If you're a vegetarian we suggest you block your ears for this one. A new study has found that not only does preparing and eating meat come naturally to humans, but without an early diet that included generous amounts of the stuff, we wouldn't have become human at all.
There's no denying that a plant-based diet can be healthy, varied and is an important part of that food pyramid you were taught about at school, but this study in 'Nature' conducted Katherine Zink and Daniel Lieberman of Harvard, suggests that without discovering meat we mightn't have evolved to become the modern, verbal and intelligent humans we are today.
Apparently, it was 2.6 million years ago that meat became a significant part of the pre-human diet. Fruits and vegetables were a common staple, but the best kind were underground root foods like beets, yams and potatoes. While these kinds of vegetables were packed full of nutrition, they were difficult to chew and weren't exactly 'fine-dining'. In fact, for proto-humans to survive they would have to go through up 15 million “chewing cycles” a year. Ain't nobody got time for that.