists have noted that by adding meat to our diets, our ancestors most likely fueled a dramatic expansion of the human brain.

What we eat affects our brain chemistry.

Roughly 1 million years ago, humans found that fire could improve the taste of our food. This also broke down carbohydrates and complex proteins, making them much easier to stomach.

Human science has developed into a world of knowledge that has impacted us all

Human science has transformed from a purely observation-based set of information into a high-tech toolkit that analyzes how our bodies and brains operate.

Our ability to study the world around us has seen new findings being made. Such as the latest concern that microplastics are filling up our bodies with dangerous, foreign chemicals.

We now know that our human evolution was not a straight line to modern people.

In fact, genetic science has proven that most modern humans carry only 2% Neanderthal DNA. We have also found that our gut influences how we age over time, reversing previous theories that our body and brain determine how we age.

Through our collective scientific progress, we have eradicated diseases that decimated our ancestors.

Smallpox once killed three out of ten of the people who were infected by it. And through a global scientific push, it was completely eradicated by 1980, proving that when we work together, the impossible can be achieved.

A recent study published in The Harvard Gazette has revealed that our ancestors ate much stranger foods than we previously thought.

We have been eating starchy foods for much longer than we ever knew

A group of over 50 scientists from around the world came together to conduct a study of our early ancestors.

They found that early humans and Neanderthals were eating starch-rich foods long before we initially thought. The study finds that we have been consuming starch-rich foods as far back as 100,000 years ago.

The research that was conducted focused specifically on oral microbiomes by studying dental plaque accumulated in our ancestors’ mouths.

Digging up fossils of our early human cousins has revealed a treasure trove of information that has reshaped the world. The study noted that specific strains of oral bacteria were found in early humans and Neanderthals that break down starch in their bodies.

The bacteria in question use enzymes from human saliva to feed themselves, a trait not found in primates that have non-starchy diets.

The study has challenged the long-held belief that early humans mostly ate meat

The presence of the Streptococcus bacteria in our ancestors’ mouths proves that early humans not only ate meat, but in fact ate starch-heavy foods as well. What they were eating may have been things like nuts and tubers in the earliest days of human life on our planet.

Recent scientific findings have reshaped our human family tree, and this latest development, published in the Harvard Gazette, has proven that our diets have been far more complex than we ever thought.

How much starch do you consume on average within a month? Likely not as much as our ancestors, as the study has proven.