For both dietary and environmental reasons, we’re rethinking our consumption of meat . But for earlier humans, meat consumption appeared to be a critical, yet somewhat poorly understood, contributor to evolution—and a new study offers some novel insights into how nuanced this actually was.

Published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , the findings describe how fossil evidence from animal bones and hominin remains strongly suggest that the earliest members of the genus Homo used a varied yet consistent pattern of carcass use to consume meat. According to study lead author Francis Forrest , researchers consider meat-eating to be a major evolutionary turning point. However, how early humans accessed meat was unclear. Were they scavenging leftovers or engaging in more active forms of hunting and scavenging?…