On searching for the bigger picture of our specific evolutionary path I found this great site reptile evolution, which shows our ancestors going back 310 million years.
Here is a picture of some snap shots in time of them. The littlest guy is the first mammal, who survived the great dinosaur extinction (say meteor collision) by being so small and warm blooded. I imagine they would have had to eat a lot of high dinosaur meat before the dust cleared and plants recovered:
Here is a picture of their jaws - judging by those teeth it looks like eating animal foods was the most important source of nutrition over the last 300 MY. I am now thinking that, when looking at this time scale, the lower animal food consumption of apes is more of an aberration than the norm proposed by vegans:
http://www.reptileevolution.com/
