VEGANGELICA

Yep, Tore, arable land would be suitable for growing vegetables. "Arable" sounds like something you'd do with a bull. Actually, that isn't far off, because early agriculturalists eventually often used livestock to pull plows...though to this day some agriculture depends only on human labor.

Wikipedia says:

I'd say your rocky Norwegian mountainsides are *not* arable! Probably pretty hard to plow up there. Or on the tundra where the mites thrive.

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Guybrush

People have been putting up videos and such so maybe I could come with a recommendation as well This guy here is Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall :



In 1999, his series Escape to River Cottage aired in England. In the series, he's fed up with his urban life and so he moves to the Dorset countryside to become a smallholder. The series is about him building up his new life as a smallholder which includes caring for the animals he gets and doing activities like pressing cider, baking or fishing with other locals.

Anyways, he's a chef by trade so there's quite a bit of cooking involved and he's put some effort into food awareness. There's a spin-off series called the River Cottage Treatment where urbans with pretty horrible diets come to live the river cottage lifestyle and pick up some knowledge about the food we eat. During their stay, they also visit abbatoirs and chicken farms and the like so that the people gain some knowledge about the food they eat .. and some of them turn vegetarians after that.

The show itself is not pro-vegetarian, but rather about awareness about where animal products come from and how animals are treated. Hugh himself keeps and kills his own animals, a power which I believe comes with responsibility and he knows it, does it well and promotes that kind of thinking. That's the kind of meat eating I feel I can support 100% and whether you agree or not, I think the show would appeal to both vegetarians and meat eaters.

River Cottage Treatment is not as good as his regular series, though. Warmly recommended to anyone who's ever dreamed of living in the country.

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Something Completely Different

Riloux Gartier

The human brain began to grow when humans had to deal with increased social interaction. That social interaction tends to follow hunting, since unlike with gathering, huge ammounts of calories could be ingested in what were occasional bonanzas of meat. This led to an increase in the complexity of social behaviors, including finding how to rise in rank with procurement of meat and other animal products, which were rare, and a luxury... since meat was not nessesary for growth or development; but it was a rare case of having large ammounts of fats+protein calories for the group. It was the gatherings that resulted from harvests (of veggies) and finding meat that led to increased brain complexity, not the item being eaten. By that logic lions would be the most intelligent (at things like math and reading of all) animal on earth.

Health is relative to the time period. It changes with the advent of new Knowledge/technology/education The average "Healthy" human in the 1800s would very rarely live to see 50.

VEGANGELICA

Riloux Gartier, I am confused by your quote above, which seems to point out that you feel hunting animals inspired social interactions that triggered increased human intellect, yet meat-eating wasn't so important since the social interaction itself was the key factor in the evolution of our human intellect.

If it were true that meat-eating partly encouraged the social interactions that were an important force in human evolution (which is under debate), then it sounds as if you are stating exactly what Tore stated: that meat-eating had an important evolutonary role.

You suggest that meat-eating may not have been of primary importance in the development of traits we associate with Homo sapiens that distinguish us from our ancestors, such as smaller teeth, and this is true. Some scientists hypothesize that the ability of early hominids to control fire and use it to cook tubers may have selected for many of the traits that distinguish humans from earlier ancestors (australopithecines). After all, human ancestors were hunting animals and eating meat for millions of years without developing the extent of social, intellectual, and physical traits humans have, suggesting that meat-eating was not by itself a driving force in development of these traits:

So, it is very possible that meat-eating was not a key factor in the development of human traits such as pair-bonding and smaller teeth and even cleverer, social brains. However, simply because carnivores like lions, whom you mention, are not as intellectual as we are does not mean that meat-eating did not play an important role in human evolution during the past.

Homo sapiens and our hominid ancestors, Homo erectus and before them, australopithecines, naturally do/did have the ability to digest meat; therefore, I view the ability to digest meat as "natural" and as being an adaptive, beneficial trait that conferred reproductive advantages on those who possessed it. This is the reason humans are still biologically omnivores.

Here's an article in the journal Human Evolution that points out that humans have the capacity to eat mostly plant-based diets or mostly meat-based diets.

If the ability to digest meat were a neutral trait (rather than a beneficial trait that increases reproductive fitness), then we would expect to see among humans some who have lost the ability to digest meat (making them obligate herbivores). Since this is not the case, I conclude that the ability to digest meat has been an important trait among humans during evolutionary history; those who lacked this ability would have been less likely to "exploit their environment" and produce as many children as those of our ancestors who ate whomever they could catch while also gathering edible plant material.

