This is how myths are made. This myth has basically been in the scientific & general unconscious since Raymond Dart came up with Man the killer ape idea! I really would like to challenge anyone who thinks otherwise to sit down with a dead cow carcass on
their dining table, and consume it in its raw state: muscle, organs, guts, brains, eyeballs... using only a stone tool. Or even just a single piece of muscle meat... you'll chew, chew, chew but won't be able to break it down with your teeth - we
completely lack the morphology of carnivores in every part of our body. My dogs OTOH can devour a sheep's head in under 15 minutes, gulp down half a kilo of muscle meat in 2-3 bites, drool at the bloody dripping internal organs I give them as a
special treat... they are carnivores - we are not.
Here's a contrasting paper which of course doesn't get the same publicity
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/quaternary-research/article/abs/uncertain-case-for-humandriven-extinctions-prior-to-homo-sapiens/F91F1125CC0A988E322DA9AD9564F0C5
Humans can't eat meat in its raw & natural state (other than steak tartare, cut up into tiny swallow-sized pieces). We can't chew it, we can't digest it, and even cooked, it causes more detriment than good (higher risk of cardio-vascular diseases, bowel
cancers, calcium & Vit.D deficiencies, type 2 diabetes, gout, kidney stones, haemorroids, hypertension etc). Uncooked meat without fire is a waste of time for humans. It doesn't provide energy (carbohydrates do), animal protein is toxic to us in
large quantities, even causing death in extreme cases, >250g of meat a day can lead to weakness, lethargy, foetal congenital disorders & perinatal morbidity. (The so-called Paleolithic diet has been shown to be bad for health). We don't need >10% protein,
the best proteins come from plant foods & seafoods (alkaline instead of acidic) and can be better utilised for building & repairing muscle (google vegan bodybuilders / see gorillas). Meat consumption increases the metabolic rate to the point where you
need more calories to digest it than you gain from it. It heats you up and makes you thinner & weaker. You need extra water to digest it. Women & children are unlikely to have benefitted from it (read Grandmothering and the Evolution of Homo erectus) -
the majority of calories in hunter-gatherer societies are provided by female gatherers collecting USOs, there's no evidence that meat increases brain growth, stone tools are pretty useless at butchering animals (in one experiment it took 300 strikes to
crush a bone open with an Acheulean hand axe), any evidence of animal butchery marks on bones before 1 Ma is highly dubious, and any suggestion that it was by the actions of hominins has generally been refuted and was more likely caused by other animals..
. primates never scavenge. H.erectus couldn't have run across the savannah without breaking his bones and sweating to death, and with what? A hand axe? Hunting large prey is highly dangerous & unreliable & often unsuccessful, often stolen by dangerous
predators, even in modern groups, and is a waste of energy when plant proteins are far more available, African ungulates lack fat, etc. If mother & children are waiting for Mr Big to bring home with the bacon, they're likely to starve so they're
better off digging for tubers. Whereas plant & aquatic foods are far more safe, stable & collectable, and provided far more nutrition, useable protein, DHA, carbs, and shellfish can be opened with stone tools, etc.
All this would have changed when 1) Homo discovered fire, 2) Homo was somewhere with a lack of edible plant or aquatic foods (i.e. during glacials in Europe / N-Asia, in the mountains, inland populations), 3) Homo invented throwing & thrusting
weapons, and possibly teamed up with wolves. In those cases, cooked fatty meat would have provided calories where there weren't better or easier ones available. That's when Man became the killer ape, not earlier than 800 ka.
I could go on, but there are too many reasons, so I've attached the relevant section concerning anatomy, encephalisation & diet from my chapter on H.erectus, with all the references (Verhaegen, Munro cs are quoted) - if anyone wants to read it! :)
Francesca
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Can you imagine "scientific" journals still publish such nonsense??
(I left out the authors' names... :-D)
Prey Size Decline as a Unifying Ecological Selecting Agent in Pleistocene Human Evolution
Quaternary 2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/quat4010007
We hypothesize: mega-fauna extinctions throughout the Pleistocene, that led to a progressive decline in large prey availability, were a primary selecting agent in key evolutionary & cultural changes in human prehistory.
The Pleistocene human past is characterized by a series of transformations: the evolution of new physiological traits & the adoption, assimilation & replacement of cultural & behavioral patterns.
Some changes (e.g. brain expansion, use of fire, developments in stone-tool technologies, or the scale of resource intensification) were uncharacteristically progressive.
We previously hypothesized that humans specialized in acquiring large prey because of their
- higher foraging efficiency,
- high biomass density,
- higher fat content &
- the use of less complex tools for their acquisition.
Here we argue that the need to mitigate the additional energetic cost of acquiring progressively smaller prey may have been an ecological selecting agent in fundamental adaptive modes demonstrated in the Paleolithic archaeological record.
We describe several potential associations between prey size decline & specific evolutionary & cultural changes that might have been driven by the need to adapt to increased energetic demands while hunting & processing smaller & smaller game.
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