How Scavenging Made Us Human

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VCrops, hyenas and other scavengers tend to have less than stellar reputations. Because they are attracted to the smells of rotting flesh, they are often associated with death. If you see vultures circling, you can probably assume that a creature is nearing its end or has just left. And they are parasites: they don’t work as hard for their lunch as the hunters of the animal kingdom, they just steal the spoils. So while scavengers are essential to the proper functioning of the planet, helping to clean up nature’s messes and protect against the spread of disease, they also tend to inspire disgust.

So it might be surprising to learn that early humans relied heavily on scavengers, even after they had the tools to hunt. It is the result of an in-depth study carried out by a team of Spanish paleontologists, archaeologists and ecologists, who reviewed theoretical work as well as experimental observations in the field of carrion ecology. Their discovery overturns preconceived ideas on the subject, according to which for the first human ancestors, the risks linked to the consumption of already dead animals would have exceeded the advantages. The study was published in the Journal of Human Evolution.

“When large land and marine mammals die, they provide tons of easily accessible food, allowing many scavenger species to coexist and feed at the same time,” Ana Mateos, a researcher in paleophysiology and human ecology at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana in Spain and lead author of the study, said in a statement.

Early scholars believed that excavation was too unpredictable and animals that had already died were too rare for it to be a frequent approach to finding food for ancient humans. And the risks – of attack by a persistent predator or of catching disease from rotting meat – would have been too great.

But the new research suggests that carrion may have been a more reliable resource than previously thought, particularly when plant food sources were scarce. Scientists also suggest that humans are, in fact, well adapted to waste: they have defenses that could protect them against diseases caused by carrion, such as a particularly acidic stomach to help kill potential pathogens. And when humans learned to use fire for cooking, it would have added an extra layer of protection. They also had the linguistic and social skills to coordinate to find carrion in the wild and bring it home for dinner.

Evidence of human consumption of meat has surfaced since the 1960s, when archaeologists began finding stone tools and bones of butchered animals dating back more than 2 million years at many African sites. This sparked a debate among researchers about the origin of meat: whether our ancestors were hunters or scavengers, or both, and when each practice may have evolved.

Until now, the general consensus was that as soon as humans began hunting, they abandoned carrion as a source of meat. This line of thinking, which posited that humans evolved in a straight line from scavenger to hunter to farmer, may have developed in part because scavengers have historically been considered marginal or primitive creatures. But this view of scavengers has recently been debunked.

The new work suggests that foraging persisted among humans long after the emergence of hunting. So while it has long been claimed that “eating meat made us human,” Mateos says, an equally true statement might be that “eating trash made us human.”

Main image: AnnstasAg / Shutterstock

• Kristen French

  Published on October 23, 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and editing features and news for publications such as Wired, Rear channel, The edgeAnd new York magazine, among others. She studied science journalism at Columbia University. She is based in San Diego.