Questions about the timing, frequency, resource yield, and behavioral and biological implications of large animal carcass acquisition by early hominins have been a part of the "hunting‐scavenging debate" for decades. This article presents a brief outline of this debate, reviews the zooarchaeological and modern ecological evidence for a possible scavenging niche among the earliest animal tissue‐consuming hominins (pre‐2.0 Ma), revisits some of the questions that this debate has generated, and outlines some ways to explore answers to those questions with evidence from the archaeological record.
