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It has been suggested that honey may have been an important food source for early members of the genus Homo, yet the importance of meat and savanna plant foods continue to be stressed as the most relevant foods in dietary reconstructions. Here, the importance of honey and bee larvae in hominin diets is explored. Ethnographic reports, examples of Paleolithic rock art, and evidence from non-human primates are used to show that early hominins likely targeted beehives using the Oldowan tool kit. The consumption of honey and bee larvae likely provided significant amounts of energy, supplementing meat and plant foods. The ability to find and exploit beehives using stone tools may have been an innovation that allowed early Homo to nutritionally out-compete other species and may have provided critical energy to fuel the enlarging hominin brain.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments. I am grateful to Dr. Margaret Schoeninger, Dr. Adrienne Zihlman, and Dr. Frank Marlowe for very stimulating discussions on the role of honey in human evolution.
Notes
1. The term “hominin” is a taxonomic classification used here to refer to members of the genus Homo and their direct ancestors, including Australopithecines.
2. Grasslands using a C4 photosynthetic pathway (versus the more common C3 pathway for most flowering plants) began radically changing the biosphere around 3–8 mya (Cerling 1992; Edwards et al. 2010).
3. Although Western populations are cautioned against feeding honey to infants due to the dangers of botulism (Smith et al. 2010), some rural populations routinely use honey as a weaning food (Kumar et al. 2006; Madhu et al. 2009).
4. The earliest appearance of use of a home base, or central place, dates to the Plio/Pleistocene boundary (O’Connell 1997). Early Homo foragers were nomadic and, as such, most likely did not store food for extended periods of time (Marlowe 2006). The preservative properties of honey, however, may have made it easier to store. It has been suggested that early hominins may have stored some foods for short periods of time as a way to combat scarcity of seasonal resources (McBrearty and Brooks 2000).