Red meat has long occupied a near-mythic place in the story of human evolution. It is often cast as the food that helped make us human, feeding bigger brains, stronger bodies, and more complex societies. But a sweeping new review in The Quarterly Review of Biology argues that the story no longer ends there. The same food source that may once have helped early humans survive is now tied to chronic disease, environmental damage, and a global food system whose scale looks nothing like anything in the human past. In the review, Juston Jaco, Kalyan Banda, Ajit Varki, and Pascal Gagneux from the University of California, San Diego pull together evidence from archaeology, anthropology, nutrition, epidemiology, and molecular biology. Their conclusion is not that meat was a mistake. It is that modern red meat consumption has drifted far from its original biological and ecological setting. “The nature, scale, and context of red meat consumption today differ drastically from those of our evolutionary past,” the authors write. As Homo sapiens increasingly relied on animal-derived foods—whether hunted …