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The main reason they were examining other animals is that a lot of the raw data Aiello and Wheeler based their original hypothesis on came from non-human species. Thus animal data has always played a big role in the expensive tissue hypothesis. Of course, whether animal data can be used to examine humans is a big fat question mark given how different we are. At the same time I'm also weary of special pleading. The "refuting" paper noted that for the expensive tissue hypothesis to remain viable we must propose unique mechanisms operating in humans, which Occam's Razor doesn't like.