Most importantly, I feel the exact role of meat-eating in human evolution is not important now for deciding whether people can or should be vegetarians, which I view to be a health and ethical issue.

In the not-too-distant past, before vitamin B-12 was synthesized by organic chemists, humans would not have had the ability to survive at all as vegans, since the concentration of this essential vitamin in free-living bacteria (upon leaves or in soil on plants that are eaten) is very low. In order to survive, our recent ancestors appear to have needed a more plentiful source of vitamin B-12 than soil or plant microbes provide. When humans moved into areas (such as Norway) where edible plant material was perhaps scarce but animals were plentiful, humans could only survive by eating diets heavy with animal parts.

Some animals (such as cows) are able to obtain sufficient vitamin B-12 through their gut bacteria. This is not the case for humans, nor for other primates:
I accept that natural selection has resulted in humans needing an exogenous source of vitamin B-12. I feel this has no bearing on whether or not we choose to be vegan, Riloux Gartier (assuming we have access to synthetic vitamin B-12).

Tore, thanks for the video documentary suggestion! I'll try to find it and view it. That sounds interesting!

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Guybrush

Like Vegangelica mentioned, I think that what you write more supports what I wrote - that a meat diet has had tremendous importance to our evolution - than counter it. You write yourself that gatherings after hunting has promoted social interactions, although I would say the hunt itself must have promoted some as well. It takes a lot of cooperation from humans to hunt animals sometimes. To illustrate the point, it would take a lot of cooperation I'm sure to bring down a mammoth. Although I don't think our smartness is explained by any one thing, I think a lifestyle that involves hunting animals helps promote it more than one that has people gathering fruits and veggies.

Have you heard the argument that humans are highly undeveloped when born compared to an adult and that to become an adult, the brain has to go through much growth which requires a lot of B12 and other vitamins as well as proteins and fat? This is stuff you easily get from a meat diet, but not so easily from fruits and roots. The argument is that without meat and fat in our diets, we would be so contrained by our food that evolution to the current size of our brain wouldn't even be a likely possibility. It illustrates the importance of meat for eating in our evolution.

There's another point as well which relates more to behaviour which is that while our stomachs got smaller, our brains got bigger as we shifted from mainly plant diets to including more meat. When we were herbivores, we had to spend more time eating and more energy digesting as plants are tough to digest. Meat is more easily digestible, gives quick energy, gives you more time to do things other than think about the next meal and so on. A herbivore diet constraints animals in that they need to spend more time eating and digesting. Getting rid of this constraint allowed us to evolve other behaviours.

I can't say that all of this is true always and everywhere, but it seems logical to me and I'd like to see what others think about it.

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Something Completely Different

bubu

I think people shouldn't eat meat as often as we do. It's not about animal cruelty, your own body tells you that you don't really need to eat too much meat.

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Acoustic Guitar

Paco De Lucia

Antieant

I think meat is good if cooked and prepared well, though fish is the best meat to eat

VEGANGELICA

bubu, what are some reasons you feel eating meat doesn't have to do with animal cruelty?

I read an interesting article in the Des Moines Register on May 2, 2010, in which an animal industry representative, David Martosko, shared his prepared response for activists who say killing livestock is murder: "Eating meat is murder. Tasty, tasty murder."

I think his response shows the livestock industry recognizes that raising animals and killing them involves cruelty, but this doesn't matter to some in the animal industry because they feel the tastiness of meat is the most important reason for eating animals and trumps ethical concerns.

The article, "Ag industry defender criticizes humane group," is the last one on this page, in case you want to read the source of the quote: Green Fields: Vilsack says criticism is 'total nonsense' | desmoinesregister.com | The Des Moines Register)

Tore, I've actually read that it wasn't so much the meat in the diet that encouraged the increase in brain complexity and size (and shrinkage of gut length), but the cooking of food in general, which allows greater nutrient acquisition from a given quantity of food (both plant and animal), and also preserves the food (allowing storage and hoarding). However, are you talking about very early in hominid development, before the evolution of Homo sapiens?

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The Reaper

Who gives a sh1t about little fury things that have no other fate but to be killed by something else for sustenance?

Boo hoo hoo

Living creatures. Boo hoo hoo.

Nature's a cold bitch.

btw

Loving the aftertaste of this nice, fat juicy steak I ate tonight.

Freebase Dali

If you're here just to piss people off, we can fix this real quick.