Are Humans Apex Predators? Here’s What the Evidence Shows

Humans are wise and strong, but we don't usually reach the top when discussing apex predators. According to reports, we were once at the top of a food chain. However, the answer to this question is not that simple.

Are Humans Apex Predators?

Top predators like lions, gray wolves, and great white sharks all share this trait. They eat virtually exclusively meat, and besides humans, these animals don't have any other natural predators.

Does this suggest that humans are at the top of the food chain if we are predators of other top predators?

This depends on how you define "predator," whether you're murdering for food or killing other animals. If you're looking at ancient or contemporary people, the answer will vary, ScienceLive reported.

According to Sylvain Bonhommeau, a marine ecologist at the French marine research institute IFREMER, humans' position in the food chain is not dependent on what eats us or doesn't or on what we destroy. Instead, according to Bonhommeau, it is entirely dependent on the foods you consume, and considering those criteria, the answer is no - because we don't consume every animal we kill. Thus, humans aren't top predators.

However, that isn't as simple as that. Using some other metrics, humans can be apex predators. Some reports also claimed that humans were once apex predators.

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Humans Were Once Top Predators

Homo sapiens and their ancestors abandoned the salad in favor of a meat-heavy diet for around 2 million years, which propelled them to the top of the food chain.

The balanced diet of berries, grains, and steak that comes to mind when we think of "paleo" food is not precisely the case. But modern hunter-gatherers have given us an erroneous picture of what humans formerly ate, according to anthropologists from the University of Minho in Portugal and Tel Aviv University in Israel.

The comparison is pointless because hunter-gatherer tribes had access to elephants and other huge creatures 2 million years ago, whereas modern hunter-gatherer civilizations do not, per Miki Ben-Dor from Israel's Tel Aviv University. The conditions are incomparable because the entire ecosystem has changed.

We were essentially apex predators until around 12,000 years ago, according to hundreds of studies on everything from present human anatomy and physiology to measurements of the isotopes found in ancient human bones and teeth, ScienceAlert reported.

Another potential proof of human beings' apex predators is their physiology. We have greater fat stores and may use them by quickly converting fats into ketones as necessary. Our fat cells are small and numerous, resembling those of a predator, in contrast to other omnivores whose fat cells are rare but huge.

Additionally, it appears that our digestive systems resemble those of animals that are higher on the food chain. We may require extremely potent stomach acid to break down proteins and eliminate dangerous bacteria, which you find in a week-old mammoth chop.

Even our genomes suggest that we rely more on a diet high in meat than sugar. For instance, according to geneticists, parts of the human genome were shut off to allow for a diet high in fat, while parts of the genome in chimpanzees were unlocked to allow for a diet high in sugar.

The team's case covers many topics, including evidence from tool use, traces of trace elements and nitrogen isotopes in Paleolithic remains, and tooth wear.