During a complex evolutionary niche transition that occurred over a period of millions of years, the human lineage emerged from the African grasslands, within an idiosyncratic ecological and dietary context mostly unknown to its forest-inhabiting ancestors (Ulijaszek et al., 2012; Mann, 2018; Pontzer and Wood, 2021; Leroy et al., 2023). The exact timeline and the specifc hominid species involved in this transition have not been fully elucidated, but it is known that early hominins already displayed a fexible mix of arboreal and bipedal adaptations. Approximately 2–3 million years ago, the Homo genus made a decisive move into the savanna landscape, acquiring the physical capacity to cover extensive distances. Within this ecosystem, tool usage became a lot more advanced, whilst enabling some degree of manipulation of the environment and more effcient access to nutritional resources. The resulting dietary transition, away from fbrous plant materials toward foods with a higher nutritional density that was derived from the grassland niche, translated into encephalization (i.e. an increase of brain size) and a shrinkage of the digestive system, some 1–2 million years ago (Aiello and Wheeler, 1995). This led to enhanced cognitive capacity, which became a defning feature of Homo and contributed to the development of sophisticated social structures and various adaptations to dynamic environments.