The extinction of megafauna forced humans to rely on less calorically dense food sources, which may not reflect ancestral diets from hundreds of thousands of years ago.

“when we're not hunting large animals when megafauna has become extinct these incredible 12 ton elephants I can't even imagine what a 12-ton elephant looks like but that that the return on investment of hunting something like a woolly mammoth is just so great and we have been forced the hypothesis would be that we have been forced as as our contemporary indigenous people like the hodza have been forced to use different sources because there are not these these great large animals around anymore and that may not be reflective of what we were doing a 300 thousand years ago”

“and one could make the case that until we hunted the megafauna into extinction globally that was the transition then that led to the smaller game and trapping and more reliance on plant material”

“and the megafauna have gone extinct you know in the last thousand years we don't have a big woolly mammoth to go hunt”

“when prime adults when medium-sized animals disappear really they have they have no choice but to go become more sedentary and go for plants because they are limited in the amount of protein that they can consume”