How an ancestral shift to eating more meat changed the course of human history for the better

It helped us reach our “prime.”The Progression of Man apparently wasn’t as gradual as once thought.UK researchers found that our ancestors experienced a rapid growth spurt between 2 and 2.5 million years ago, potentially due to increased meat consumption and walking upright, per a beefy study published in the Proceedings Of The National Academy of Sciences.The authors set out to shed light on the size discrepancy between modern humans, whose average weight clocks in at 137 pounds globally, and our earliest prehistoric forebears, such as Australopithecus, which weighed a child-sized 88 pounds on average.They specifically wanted to know if this evolutionary pound-packing happened incrementally over time or in rapid spurts like prehistoric puberty, IFL Science reported.“For years, different studies have come to different conclusions about whether our ancestors steadily grew bigger over time or jumped in size at some key point,” said lead author Jacob Gardner at the University of Reading.

He believes that by analyzing the various theories, piecing together the fossils and comparing the different species, they were able to paint the complete picture.To get to the bottom of how our species reached new heights (and weights), the researchers specifically analyzed 386 specimens of hominin encompassing 21 species, from Australopithecus to modern humans.They then ran a series of 1,000 statistical models to measure how body size changed over millions of years, accounting for structural family-tree relationships and historical gaps.This improved upon prior scholarship, which either focused on the growth trajectory of specific species, Australopithecus or later forms of Homo, and tried to extrapolate sizes from incomplete fossils.By combining all the methods, the researchers discovered that these fragmentary models weren’t at odds with each other, but rather focused on a narrow sample size.According to the new comprehensive research, body weight steadily increase...