ELCHE, SPAIN—A team of researchers from the University Miguel Hernández concludes that interactions with scavengers, such as vultures, hyenas, and lions, have been crucial to the evolution and welfare of humanity. “At first, the interaction was primarily competitive, but when humans went from eating carrion to generating it, scavengers highly benefited from the relationship,” Marcos Moleón and José Antonio Sánchez Zapata explained in Science Daily. Language, cooperative partnership, and cultural diversity were all probably the result of selective pressures brought on by this competition with scavengers, they argue.