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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.
Which of the following would be the best title for the text?
选项 A、Hunting by Hominins Led to the Extinction of Megafauna
B、Hunting Megafauna Needs More Courage than Small Game
C、Hunting Small Game May Have Driven Our Evolution
D、Hunting Skills of Ancestors Outperformed Homo Erectus
答案C
解析 主旨题。解答主旨题的关键是通过把握各段的段落大意(一般位于段落的首尾句)来把握全文主旨。需要排除文章某一句或者某一段内容的干扰，这些信息很熟悉，但是由于过于局部而无法概括全文，如本题的选项A、选项B和选项D。选项A、选项B和选项D均为第四段提到的细节性内容，不足以概括全文，故排除；文章第一段点明主题——我们祖先饮食的变化影响了我们的进化，第二段描述了一项研究的发现，猎物体型的变小推动了现代人类的进化，第三段和第四段描述古人类和南方古猿的区别。以及为什么古人类最终取代了南方古猿，最后一段则描述纳尔逊对这个假设的看法，综合来看，选项C与主旨最贴切，故选项C正确。
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