Bible_Belt said:
The early man as a vicious hunter is a myth based on our own pride and manly associations with hunting. Eary humans were more likely to eat the abandoned remains of another animal's kill or an animal that died of other causes. The amount of skill and energy that it takes to bring down large game is just too much to accomplish. Any hunting would have been very simple, like picking up shellfish and fish in shallow water. They also ate a lot of bugs, because they are easy to catch.
Primitive man didn't hunt the way animals do, by outrunning and overpowering their prey. They used weapons, but more importantly, they used their one physical advantage over any animal. Animals are superior sprinters, but man is the superior endurance runner. Economical upright movement, long tendons and large numbers of slow-twitch muscle fibers in his legs, and the ability to sweat (to avoid overheating) all gave primitive man an incredible advantage over long distances at a constant moderate speed.
Prehistoric hunters would not have bothered to try to outrun their prey, but would simply keep it moving until it tired out and collapsed. Also, with the animal so weakened, the immense strength of other predators would not have been necessary, though the hunters would probably have finished the animal off from a distance if possible.
It's true that primitive man would have eaten anything he could get his hands on, and would prefer to exhaust an easier source of food before trying for something harder, but he could never have evolved his large brain without a large amount of protein in his diet, something that fish and bugs could not have provided on their own. Primitive man could have scavenged, but it would have to be an extremely fresh carcass, as the human immune system simply isn't strong enough to handle the large numbers of potentially disease-carrying bacteria that even day-old flesh would have in it - think raw chicken left out overnight, lying on sh!t-filled dirt, and having the saliva of other animals, including flies (and their eggs), all over it. The remote possibility of finding a carcass fresh enough to not make him sick meant that primitive man would have to have relied on more readily available sources of protein. Eggs would have been a more likely target for scavenging.