We've Been Eating Fish for 40,000 Years

In their analysis of human remains dating back more than 40 millennia ago, researchers have determined that at least one of our ancestors ate fish regularly. The find helps set another piece in the puzzle of human development, and offers a better understanding of the diets that people had long before the first modern ones came to Europe and colonized the land. The fossils of our ancestor were found in the Tianyuan Cave, near the Chinese capital of Beijing.

Anthropologists and historians believe that eating fish on a regular basis that early on must have involved a considerable effort on the part of the hominids, mostly because they lacked the tools necessary to capture their prey easily. Other than stone blades, there weren't really any other fishing tools available. It's widely believed that the development of the spear made hunting and fishing a lot easier, and also that it helped further enhance the human brain, as better coordination between the limbs was necessary for an accurate aim.

“This analysis provides the first direct evidence for the consumption of aquatic resources by early modern humans in China and has implications for early modern human subsistence and demography,” Michael P. Richards, who is an expert at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Germany, explains the significance of the new investigation. According to some theories, it wash fish meat and the vitamins it contained that helped the human brain grow in size, and develop more complex social behavior, which ultimately led to our ancestors rising to the dominant species status.

The fish vitamins added to the introduction of meat protein from mammals and other land-based animals, which most likely took place two million years ago or even earlier, as fossils show. Anthropologists believe that basic needs, such as that to mate, eat and survive, may have also played an important role in boosting the overall volume of the human brain, and may have brought an invaluable contribution to our development as a species.

In a paper published in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the researchers hypothesize that the fish populations began to be harvested at a point in time when the human population got so big, that land resources alone could not sustain it, LiveScience informs.