This is just not true in the bigger picture of human evolution. That paper focuses on humans in North Africa 15,000–13,000 years ago which is a very tiny snapshot in time and geography.

Eating meat is a major part of what separated archaic humans from other primates; it is theorized that the calories from meat is part of what helped us grow our larger brains. Homo Erectus was hunting large game maybe up to 2 million years ago, well before Homo Sapiens even existed. They hunted to the point of wiping out many large herbivores of that time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus#Subsistence

Since common modern human tapeworms began to diverge from those of other predators roughly 1.7 million years ago (specifically the pork tapeworm, beef tapeworm, and Asian tapeworm), not only was H. erectus consuming meat regularly enough for speciation to occur in these parasites, but meat was probably consumed raw more often than not.[80]

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml -1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Humans and human ancestors have also been consuming large quantities of plants for far earlier than that. Here's another paper looking 780,000 years ago finding a wide amount of plants consumed

we demonstrate that a wide variety of plants were processed by Middle Pleistocene hominins at the site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel (33° 00’ 30” N, 35° 37’ 30” E), at least 780,000 y ago. These results further indicate the advanced cognitive abilities of our early ancestors, including their ability to collect plants from varying distances and from a wide range of habitats and to mechanically process them using percussive tools.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2418661121

I am not saying that hunting didn't happen (it definitely did). I am just saying that more recent research is painting a very different picture of the level of consumption of it

[–] acosmichippo@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

yes, of course we ate lots of plants as well, that was never disputed. We were hunters and gatherers. The point is meat has absolutely been a significant part of our diets for millions of years (the exact ratio depending on the environment humans found themselves in). it is well documented by many direct lines of evidence as i laid out above.

I am not saying that hunting didn’t happen (it definitely did).

it didn't just "happen" like once in a while. we are/were probably the best hunters ever seen on planet earth. we basically wiped out global megafauna over the last 1.5 million years.

I am just saying that more recent research is painting a very different picture of the level of consumption of it

what exactly do you mean by "very different picture"? that's an extremely vague statement that could mean almost anything.