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  3. 　　Our ancestors’ diets changed dramatically over the course of the past 2. 5 million years, and one research team thinks that th

　　Our ancestors’ diets changed dramatically over the course of the past 2. 5 million years, and one research team thinks that th

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问题 　　Our ancestors’ diets changed dramatically over the course of the past 2. 5 million years, and one research team thinks that this shift profoundly affected our evolution.
　　According to a team including Miki Ben-Dor and Ran Barkai at Tel Aviv University in Israel, hominin diets were once so dominated by meat from massive animals that the hunters caused some of those species to go extinct. This, in turn, forced our ancestors to develop more sophisticated hunting methods to bring down smaller, more elusive prey, leading to greater intelligence and the evolution of modern humans. "The key idea is that just one ecological driver drove all of human evolution," says Ben-Dor. "The one driver is the decline in prey size. "
　　Humans—members of the Homo genus—appeared roughly 2. 8 million years ago, eventually replacing the more ape-like Australopithecus hominins that lived in Africa prior to that time. Ben-Dor and his colleagues compiled evidence on what these early hominins ate. This included traces of foods preserved on teeth, animal bones with cut marks suggesting butchery and chemical analyses of preserved hominin protein. They concluded that Australopithecus ate mostly plants. However, early Homo species ate more meat. When our species, Homo sapiens, first appeared about 300,000 years ago, meat was still a large dietary component, but within the past 50,000 years, we began eating less.
　　Ben-Dor and Barkai argue that early humans like Homo erectus were mostly hunting very large animals like elephants. This, they say, only required simple spears. " You probably need more courage to hunt an elephant than to hunt a zebra, but it’s less complex," says Ben-Dor. However, he points to a 2019 study that found that the populations of such megafauna were declining in east Africa, beginning 4. 5 million years ago. He argues that hunting by hominins contributed to that decrease. As the largest animals became rarer, hominins had to hunt smaller, nimbler animals. That required better technology, such as bows and arrows.
　　It’s "an interesting hypothesis", says Sherry Nelson at the University of New Mexico. Parts of it do fit the evidence, she says. For instance, Australopithecus seems to have had big guts, similar to plant-eating gorillas, while there is evidence that early Homo species ate more meat. But Nelson isn’t convinced that Homo, erectus was regularly hunting the largest animals. " Going after big game like that implies a significant level of cooperation and coordination and planning," she says, even if it doesn’t need complex tools. "That doesn’t really fit," she says.
What is the main difference between early Homo species and Australopithecus?
选项 A、Body size.
B、The ingredients of teeth.
C、Hunting skills.
D、Diet structure.
答案D
解析 推断题。根据题干可定位至第三段。由第四句中Australopithecus ate mostly plants可知南方古猿主要吃植物，而early Homo species ate more meat“早期的智人吃更多的肉”，故它们主要的区别在饮食结构上，选项D正确；选项A应为猎物的体型，故排除；文章中并没有提到两者牙齿成分的区别，故排除选项B；选项C为无中生有，故排除。
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