In the early 1960s, when the british primatologist
Jane Goodall first observed wild chimpanzees hunting
and eating meat in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, it
was widely believed that these animals were strict
vegetarians. Skeptics suggested that the diet of the
Gombe chimpanzees was aberrant. Others suggested that
the quantity of meat the chimpanzees ate was trivial.
After more than 30 years of research, however, it is
now clear that meat is a natural part of the
chimpanzees' diet. Indeed, hunting has been observed at
most of the other sites where chimpanzees are studied
across central Africa. And, it turns out, a chimpanzee
community may eat several hundred kilograms of meat in
a single year.

To many anthropologists this is a surprising
development. Of all the higher primates, only human
beings and chimpanzees hunt and eat meat on a regular
basis. The similarities pose an intriguing prospect:
Might the close evolutionary relationship between
chimpanzees and human beings provide some clues to the
evolution of our own behavior? We do know that the
earliest bipedal hominids, the australopithecines,
evolved in Africa about 5 million years ago and that
they shared a common ancestor with modern chimpanzees
shortly before that time. Unfortunately, the evidence
for the occurrence of meat-eating among the early
australopithecines is spotty at best. Primitive stone
tools that were made 2.5 million years ago suggest that
early hominids had the means to carve the flesh from
large carcasses, but we know very little about their
diets before that time. Were they hunters or perhaps,
as many anthropologists now argue, scavengers? The
behavior of chimpanzees may provide a window through
which we can see much that has been lost in the fossil
record.

http://www.americanscientist.org/tem...true&print=yes