Quote:
Originally Posted by Tsunami
I don't believe that humans ate raw meat regularly before fire. If there are some cases they did to survive, it doesn't equal to being natural omnivores, because humans can work outside of instinct unlike most of the animals (apart from some primates)
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Actually, we owe a lot to our meaty diets. Eating plants in the real olden days may not have been as easy as you think. Generally speaking, it's not like life in the fruit section of your local supermart. Agriculture is only 10 000 years old and involves relatively few species. Most plant matter is very tough to digest and so large primates like gorillas or geladas have to spend
a lot of time foraging, most of their waking hours. The reason is the low quality plant food is so low in nutrients and tough to digest that you have to eat a lot of it to meet nutrient/energy requirements and so these animals need to have large stomachs to accommodate their vegetarian diets. Being a vegetarian animal tends to make you more dependent on habitat so that you need to stay put. It's a pacifier.
Humans with our large brains (requiring a lot of protein rich and fatty food to develop) and our relatively small stomachs undoubtedly owe a lot to our meaty diets through our evolutionary history. The general hypothesis is that assumed ancestors like Homo habilis (lived approximately 2.3 to 1.4 million years ago) were not hunters themselves, but scavenged kills by other predators. Better food meant bigger brains, leaner bodies and eventually, man started hunting on his own. The high quality food also meant we had to spend less time eating, less tied down to specific habitats and started moving around more in hunt for animals.
You wrote earlier that humans are not supposed to eat meat. I thought that was a strange way to put it. What are we
supposed to do then?