ABSTRACT
The advent of hunting-variously estimated at between two and four million years ago-marks the emergence of humanity, and prehistoric life revolved around securing meat…or so it is said. Jane Renfrew, for example, writes that ‘The first men appear to have arrived in Britain sometime before 300,000 years ago. These men were hunters’ (Renfrew 1985a:6). This canon will be shown in Chapter 5 to be based largely on modern supposition. Indeed Renfrew tacitly admits that the common icon of early humankind’s carnivorism is substantially conjectural: ‘From the camp sites so far excavated, there has been little evidence for the plant food part of their diet, but on analogy with modern hunting communities up to 80 per cent of their diet may have consisted of vegetable sources’ (1985a:6).
